[WEB4LIB] Wikipedia

[Lars Aronsson]

Sloan, Bernie wrote:
> http://cites.boisestate.edu/civ4i12.pdf 

Very interesting.

Much of the current discussion of Wikipedia and wikis in general is
similar to trying to understand world history by only looking at
newspapers from 1920. Why is Lenin doing all these things in Russia?  
Why is Kemal Ataturk doing what he does in Turkey?  Why do the Germans
seem so depressed, when many other countries speak about the happy
1920s?  It's almost like a great war had been going on just a little 
bit earlier!  Did it?  Dad, what happened really?

Remember that we used to have a hippie dream of the Internet, where
information wanted to be free, and that dream was stolen by risk
capitalists, whole populations were swept away in NASDAQ speculation,
and then it all crashed in 2000.  We still have Amazon.com, but do you
remember Pets.com?  Long before the crash, part of the old dream was
to build an encyclopedia or global virtual library, and many tried
naively to gather and publish as much information as they could on
some topic.  Many libraries saw as their responsibility to gather
links to all web resources and catalog them by subject.  Some of these
ambitious dreams are still around, e.g. the IMDb.com, but many others
stood abandoned as ghost cities long before the commercial dotcom
death.  Corporate intranets were covered in cobweb because the first
years of enthusiasm had be reorganized and lost in the org chart.  
The first years of the web (say, 1993--1996) were wonderful but we
also did terrible mistakes in judging our own abilities.  Already
before NCSA Mosaic, the idea of an open source encyclopedia was
discussed on Usenet newsgroups.  At the end of the 1990s, yet another
hopeless attempt was the Nupedia, started by Jimmy Wales and Larry
Sanger.  They got something like 30 articles in the first year, and
then Larry got so frustrated he decided to try this "wiki" thing that
some software engineering types in Portland had thought up. That was
January 15th, 2001.  BANG!  Wikipedia was born.

There is your World War I.  Those who thought they were immortal, were
proven wrong.  So many ideas and businesses died.  Now the dust clouds
are clearing.  A few players are still standing.  Perhaps the happy
1920s lay ahead.  Jazz music, broadcast radio, commercial aviation,
high speed trains, the first streamlined cars, so many new things.

Wikis and blogs are specializations of websites that are easier to
host and maintain by an individual, a group or the open public.  You
no longer need a webmaster employed to update your own website.  For
the first time in history we actually have something that looks like
an open access, open content online encyclopedia.  It might not be
perfect and it most certainly will not make you a NASDAQ millionaire,
but it seems likely it will be around for the next few years. You
could jump on now, or wait until the end of the decade.



Lars Aronsson, lars at aronsson.se
-- 
  Aronsson Datateknik