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The Wiki Wonder

Can a user-generated encyclopedia revolutionize the Web?

The encyclopedia salesman must be having a tough time these days. First, people decided they could replace their bulky, out-of-date encyclopedia books with a single disc in 1993, the year Microsoft’s Encarta was introduced. Then, in the late 90s, the Internet made huge amounts of information – albeit in scattered form – available instantly via easy-to-use search engines. Certainly, encyclopedia salesmen rued the day Google became more than a number. No longer did users need to sacrifice a bookshelf to vinyl-bound books to be “in the know.” They just needed a phone line and a little will.

Even then, though, a true replacement for the encyclopedia was not available. The easy categorization and authority of text that, for generations, made the encyclopedia the beacon of knowledge for so many young Americans could not be replicated in digital form. That is, until, almost everyone got involved. In what may be the ultimate expression of the networked world, the final nail is being driven for the lost art of door-to-door sales.

A few years ago a movement, some would say a revolution, started to take hold on the Internet. Depending on how broadly you define it, a movement of collaboration is taking over the Web. What started with the Open Source software movement has moved into a more mainstream vehicle for cooperative expression – the wiki.

More than a new product, wikis could represent an extraordinary step forward for the Internet and its place in the Information universe. Whereas thus far the Internet has been a place of almost hyper-individualism, a place where one person, with little technology or start-up capital could build an empire, wikis represent the opposite phenomenon. Wikis show us what many people, contributing just a little, can build through sheer numbers.

What is a wiki? Well, the name makes it confusing, if only because it really has nothing to do with the process. Basically, a wiki is a Web site (or possibly software program) where anyone who visits (or is allowed to visit) may add, remove, and otherwise edit and change any available content on that site. So imagine if the New York Times Web site was a wiki. As a reader, you would be able to add stories, edit stories, delete stories, whatever, and it would affect what everyone sees when they visit the site. Sounds like a bad idea doesn’t it? You like your content controlled by professionals, not Joe Sixpack tapping away at his computer? Remarkably, although it may sound like pie-in-the-sky thinking, for one major Web site, at least, the concept has worked like a charm.



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