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Tuesday 8 November 2005, 1:28 PM
Myriad explanations, from academic to street-savvy
The Wikipedia has 750,000 articles describing things that ordinary contributors find interesting and have knowledge of, mainly from work, leisure or nature.
It is a work-in-progress but many articles and whole topics have now reached a detailed level.
Quality is variable; important articles are generally written by lucid and knowledgeable contributors. The review and edit process available to any contributor improves quality by allowing future contributors to remove unreliable or badly written text and to add further information.
Many articles are intellectual or highbrow but many other very interesting ones are not and are very worthwhile because of it.
The project is open to anyone who is on the Internet and has been going since 2001. If such a useful reference work has been created so far, it’s difficult to imagine how important it will be when it matures and nears completion in decades to come.
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