《维基经济学》.docVIP

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything Chapter 3 THE ENCYCLOPEDIA THAT ANYONE CAN EDIT Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is onto something big. Or should we say huge? Wikipedia, after all, is now the largest encyclopedia in the world, ofered for free, and created entirely by volunteers on an open platform that allows anyone to be an editor. Its amazing that Wikipedia exists at all, let alone that it includes over four million articles in over two hundred languages. It has become one of the most visited sites on the Web. It represents the future of publishing, and every company that produces information, from publishers to data providers, should be scared. Its not just its size or popularity, but also the way Wikipedia has evolved that makes it unique. Thousands of Web users volunteer their time and knowledge to help fulfill the communitys goal of providing every person in the world with a high-quality encyclopedia in their native language. Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Thats what were doing, says Wales. Built on Web software called wiki (Hawaiian for quick), Wikipedia allows multiple users to create and edit the same Web page. It is built on the premise that collaboration among users will improve content over time, in the way that the open source community steadily improved Linus Torvaldss first version of Linux. Wales first ventured into the world of encyclopedic content in 1998, when he established Nupedia with former employee Larry Sanger. Like Wkipedia, Nupedia allowed anyone to submit articles and content. Unlike Wikipedia, it was a centralized, top-down hierarchy: paid academics and topic experts followed a laborious seven-step process to review and approve content. One year and $120,000 into the project, Nupedia had only published twenty-four articles, and Wales decided to scrap it. One of Waless employees then introduced him to the wiki, a concept invented by Ward