More on Open Content.

Andy Carvin wrote:

> From today's Washington Post... -ac
>
> Spreading Knowledge, the Wiki Way
>
> One of the Internet's more fascinating social experiments was born at
> a time when it seemed all the dot-coms were dying. Wikipedia
> (http://www.wikipedia.org), a free online encyclopedia started in
> January 2001, has since surprised Web watchers by maturing into a
> popular reference site. Wikipedia's success is particularly remarkable
> because unlike regular Web sites, it is created entirely by the people
> who visit it. With more than 340,000 English-language articles, this
> community-edited encyclopedia is already considerably larger than its
> leading rival, the Encyclopedia Britannica, which offers 75,000
> articles online in a subscription service.
>
> The free Wikipedia also features a publicly authored current-events
> page recapping the day's top news, and it is rapidly expanding into
> other languages -- more than 10,000 articles have been created in each
> of roughly a dozen languages besides English. Yet some worry that
> because it charges users nothing, this new-age reference work may
> siphon readership away from old-school encyclopedias and take a
> devastating bite out of their revenue -- without delivering the same
> levels of accuracy and quality.
>
> (snip)
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5430-2004Sep8.html
>
> ac
>
> -------------------------------------------------
> Andy Carvin
> Program Director
> EDC Center for Media & Community
> acarvin @ edc . org
> http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org
> http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/

Have you hugged a Wikipedian lately? Well, if you're male, you can just
buy me a beer... ;-)

-- 
Taran Rampersad
cnd@knowprose.com
http://www.knowprose.com
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