« Whining About the .EU Landrush is a Joke | Main | This I'd Like to See »
April 22, 2006
Okay, Wikipedia is Cool
Everyone loves Wikipedia. NPR has weekly stories about them, the NY Times lauds their work and Nature Magazine has even compared them favorably to the Encyclopedia Britannica. But you know, even though I use Wikipedia, the underlying wiki technology has always struck me as being unpractical in the 'real world.'
But they've won me over, in spite of me. While reading an article on PCR (I bet that one could build a functioning lab for less than $2000 these days) I stumbled over a poorly phrased sentence. It was so bad that I had to read it three times to verify that the authors did indeed mean what I thought they meant. And then it happened, that little 'a-ha' moment. I clicked the '[EDIT]' link to the right of the section title and re-worded the sentence so that it was intelligible and clicked 'SAVE.' So, maybe my changes were an improvement, maybe not. But I realized that Wikipedia is cool because it allows people like me to revise pages, to put right what once went wrong, and to satisfy our own need for quality. I don't know how many people out there are annoyed when they read something on the web that's unapproachable due to the original author's writing style (or lack thereof) but I know that I can't be alone. Maybe public wiki's are workable in the 'real world.' People generally like to fix things that they perceive as being wrong, and people's egos always like to have their work displayed to a wide audience. Therefore people will tend to contribute positively to collective efforts, even if the contribution is anonymous, as long as the barrier to entry is low enough. Wikipedia's success in the face of naysayers, like me, proves that they've found a way to ease entry without losing control of quality. Now if I could just figure out how to get teammates on projects to do the same thing, I'd be a happy guy.
Oh, I also like Wikipedia 'cause I can put lots of links to the site in posts and pretend that I'm writing something erudite enough to require support or that I'm referring to pop-culture ephemera that are obscure enough to need an explanation.
Posted by ashusta at April 22, 2006 06:24 PM