Journal

Wikipedia

Posted on November 10th, 2004, in the afternoon

Every now and then I get a sudden re-realisation of how brilliant something I take for granted is. I had that experience visiting Wikipedia earlier this morning.

For those of you who haven't come across Wikipedia before, it's a huge, free, publically edited online encyclopedia. Anyone can add or edit entires for any subject. It may sound like a recipe for anarchy, but it really works - instances where entries have to be locked to prevent spamming or 'edit wars' are unbelievably low considering there are currently nearly 400,000 enties in the English language version.

Wikipedia is as fulfilling a user experience as visiting Google, bbc.co.uk or Amazon. It's among my first ports of call for researching almost anything.