Wikipedia Cornucopia

You wait ages for a bus, and then three arrive at once. And so it seems for articles on Wikipedia. After I commended the piece in The New Yorker yesterday, here's an even better one in The Atlantic - home of the original "Memex" article by Vannevar Bush, which prefigured so much of the Web and Wikipedia.

The Atlantic's piece is particularly good on the origins and history of Wikipedia. Indeed, I had vaguely contemplated writing a book about Wikipedia and related open content projects to go alongside Rebel Code and Digital Code of Life, but there doesn't seem much point now with all this material available online.

And I liked this meditation on how Wikipedia functions:

Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth. Just think about the way we learn what words mean. Generally speaking, we do so by listening to other people (our parents, first). Since we want to communicate with them (after all, they feed us), we use the words in the same way they do. Wikipedia says judgments of truth and falsehood work the same way. The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isn’t likely to do such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability.

It also quotes the following striking idea:

[I]n June 2001, only six months after Wikipedia was founded, a Polish Wikipedian named Krzysztof Jasiutowicz made an arresting and remarkably forward-looking observation. The Internet, he mused, was nothing but a "global Wikipedia without the end-user editing facility."

Now there's a thought.