We love to wiki

Wikipedia is fast becoming one of those great internet ideas, something that helps to define the web, just as Google, Amazon and eBay have done in the past. But I think that Wikipedia is much more than a mere site, it is the living example that open source works. When somebody posts something in Wikipedia, it is open to the world to debate and argue about. True, it still has a lot of inaccurate information, but if you find some inaccuracies, then you should just change them!

Anyway, I have become hooked to collaborating to Wikipedia. For example, I was browsing for some information, and I found out that gender-baiting was not defined. This is a term that I like, so I decided to create an entry for gender-bait. This taught me a lot about the editing process in Wikipedia. I wrote a brief definition, and then noticed that the term had been provisionally deleted by another member on the basis that it was a neologism. Apparently, besides the mere mortals like myself who decide to collaborate, there is a class of super users looking over new entries. The decision was overruled by another super user, but there was a request to expand the article, which I did.

This is a form of anarchic organisation, something that I am reading about in Siva Vaidyanathan's excellent book The Anarchist in the Library.