Wikipedia

I love Wikipedia. It’s a fantastic resource. I think I first espoused its greatness in this post last January but I’ve used it on countless occasions for information on obscure and mainstream topics alike. I liked the Wiki software so much that I switched my own Wiki from using PHPWiki to MediaWiki.

Last week there was some uproar around a lot of blogs because a journalist said that the Wikipedia was unreliable as a resource because anyone could change the contents. Here are a couple of Boing Boing posts on the topic. I especially like the last post because this journalist made a bunch of changes to some articles thinking that they’d never be found but they were all corrected within hours (mainly because a lot of people read the recent changes feed).

Anyway, this morning on Tim Bray’s blog, I read a nice summary of how he feels about the Wikipedia:

The Wikipedia is beautiful. It’s an unexpected and unexplainable triumph of collective creativity and of order over entropy. I hope it lasts a long time, and those who criticize it Just Don’t Get It.

He’s right, it is a beautiful thing. Who would have guessed that such a wonderful resource could have grown out of the wilderness that is the Internet? With all of the centralized, controlled content available online now, it’s refreshing to find an open, collaborative site like this.

When I visited the Wikipedia site this morning, I noticed for the first time the list of sister sites that are available:

• Meta-Wiki – Coordination of all Wikimedia projects
• Wiktionary – A dictionary and thesaurus
• Wikibooks – Free textbooks and manuals
• Wikiquote – A collection of quotations (note the correct usage)
• Wikisource – Free source documents

Wow that’s really awesome! I’ll have to make use of these new resources (to me).

License

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