Wikipedia is to open as Britannica is to closed [sourced software, that is].
That thought came upon me while reading this post at Boing Boing snatched from this post at Many-to-Many. Doesn't it sound the same? Here's a quote from Boing Boing:
If these errors had appeared in Wikipedia entries, its likely that they would have been fixed in short order -- and once they were discovered by the outraged experts quoted in this Observer article, they certainly would be fixed.
Sounds like the pro-active, many eyes, shallow bugs theory. But in this case, the barrier of entry or activation energy for the Wikipedia is really, really low. You literally can go in there and just edit something. I know I did! I spent this morning and last night, after work, of course, editing my watched articles. It felt good to contribute.
And more importantly, I found a great way to contribute that eases my mind. The short version of it is to compare the latest revision of the article to the revision that you last created. This method assumes that you approve completely the last article you created, making it "your" article. Any changes since then could collectively be called an edit, to which you must now approve.
I did this method and updated like seven articles without fretting what I missed (since in this case the in-betweens kinda don't matter?). Awesome. It's something I've been considering for the wikilog. I plan on letting anyone changing my blog entries. But just like in the forums, the posts will gain a flagged status of "this post has been edited". In order for that flag to go away, *I* have to edit the post once more. This second part is standard practice in blogs, where you can't really tell the author made a change until he told you. I changed it, good to go.
Posted by Mark Canlas at March 12, 2005 10:38 AM