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Thursday, January 06, 2005

On Wikis:
Corante's Many 2 Many blog has a great commentary by Clay Shirky on why information professionals hate Wikipedia. It also links to a discussion on Slashdot, and to the the article on kuro5hin that started the discussion (Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism). Shirky:
    "The Wikipedia is an experiment in social openess, and it will stand or fall with the ability to manage that experiment. Whining like Sanger’s really only merits one answer: the Wikipedia makes no claim to expertise or authority other than use-value, and if you want to vote against it, don’t use it. Everyone else will make the same choice for themselves, and the aggregate decisions of the population will determine the outcome of the project.
    And 5 years from now, when the Wikipedia is essential infrastructure, we’ll hardly remember what the fuss was about."

Lots of fascinating discussion in the comments too.
(Via JD Lasica.)

For a reminder of how useful Wikipedia (and its companion WikiNews) are becoming, just check out their pages on the tsunami disaster. (Wikipedia's, WikiNews) More useful information here than you can get from any other online encyclopedia or news page, I think.

Looks like Many 2 Many will be going on the blogroll.

Related: there is also now a WikiCommons where people can post multimedia reports on the tsunami or anything else. Of course, the Media Bloggers Association has also created a multimedia hosting site for tsunami information...

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