In its almost nine years of existence, Wikipedia
has achieved unequivocal success: as the fifth
most visited website in the world, it features
more than 14.3m articles in 270 languages
contributed by more than 100,000 volunteers.
Given that this has been done on a shoestring
budget, Wikipedia easily puts to shame all other
efforts to create and disseminate digital knowledge.
The debates about the truthfulness of entries
have also subsided perhaps a sign that most of
us have discoveredd there are plenty of other
lies on the internet. Wikipedia has become the
lazy man's Google: why bother sifting through 100
search results if chances are that someone has
already done this job for you in a Wikipedia entry?
Most projects would be comfortable with gaining
so much power in so little time, but Wikipedians
are an ambitious bunch. Their commitment, as
codified in the vision statement of the Wikimedia
foundation, the legal entity behind the project,
is to create a world where "every single human
being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge".
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article6936407.ece>Link
--
Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/11/wikipedia-is-bloated-with-trivia-and.htm>monochrom
at 11/30/2009 08:57:00 PM
