July 28, 2004 2:27 PM

Wikipedia

I've been citing Wikipedia articles a lot in my recent postings.

I'd like to give the Wikipedia people a bit of a plug. They've instigated a free encyclopedia, written by... well, anyone who cares to help write it. ("Free" in this case means both the free software and free beer senses of the word.) The web site that hosts the encyclopedia is a "Wiki", a system that allows anyone who sees a problem with a page or wants to contribute to do so, immediately. There's literally a button on every part of every page named "edit".

Wikis, like all "open source" style projects, work on the stone soup model. You start with a small implementation of an idea and convince lots of people that they should help you improve it. What starts as a kettle and a rock turns into something far, far better. The public good "problem" is stood on its head. The non-rivalrous, non-excludable nature of pure information doesn't bring the "market failure" traditional economic analysis would predict, but instead becomes an advantage begging to be harnessed.

If any project shows the power of an open source community, it is Wikipedia. In a few short years, they've produced, for free, one of the best information resources I'm familiar with, and they've barely even started. If you haven't looked at Wikipedia, you should.

By coincidence Slashdot is running an interview today with Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales.

There's a great quote in the interview that I'd like to share:

I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated [...] to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

I think he's on to something. Couple

  • An internet filled with the complete sum of human knowledge
  • $10 laptop computers with cheap satelite internet access
and I think that it will no longer be possible to keep people poor and ignorant except if they want to be, no matter what their neighbors, religious leaders and governments might want.

For a fictional vision of what such technologies could bring, see The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.


Posted by Perry E. Metzger | Categories: Economics, Intellectual Property, Open Source, Politics, Science & Technology