wikipedia

Unbelievable, the power of collective collaboration.

Go now and search for something common on Google, first page of results has to have the wikipedia article.

The fact that wikipedia even exists and works is unreal. Anyone can add or change any article, opening itself to mischief from the unforgiving world, and yet it works. I love its self-healing nature. I like self-healing systems.

This is an open, free, social self-healing system. Even better. This is good design.

I was browsing edge.org’s world question, “what have you changed your mind about?”, Kevin Kelly’s response was wikipedia, one particular run of sentences I found interesting:

“The Wikipedia is impossible, but here it is. It is one of those things impossible in theory, but possible in practice. Once you confront the fact that it works, you have to shift your expectation of what else that is impossible in theory might work in practice.

I am not the only one who has had his mind changed about this. The reality of a working Wikipedia has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable. Along with other tools such as open-source software and open-source everything, this communitarian bias runs deep in the online world.”