Wiki-mania

By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet. Posted August 9, 2005.

"I've seen things like this happen once or twice before," observed Mitch Kapor, software pioneer and head of the Open Source Foundation. "We're at the Big Bang of the next information revolution."

Ground Zero, at least last week, was Frankfurt, Germany, site of Wikimania, the first global gathering of the self-styled 'wikipedians' who collectively are well on their way to the goal of providing free online encyclopedias in every language on earth.

Created at virtually no cost by citizen-volunteers working collectively and using an innovative new tool called a wiki, which enables anyone to write and edit on a web page, the wikipedia site has experienced explosive growth in the past two years and now ranks among the top 50 most-visited websites in the world, according to alexa.com.

If it were a commercial venture, that means the valuation of the site would now be in excess of half a billion dollars, according to some estimates. But commerce doesn't enter into the wikipedia equation--in fact it's almost universally considered anathema among this crowd, whose most commonly articulated statement of ethos is "Free as in speech--not as in beer!"

Kapor was joined by hundreds of other enthusiasts from fifty-two countries at Wikimania, including such legends and luminaries as the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman (of GNU fame) and Ward Cunningham, the brilliant developer who created the first "writeable web page" program a decade ago and named it after Hawaii's Wiki-Wiki quick transports. "I was going to call it Quickweb," Cunningham explained in an interview. "And then I remembered these buses I took during a trip to Hawaii and I thought, 'That's cooler!'"

For years, Cunningham ran his own, semi-private closed wiki as a communications tool for a small community of software developers. Then he received a query from an Internet entrepreneur he didn't know named Jimbo Wales, asking if his tool could be used to create a free online encyclopedia.

"Yes," Cunningham responded. "But then it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki."

It turned out to be both. Somewhat unwittingly, Cunningham had created one of the greatest social networking tools ever invented. But it took the vision of Wales -- and what rapidly turned into an online, global volunteer army -- to take the wiki phenomenon to the next level.

Offered the chance to create their own "content," and handed a tool that made doing so easy and fun, a community began to coalesce around the wikipedia site. In rapid order, thousands ... then tens of thousands ... then literally hundreds of thousands of articles, photographs, illustrations, maps and other means of knowledge transfer were contributed, corrected, improved and posted online. The English and the German wikipedias were the first to take off, followed by French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Arab, Esperanto ... even Klingon (to the dismay of many!)

If wikis could be used to create a high-quality reference work like an encyclopedia, might the next step be to make an online dictionary and thesaurus? Enter the Wiktionary. How about a better Bartlett's? Enter Wikiquote. Want a repository of source text in any language? Wikisource ... All are now available via the parent organization, the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, whose stated goals are to promote the creation of free educational content -- and to make it available to the public free of charge.

Soon, other uses of the wiki began to suggest themselves. Perhaps wikis could help solve the crisis in journalism by enabling citizens to report their own news? Bingo -- wikinews. Need a way to engage readers and reverse the alarming decline in newspaper circulation? Let your readers write wikitorials. Need a better constitution for Europe than the one the Euro-crats produced? How about a Wikitution next time?

Although the wikipedians continued to ignore commerce and filthy lucre, commercial entities couldn't help but notice that something was going on. After all, the wikipedia site was drawing more traffic than that of the New York Times and USA Today combined ... and Google searches were sending more and more people to the wiki site every day, creating a virtuous circle of newbies, all in search of answers, some of whom inevitably became enamored, and seeing how easy it was to create rather than simply consume, began writing and editing on the wiki themselves.

Since anyone is free not only to create and modify content on the wiki pages, but also to redistribute the content in any way, hundreds of other web sites -- many of them commercial enterprises -- began using wikipedia in a variety of ways. Answers.com, for example, offers a direct link to wiki content among its potpourri of information services. Robert Rosenschein, who runs the company, also attended Wikimania, and pronounced himself a huge supporter of the entire enterprise -- something he demonstrated by having his company help sponsor the conference (along with Sun Microsystems and others) as a means of "giving back to the community."

This and other articles by Rory O'Connor are available on his blog.

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