Wiki-mania

"I've seen things like this happen once or twice before. We're at the Big Bang of the next information revolution." - Mitch Kapor, software pioneer and head of the Open Source Foundation.

Penned on the occasion of the August 2005 "Wikimania" conference - described by author Rory O'Connor as "the first global gathering of the self-styled 'wikipedians' who collectively are well on their way to the goal of providing free online encyclopedias in every language on earth" - this article explores trends in a burgeoning collaborative information-sharing online tool/resource called wikipedia. Created at virtually no cost by citizen-volunteers using a tool called a wiki, which enables anyone to write and edit a web page, wikipedia "has experienced explosive growth in the past two years and now ranks among the top 50 most-visited websites in the world, according to alexa.com." The increasing popularity of this online mode of communication is evidenced by the enthusiasts from 52 countries who attended Wikimania.

Created by a non-profit organisation whose stated goals are to promote the creation of free educational content - and to make it available to the public free of charge (and advertising-free) - wikipedia began seeing an increasingly number of visitors, due in part to the fact that search engines "were sending more and more people to the wiki site every day, creating a virtuous circle of newbies, all in search of answers, some of whom inevitably became enamored, and seeing how easy it was to create rather than simply consume, began writing and editing on the wiki themselves." Through that process, "a community began to coalesce around the wikipedia site. In rapid order, thousands...then tens of thousands...then literally hundreds of thousands of articles, photographs, illustrations, maps and other means of knowledge transfer were contributed, corrected, improved and posted online. The English and the German wikipedias were the first to take off, followed by French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Arab, Esperanto..."

O'Connor hypothesises that "purity of concept" has contributed to this growing trend; "Because no money has been involved, the level of trust and community that has been established is off the charts." Whatever the reason, "the wiki way continues to spread around the globe"; it is "the hottest thing in information technology since the advent of the blogosphere (Ward Cunningham predicts the coming merger of blogs and wikis, by the way)..."