Kevin Kelly, fondateur du magazine Wired profite de la nouvelle année pour démissionner du camp des sceptiques de wikipedia "qui ne peut pas marcher". Et je trouve son analyse brillante, large citation :

[...] It has always been clear that collectives amplify power — that is what cities and civilizations are — but what's been the big surprise for me is how minimal the tools and oversight are needed. The bureaucracy of Wikipedia is relatively so small as to be invisible. It's the Wiki's embedded code-based governance, versus manager-based governance that is the real news. Yet the greatest surprise brought by the Wikipedia is that we still don't know how far this power can go. We haven't seen the limits of wiki-ized intelligence. Can it make textbooks, music and movies? What about law and political governance?

Before we say, "Impossible!" I say, let's see. I know all the reasons why law can never be written by know-nothing amateurs. But having already changed my mind once on this, I am slow to jump to conclusions again. The Wikipedia is impossible, but here it is. It is one of those things impossible in theory, but possible in practice. Once you confront the fact that it works, you have to shift your expectation of what else that is impossible in theory might work in practice.

I am not the only one who has had his mind changed about this. The reality of a working Wikipedia has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable. Along with other tools such as open-source software and open-source everything, this communtarian bias runs deep in the online world.

In other words it runs deep in this young next generation. It may take several decades for this shifting world perspective to show its full colors. When you grow up knowing rather than admitting that such a thing as the Wikipedia works; when it is obvious to you that open source software is better; when you are certain that sharing your photos and other data yields more than safeguarding them — then these assumptions will become a platform for a yet more radical embrace of the commonwealth. I hate to say it but there is a new type of communism or socialism loose in the world, although neither of these outdated and tinged terms can accurately capture what is new about it.

The Wikipedia has changed my mind, a fairly steady individualist, and lead me toward this new social sphere. I am now much more interested in both the new power of the collective, and the new obligations stemming from individuals toward the collective. In addition to expanding civil rights, I want to expand civil duties. I am convinced that the full impact of the Wikipedia is still subterranean, and that its mind-changing power is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existence proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible.

That's what it's done for me.

Trouvé via le blog Cosmic Variance.

Les détracteurs de wikipedia se lamentent souvent de personnes qui copient/collent depuis wikipedia sans trop regarder, surtout parmis les enseignants. En 2006 sur la liste History of Economics Societies j'écrivais dans un débat sur wikipedia entre enseignants le 6 février 2006 :

[...] If teachers didn't taught students to check multiple source in the paper world, the move to the digital world is indeed an excellent occasion to move from bad to good teaching :).

There are many good questions raised about source, trust and authorship of information by the emergence of wikipedia and of the online world, I hope teachers and historians are agitating them before their students as food for thought. [...]

En effet, wikipedia est totalement traçable et transparente contrairement aux encyclopédies traditionnelles car on peut trouver l'historique des éditions et dans la plupart des cas des liens externes sont fournis et à défaut une recherche google sur les mots clés de l'article permets rapidement de trouver les omissions.

Qui connait l'historique et les tractations derriere un article d'une encyclopédie propriétaire ?

En quoi le fait qu'un éditeur dispose d'un capital de quelques millions d'euros le rendrait plus crédible dans le domaine du savoir ?

wikipedia est je pense un merveilleux support pour amener les étudiants a progresser dans le domaine de la recherche (critique) et de la création (édition d'article, regroupement d'informations). Peut-être encore sous-utilisé ?