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Wikipedia
2001 FirstMention.com explores the history and origin of common words and phrases Ya gotta love Wikipedia. Sure, there are occasional glitches, sloppy formatting, bad grammar, spam, tirades, and some all-around unprofessionalism. But these are rare, and rapidly dealt with by the massively-parallel Borg-mind that is the Wkipedia community. ("Copyright violations are futile"). Do you remember your first Wikipedia experience? It was probably back in 2001. Wikipedia's own biography dates its beginning as January 15, 2001, a date celebrated by some as Wikipedia Day. But it took a while for the wiki to grow, and for buzz to develop. The FirstMention we found for Wikipedia was dated July 1, 2001 and came from Down Under, in a publication called Australian PC World. Not only did they give Wikipedia a positive write-up; they made it the "Editor'sChoice". Roll-your-own fount of knowledge Wikipedia is wide open. Anyone can rock up and modify existing entries, or create new ones as I did.
Astonishingly, the result is not a pile of chaotic nonsense, as one might expect. Perhaps that's because the project is still small, with only 6000 pages of text and a few dozen contributors, but something more seems to be at work here. Evidently, articles that start off with a one-sided viewpoint are edited and re-edited until they settle into a kind of consensus with which most people are satisfied. In any case, this is an interesting experiment containing some surprisingly accurate articles.
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It was another few months before Wikipedia really hit the mainstream press, with a glowing write-up in the New York Times on September 20. | Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You
For all the human traffic that the Web attracts, most sites remain fairly solitary destinations. People shop by themselves, retrieve information alone and post messages that they hope others will eventually notice. But some sites are looking for ways to enable visitors not only to interact but even to collaborate to change the sites themselves.
Wikipedia... is one such site, a place where 100 or so volunteers have been working since January to compile a free encyclopedia. Using a relatively unknown and simple software tool called Wiki, they are involved in a kind of virtual barn-raising.
Their work, which so far consists of some 10,000 entries ... in some ways resembles the ad hoc effort that went into building the Linux operating system. What they have accomplished suggests that the Web can be a fertile environment in which people work side by side and get along with one another. And getting along, in the end, may ultimately be more remarkable than developing a full-fledged encyclopedia.
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Not everyone was so impressed. Peter Jacso, a professor of Information Science in Hawaii, wrote a scathing piece in the April 2002 issue of Online, a magazine out of Connecticut, labeling Wikipedia nothing more than a prank, and one in pretty poor taste: Picks and Pans Now we have the latest endeavor that is a joke at best, Wikipedia ...I am afraid it is meant to be a communal encyclopedia of the people, by the people, and for the people, which shall not perish from the earth, even if it looks like a prank...What surprises me is that even very respected journals and individuals publicize Wikipedia as if it was a serious project...
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Well, you can't please everybody, I suppose. Still, I wonder...Is there a Wikipedia entry for Curmedgeon? | |