It never occurred to me that Wikipedia's giant, user-edited database may actually garner most of its updates from a benevolent cabal of Trivial Pursuit Goliaths. And that's what my favorite tech-blogger, Jeff Atwood, tries to iron out:
When you visit Wikipedia's entry on asphalt, you get some reasonably reliable information about asphalt. What you don't get, however, is any indication of who the author is. That's because the author is irrelevant. Wikipedia is a community effort, the result of tiny slices of effort contributed by millions of people around the world. The focus is on the value of the aggregated information, not who the individual authors are.
But who is that community? According to Jimmy Wales, most of the work on Wikipedia is done by a tightly knit Gang of 500:
The links in the quote go to the places Atwood references. But check out the lengths he goes to to check the veracity of this.
Only a programmer . . .
-R
1 comment:
Sad only 500 people pull the wight to make a site that helps millions. We all have areas that we are expert in, lets sine up and start editing.
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