Wiki

Wikipedia is a human centered endeavor that invites participation on a massive scale. It usurps top-down authority, empower individuals, and harnesses previously untapped labor of individuals previously isolated in separate social networks, but brought together by the Internet.

Wikis are open-ended. Anyone can create a page for any purpose. Yet all page names belong to one global namespace. This creates a scarcity—who will define the meaning of each name? The result is a generative tussle that forces the emergence of negotiation, communal norms, communal goals, communal meanings.

Wikipedia is the best known example of a page-based approach to knowledge management. Each topic has a dedicated title and page, accessible on English Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org/{title}. A given topic has, at any given moment in time, a consensus about what is important and truthful.

Wikipedia, for instance, is one of the most astonishing triumphs of the past twenty years, and no collaborative enterprise—as far as I know—has ever been organized at such a vast scale, with that particular architecture, with such world-changing success.

Jimmy Wales described it in 2004, was to create “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” The following year, Wales also stated, “We help the internet not suck.

Unlike most sites on the Internet that solicit "user generated content", no registration, no email, no identification is needed before someone can change a Wikipedia page. It would seem self-evident that this "open editing" model would lead to uncontrollable chaos and absolute disaster, yet completely counter to intuition, it has produced the oppos... See more

Since the Web 2.0 era is about user-generated content, it can be a show to newcomers who are not used to the idea when they come to Wikipedia. The community practice of not waiting for a fancy solution and just getting your hands dirty has spawned a special mantra (or admonishment): SOFIXIT.

The Wikipedia community also reinforces another Web 2.0 value - reuse and rmix. If you can build and learn from the work of others, this unbridled content can evolve much faster.