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Box #5: 5th example :The free Wikipedia encyclopaedia
(http://www.wikipedia.org)
A FEW BY-PRODUCTS OF THE NETWORK
Excerpt from Jerôme Delacroix’s latest book entitled Wikis
“A ‘Wikiwikiweb’,
or wiki for short, is a dynamic website, the pages of which
anyone can edit to their heart’s content. Wikis are living
examples of cooperative and community-centred teamwork aimed
at elaborating working documents together. On a wiki, any
visitor can interact with the page he or she is reading
and even create a new one. There is no moderator on that
kind of websites; the visitor’s changes are accepted immediately
by the system and they are instantly visible to all other
readers. What is happening in real life is that a first
contributor starts writing a text, another one modifies
it, a third one corrects a typo etc. Wikis are amazing tools
when it comes to sharing knowledge and achieving cooperation,
be it amongst co-workers of an organisation or the members
of a virtual community, or even the entire community of
web users at large.
The paradox
hightlighted by wikis lies in the fact that this kind of
collaborative work is far more open yet more straightforward
than other more complicated collaborative suites. Wikis
are hinging on the belief that leaving the system entirely
open and reducing the impact of potential destructions to
a minimum is more profitable than putting all sorts of security
mechanisms up front, for the latter would discourage contributors
entirely.
Indeed, no problem is ever ‘serious’ on a
wiki because all the versions of the same document are always
retained on the server, and therefore, it is always possible
to get back to an earlier version. The whole system is based
on the trust that is bestowed on its users and the constant
watch that is carried out by the community for the
benefit of the community.
Through this
watch, glitches or even voluntary degradations can be corrected
as easily as they were created. The flagship of wikis is
the Wikipedia project, a free collaborative and living encyclopaedia.
Like all wikis it is 100% the result of collective work.
Each reader can turn into a contributor at a click of a
mouse. As a result,
wikis do bridge the gap between readers and writers. The
contents of a wiki are necessarily evolving on a permanent
basis: Wikipedia started with 1.000 pages in 2001 and grew
exponentially ever since until it reached its current status
of one million articles. In the meantime, the project had
gone round the world with local versions in 40 different
languages.”
This book can
be purchased from Amazon
See also Blogs, Wikis, And Feeds In Action,
by Dave Johnson
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