Wikipedia: Of, For, and By the People

Nestling on a server farm in Boston, USA, and beaming into the darkest recess of cyberspace, is Planet Earth’s largest “live” reference resource, www.wikipedia.com.

In size, this Web-based free content knowledge encyclopedia offers nearly 520,000 articles in English alone -- compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500. Bung in Wiki’s 195 independent language editions, which include everything from Hindi to Hebrew to Hungarian, and the total count of articles shoots to a whopping 1.4 million!

Born in January 2001, Wikipedia is an “open content” encyclopedia. It does not have one publisher or authority behind it but is an on-going collaborative effort of thousands of users and volunteers worldwide. The very basis of the encyclopaedia is to encourage users to participate and help the growth of human collective knowledge. So anyone can add an article or information and edit someone else's article. And because it almost constantly being written, updated or edited, this monster knowledge library is termed “live”.

Despite receiving over 50 million hits per day, and being one of the most popular reference sites on the Web, Wikipedia's claim to be an encyclopedia has been controversial. Due to this "anyone can change the content" pproach, it has been criticized by academics for lack of reliability, authority and comprehensiveness. That’s true to an extent, but not entirely.

Fire a couple of comparative searches on Britanica, Encarta and Wikipedia yourself and see the difference. On many fronts, the Wiki is much bigger and more accurate than any commercial encyclopedia. Due to its open nature, Wikipedia has been able to vastly improve on its information sources, especially in topics like technology and current events. Its depth of information varies between a slew of knowledge to scraps and stubs. But overall, the sheer expanse of topics and subjects is absolutely mind-blowing. Other associate open projects here include a dictionary and thesaurus, free textbooks and manuals, a collection of quotations and free source documents.

And best of all, in spite of all its girth, the Wiki moves… and it moves as fast as greased lightening. Well almost...

Light the flame of knowledge, else flame me at ashishone@gmail.com...