[Marxism] Wikipedia - a new flourishing of public knowledge

[si <si@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It occured to me that I've not seen any discussion of the work of the
wikimedia foundation here, and so I thought that it had perhaps slipped
under the radar of a few of you. There's been some discussion on PEN-L -
I don't know what the intersection between the two memberships is.

Anyway, wikipedia is an online, collaborative,
free-as-in-speech-and-beer
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_as_in_speech), encyclopedia. Its
content is created actively by the community, using a a recent(ish) web
technology called a 'wiki' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki) .
Basically, any individual, registered or not, can at any time change the
content of any page on the entire site. Wikipedia's page on itself is
more informative and concise than I could hope to be -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia . Wikipedia is a frankly
incredible, beautiful product of human collaboration, and utterly
inspiring. Also interesting is the wikibooks project, which aims to
produce academic textbooks on a range of subjects, on the same
free-as-in-speech-and-beer basis.

I've posted this for three reasons. Firstly, because it has been a
useful resource for me, and I imagine it might be in some small ways to
some of you. Secondly, because it is perhaps significant of the
broadening of the previously technical open-source/free software
movement into something far more socially significant. Thirdly, and most
importantly, I hoped that some of you might consider contributing your
considerable expertise to the project. It seems a shame to have your
knowledge fragmented both across mailing lists like this and across
articles, blogs etc when there is a central repository as glorious as
this available.

Of course, unlike those other means of literary production, at wikipedia
there is a community, and you will at times find yourself in conflict
with that community. Whether you are prepared for those conflicts is, of
course, up to you.

Thanks for enduring yet another tenuous, turgid and verbose production
of mine. Know at least that I'm working on my style...

--Simon Bull



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