Really useful article just sent through to me by Michaela from the National Library titled Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? published in The New Yorker .
The article is rather long, but provides an excellent history of the development of Wikipedia, the phenomenally successful online encyclopedia where the number of visitors has been doubling every four months and the site receives as many as fourteen thousand hits per second. The article includes an historical overview of encylopedias in general, before focusing on Wikipedia and how it works etc.
This is one of those articles that is worth squirreling away for future reference.
Thanks for the link Derek. And I see that the wikipedia world is expanding, as announced over the weekend at the “wikimaniacs” conference. As well as a partnership with the MIT $100 laptop, there was the announcement of a new project called Wikiversity. “It will serve as an online center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual learning materials, for all ages in all languages. It’ll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research based in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. Launching in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.” from Andy Carvin’s blog.
Derek, I wanted to contact you about the next edition of my free book about Web 2.0: please see http://www.terry-freedman.org.uk/db/web2/
Would appreciate it if you could email please — I can’t find an email address on your website
Cheers
Terry