Wikipedia already has a very long and very detailed account of the London bombings. This is no surprise to those who watched Wikipedia contributors rapidly build an authoritative picture of last December's earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Will Richardson documents and reflects on this phenomenon in the July 8 issue of Ed-Tech Insider:
[T]he first post on Wikipedia [went up] at a little after 10 am London time....It takes 10 minutes for someone else to join [the first contributor] in making changes. Nine minutes later, someone adds external links [and an obscenity]. A minute later, the [obscenity] has been removed. A couple of minutes later, a table of contents is added, which is then edited out, only to return 2 minutes later. In the eight minutes between 10:18 and 10:26 am, 52 edits are made. Within the next hour, 46 (by my count) other contributors join in and the post grows to about 650 words. Now, here we are a day and a half later. At this writing the article just crossed 2,500 edits and is nearing 3,500 words in length. I'm not going to count how many different contributors there have been, but it's easily in the hundreds. The amount of information is once again amazing. And I would argue the accuracy of the article is probably as good as you'll get from any major media outlet (although the writing may not be as good.) I find all of this amazing, and I find myself thinking more and more about what it means. The teachers in the class yesterday pushed back a bit against this whole open content concept. I showed them the South African curriculum wiki and they were amazed, yes, but concerned too. (As am I....) Our whole concepts of accuracy and trust and truth are being challenged and redefined. This feels like such a big shift, such a HUGE shift for educators. And it's just totally manic right now. The beauty of Wikipedia. The ugliness of spammers and other ne'er do wells. Opening things up creates both, unfortunately. I don't think we can fight these changes. The question then becomes how do we best navigate them.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/09/2005 10:32:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
