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

The website may be free of advertisements, but that hasn't stopped entities from trying to exercise influence. Spammers, public relations companies, and those who can gain from crafting a public perception have turned their sights to Wikipedia. Thomas Friedman noted in his book: "it is not an accident that IBM today has a senior staffer who polices... See more

Wikipedia had to deal with unique problems, since anybody could edit. With its popularity, spam and shameless self-promotion became a constant problem. These were challenges predecessors didn't have to face. Pasting a sales brochure into the Web pages of Britannica was impossible, yet this phenomenon was a continual battle for Wikipedia's patroller... See more

For many wikipedians, the act of participating in article making is also an act of learning. This is a dynamic most outside readers don't often see or experience. Writing about subjects while abiding by Wikipedia's neutral point of view requires research, critical thinking, and weighing the facts. Contributors often find themselves learning by edit... See more

The lack of top down editorial oversight resulted in uneven development of Wikipedia's articles, oftentimes with stark examples: The biography of Britney Spears takes up nearly twice the space as the one for Socrates.

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

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.

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

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).

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