Larry Sanger, the first editor-in-chief of Wikipedia, and allegedly the originator of the plan to make it a wiki, has announced that he plans to fork the project. The new branch will have no anonymous changes and expert editors. The project will be called the ‘Citizendium’. (Hang on, I know there are some PRs among my readers – could you …read the rest of this article

USA Today takes a pop at internet techies citing the Wisdom of Crowds, suggesting that the recent digg and wikipedia controversies may show the idea is fallacious. David Freedman takes another swipe in ‘What’s Next: The Idiocy of Crowds‘ published at Inc.com, saying that on the internet, “the scum tends to rise to the top”.
As usual, the criticism is based …read the rest of this article

Aaron Swartz contributes some fascinating analysis to the study of who writes Wikipedia. Founder Jimmy Wales has often stated that a small number of people make the largest number of contributions. He told Stanford University that “the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits,” for example.
Swartz decided to count the evidence in a …read the rest of this article

The largest and perhaps the most daring Web 2.0 project is the Wikipedia. This online encyclopedia is free and it is created through contributions by its users. You or I write and submit articles on a subject of interest, and then other users, rather than officiating editors, add to and correct those articles. With millions of articles already, and about …read the rest of this article