The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia

Larry Sanger said: "wikis don't work if people aren't bold" Wikipedia says: "be bold in editing, moving, and modifying articles, because the joy of editing is that, although it should aim for, perfection is not required. And do not worry about messing up. All prior versions of articles are kept, so there is no way that you can accidentally damage W... See more

Eventualism has become an accepted norm in the community, because by default since the beginning of the project, starting from nothing, articles have overwhelmingly benefited from multiple eyeballs (and edits).

There are a range of topics that are always being disupted between inclusionists and deletionists. It's the borderline cases that are the hardest. A long-running battle has been about whether or not to have an article about each and every school that exists. Each college or university certainly deserves one, but what about each and every middle or ... See more

...the ever-increasing feature set of the Wki markup language has become more arcane and more user-unfriendly. Even a new user who braves the community policies is likely to be scared off by the increasing complexity of the markup language.

Durova's fourth law: small organizations run on relationships. Formal policies emerge when the organization becomes too large to operate on that basis. Policies continue to grow in both quantity and complexity in proportion to organizational growth until the policies no longer work, at which point policies remain in place while the organization rev... See more

...it was decided early on that there could be only one version of each article presented at any single time. Participants had to work toward a single common article entry. Differng parallel versions of an articple would serve no one well - it would simply be too easy for factions to go off their own biased corners.

Generally, we find most people out there on the Internet are good, says Jimmy Wales. It's one of the wonderful humanitarian discoveries in Wikipedia, that most people only want to help us build this free nonprofit, charitable resource.

One Wikipedian, with the handle of Durova, is pessimistic about the ability of Wikipedia to remain personable. She came up with a formulation that seems to track Wikipedia's evolution:

The story of Wikipedia has inspired business, government, and academics to reevaluate accepted truths about producing works of knowledge. Credentials and central control, once considered the most important parameters for generating quality content, now yield to new terms crowdsourcinf peer production and open source intelligence. What was once only... See more