Wikipedia Is Like a Community Leaf Raking Project

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by: Lynette Webb

This quote is slightly paraphrased but comes from a great recent article in The Guardian about Wikipedia by Nicholson Baker. www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/wikipedia.internet

The article posits that Wikipedia has become a world wonder, and I agree. In a few hundred years, when we look back on the wonders of this century, how many of them will exist in the purely digital realm?

What I also like about the article is it was written by a guy who isn’t just a journalist reporting from the outside, but who is intimately involved. It thus brings a different perspective than what you commonly see in the press.

One day I can imagine I could get hooked on Wikipedia contributing. So far I’ve only submitted one article (it was for my old job and was basically just a boring profile of a company) and it was a great experience… It got marked for deletion within about 10 seconds by two people, so I posted to ask what I needed to do to justify it warranting an entry, and they told me. I worked that evening and found more links and rewrote it to fit the guidelines. The next morning not only had they agreed not to take the entry down, someone else had gone to the trouble of fixing the formatting and added a summary. I was blown away by how efficient,effective and collegial the process was.

Image thanks to Forever Souls via www.flickr.com/photos/foreversouls/4633378/

PS: sorry I’ve been away for so long. I’ve been caught up in other “stuff” but making a concerted effort to get back to it now.

Original Post: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynetter/2409997360/