Mike Palij, in his TIPS post of 07 Aug 2006 04:57:08-0700 titled
"Wikimania Runs Wild!!!" wrote:
"The NY Times reports. . .[<http://tinyurl.com/q4blv>]. . .on the
second annual Wikimania meeting of 400 Wiki participants and devotees
which was held over the weekend at Harvard Law School."
Some TIP'ers might be interested Marshall Poe's (2006)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Poe>, fascinating article "The
Hive: Can thousands of Wikipedians be wrong? How an attempt to build
an online encyclopedia touched off history's biggest experiment in
collaborative knowledge," Poe wrote [bracketed by lines "PPPPPPPP. .
. "]:
PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
Wikipedia has the potential to be the greatest effort in
collaborative knowledge gathering the world has ever known, and it
may well be the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration of any
kind. The English-language version alone has more than a million
entries. It is consistently ranked among the most visited Web sites
in the world. A quarter century ago it was inconceivable that a
legion of unpaid, unorganized amateurs scattered about the globe
could create anything of value, let alone what may one day be the
most comprehensive repository of knowledge in human history. Back
then we knew that people do not work for free; or if they do work for
free, they do a poor job; and if they work for free in large numbers,
the result is a muddle. Jimmy Wales
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_wales> and Larry Sanger
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger> knew all this when they
began an online encyclopedia in 1999. Now, just seven years later,
everyone knows different.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wales was looking for someone with good academic credentials to
organize Nupedia, and Sanger fit the bill. Wales pitched the project
to Sanger in terms of Eric S. Raymond's essay (and later book) "The
Cathedral and the Bazaar"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar>. Raymond
sketched two models of software development. Under the "cathedral
model," source code was guarded by a core group of developers; under
the "bazaar model," it was released on the Internet for anyone to
tinker with.
Raymond argued that the latter model was better, and he coined a
now-famous hacker aphorism to capture its superiority: "Given enough
eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Given_enough_eyeballs%2C_all_bugs_are_shallow>.
His point was simply that the speed with which a complex project is
perfected is directly proportional to the number of informed people
working on it. Wales was enthusiastic about Raymond's thesis. His
experience with MUDs and Web rings had demonstrated to him the power
of the bazaar. Sanger, the philosopher, was charier about the
wisdom-of-crowds <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds>
scheme but drawn to the idea of creating an open online encyclopedia
that would break all the molds. Sanger signed on and moved to San
Diego.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
Could the Cornell preprint library <http://arXiv.org> eventually lead
to a Wikipsychologia that breaks all the molds?
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Street, Woodland Hills, CA 91367
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi>
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