speaking of wikipedia - with a colbert quote

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reason mag on wikipedia
www.reason.com


Any site that has a longer entry on truthiness than on Lutherans has their priorities straight!

—Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, on Wikipedia

Five hundred geeks, outfitted with their signature ponytails and Macs, laughed as Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales opened this talk with a Stephen Colbert clip last weekend at Wikimania 2006. Nearly all of the participants were there, in part, because they were writers, editors, or administrators for Wikipedia, the free, online encyclopedia which modestly aspires to "create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." Its content is written and edited entirely by volunteers, working collaboratively. And last weekend, a bunch of them came together for what professor and "free culture" advocate Lawrence Lessig called, "Woodstock for the 21st Century." It was, after all, raining.

Wikipedia and its contributors are excruciatingly self-aware. Wikipedia has developed many charming quirks and in-jokes in its five short years of existence, nearly all self-reflexive, including a habit of obsessively linking to its own articles. But, far more interesting, it has also collectively developed a robust sensibility about what is permissible in its own pages. Nearly every Wikipedia user has occasionally come across a little tag at the top of an article: "Stop!" it says, "The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page." This little tag, I'm convinced, is the secret to Wikipedia's success. And I'm not alone.

Neutral Point of View, or NPOV, as the cool kids say, is a central Wikipedia concept. But as Wales notes, neutrality is a richer, more nuanced term for Wikipedians than it is for the rest of us: "One of the great things about NPOV is that it is a term of art and a community fills it with meaning over time."

Nearly every statement from Wales, a self-avowed libertarian (not of the Libertarian party; "They're lunatics," he says) and fan of Friedrich Hayek, carries similar sentiments. It's clear that he already gets something most of the Wikipedians are still struggling to grasp. Order and rules generated by a community using evolved mechanisms—the neutrality requirement, for example—aren't antithetical to freedom. Wales has said part of the inspiration for Wikipedia were Hayek's writings on spontaneous order and information aggregation. Though Wales often emphasizes that Wikipedia is "an encyclopedia, not an experiment in democracy," he and other participants are very cognizant that the success of Wikipedia suggests exciting things for other types of open-source collaborations and movements.