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Wikipedia drama + thoughts
By Sparky | December 5, 2005
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced that due to problems with spam and bogus content creation the Wikipedia will be restricting the creation of new articles to registered members. Not that this will change much - it’s still free and easy to register, but still not necessarily a welcome change.
That coupled with a recent flame war resulting from the internet famous podcaster Adam Curry editing articles to minimize others involvement in the current new-media podcast revolution has left the Wikipedia to face the brunt of a wave of bad media.
I think it’s sad that everyone is taking such a negative view of the Wikipedia suddenly. Wikipedia is a great resource, and although it should not be considered the authoritative source for serious research (yet) it is a great source of information and as more and more authors/editors participate it’s becoming a great bastion of collective human knowledge.
It will be interesting to see how wikis grow over the next 10 years or so. It’s a very new concept that I think has some incredible potential. How else can such a disparate group of (potentially anonymous) authors come together and be able to create a melding of intellect and knowledge. I hope that in years to come both the enterprise market and groups of people with like minded interests continue to use wikis as methods of sharing information with each other and the world in general.
Go on - if you have a passion start a wiki about it. MediaWiki and other free, open source platforms are available for the general public to easily set up, use , and share their wealth of knowledge with the world - or just keep it handy and organized.
Topics: Open source, Technology |