Wikipedia: Friend or Foe?
11 October 2006 at 12:33 pm Peter G. Klein 1 comment
| Peter Klein |
Is Wikipedia “the ultimate vindication of universal education, or a widening crack in the edifice of our culture?” Stanford’s Jackson Library blog directs our attention to “Know It All” in the New Yorker and “The Hive” in the Atlantic for different perspectives.
As economists, of course, we happily consume wikis but wonder why anyone bothers to produce them. (After all, wikis aren’t just vanity projects, like organizational economics blogs.)
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Institutions.
Organizations and Markets 
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Eric H | 13 October 2006 at 11:11 am
I’ll offer another suggestion for editing wiki: as a universally available resource for myself. If I put information on wikipedia, I can access that information from any net-connected computer on the planet. I don’t have to be in my office or home. That seems to be the trend for many applications: get it off your local computer, put it on the web, eventually the net becomes your storage device. Thus, the more information you put on the web, the more valuable it becomes to you. Writely and del.icio.us are similar examples, one taking the place of Word and the other of your local browser bookmarks. Nobody has to remember anything anymore: you just have to know how to use Google.
BTW, is a blog only useful for vanity? It seems to me that you would have to be incredibly vain to keep one up if that were so. Having met Tyler Cowen, I would choose “prolific blogger” long before “vain” to describe him. Or my wife, now that I think about it.