I like wikipedia, it has a very Peircian taste. Surely, he would piss his pants at such a thing.
Jimmy Wales co-founder of wikipedia, gave a talk at the Open Source Applications Foundation, blogged by ross mayfield, socialtext entrepreneur. it’s well worth a read, though it’s blogged live and the english is a mess. a few excerpts:
Mitch recalls that at one point there were more articles on Tolkien’s Middle Earth than Africa. Jimmy recalls that there were more words about the war on Deep Space 9 than the Congo war and how old time Wikipedians saw that africa was a red link, then someone wrote that africa is a continent.
The English Wikipedia said the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, French said otherwise. Now there is a wonderful and detailed article on definitions and a discussion of the issue. Korean and Japanese Wikipedias differ on disputed islands. In the Japanese Wikipedia, incidentally, they use the discussion page for a long time before they make the article.
More rules are necessary over time, but they encourage not making rules until they are absolutely necessary. Small languages haven’t made the same rules as large ones. The 3 revert law (in one day) in English version was created to prevent revert wars. But in small languages it’s okay to do 10. What I do varies in many languages, I can’t work on the Chinese Wikipedia in the same way as English, so they vote a lot. Dutch Wikipedia had a civil war, 500 users quit.
and this:
But in the end, there is no such thing as competition for Wikipedia.
