Under enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow

The Hive, by Marshall Poe in the September, 2006 Atlantic, is the best article I've read on Wikipedia -- its origins, practices, strengths and weaknesses.

I found the overview of the roles of Larry Sanger and Jimbo Wales particularly interesting.

"Wales’s benign rule has allowed Wikipedia to do what it does best: grow. The numbers are staggering. The English-language Wikipedia alone has well more than a million articles and expands by about 1,700 a day. (Britannica’s online version, by comparison, has about 100,000 articles.) As of mid-February 2006, more than 65,000 Wikipedians—registered users who have made at least ten edits since joining—had contributed to the English-language Wikipedia. The number of registered contributors is increasing by more than 6,000 a month; the number of unregistered contributors is presumably much larger. Then there are the 200-odd non-English-language Wikipedias. Nine of them already have more than 100,000 entries each, and nearly all of the major-language versions are growing on pace with the English version."

Long, but worth reading.

Tagged: wikipedia, internet+resources