Unlike other encyclopedias throughout history, Wikipedia has no physical limit on how many pages it can contain.... also, in the age of Google search and hypertext, people can come across Wikipedia's content through any number of avenues... The idea of a volume or alphabetical order is completely irrelevant to a modern Internet encyclopedia. Althou... See more

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

...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.

Wikipedia survives and retains its passionate community also becuase it is social. You never know whom you will meet, strike up a conversation with, and as a consequence, learn from. Every Wikipedia article has a discussion page, to encourage debate and the exchange of ideas with others in the community. Imagine taking an online bulletin board, dis... See more