Check out Wikipedia! It’s an “open” encyclopedia — that is, one that anyone can write an article for — that is growing at an amazing rate, and remaining amazingly cogent and crap-free.

So, we’re are constantly monitoring Wikipedia’s Recent Changes page. When–as happens rarely–some eedjit shows up and vandalizes a page, it’s fixed nearly instantly. (We save back copies of all pages, and these are very easily accessible.) We (that is, we participants) work on a lot of different pages, and I think most of us feel some collective responsibility for how the whole thing looks. We’re constantly cleaning up after each other and new people.

In the process, a camaraderie–a politeness and congeniality not found on many online discussion forums–has developed. We’ve got to respect each other, because we are each other’s editors, and we all have more or less the same goal: to create a huge, high-quality free encyclopedia.

Link Discuss (via Meerkat)