April 27, 2004

Salon's Everyone is an editor by Sam Williams is an interesting look into the world of collaborative content projects, particularly the Wikipedia project. For those that don't know, the Wikipedia is a giant collaborative encyclopedia that basically anyone can contribute to. It's range of entries is shockingly diverse and of surprisingly good (if sometimes uneven) quality. Check out the definitions of computer science, software or computer engineering or electrical engineering to see what I mean. The linking between terms is fantastically useful, definintions practically serving as portal pages to an entire subject area -- and if you see a term that not fleshed out, you can do it yourself. And it's multilingual, both in terms of multiple main entry points for the encyclopedia and each term linking sideways to definitions in other languages. What the heck: Physics, Astronomy, Math,

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