Sublime

Welcome to Wik

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.

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

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.

Wikipedia operates on a central database, but its peer production model and edit transparency bears some similarities to decentralized networks. And this option feels decidedly less radical a step for the major social platforms than, say, exit to community.

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.

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