InfoCompanions » Ragtag Band http://www.infocompanions.com Brain spasms of an enthusiast who loves to live at the intersection of business, innovation, process and technology Sun, 26 Sep 2010 16:37:28 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Wikipedia’s Growth Secrets http://www.infocompanions.com/wikipedias-growth-secrets/ http://www.infocompanions.com/wikipedias-growth-secrets/#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:00:00 +0000 Himanshu Sharma http://www.infocompanions.net/?p=41 Jimmy Wales assembled “a ragtag band of volunteers,” gave them tools for collaborating, and created , the self-organizing, self-correcting, never-finished of the future. Here, he explains how the collaborative approach works, and why it succeeds. Along the way, he debunks some controversies, explains the “neutral point-of-view policy” and why it is non-debatable; and details the Wikipedia governance model: a democracy with a bit of aristocracy and some monarchy thrown in.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Jimmy Wales:
Jimmy Wales went from betting on interest rates and foreign-currency fluctuations (as an option trader) to betting on the willingness of people to share their knowledge. That’s how Wikipedia, imagined in 2001, became one of the most-referenced, most-used repositories of knowledge on the planet, with more than one million articles in English (compared with the Britannica’s 80,000) and hundreds of thousands in dozens of other languages, all freely available.

The “wiki” in the name refers to software that allows anyone with access to add, delete or edit entries. This has led to controversies about the reliability of the , prompting the to set tighter rules for editors, while still keeping Wikipedia open-source. One thing is certain: Wikipedia will never be finished. In the meantime Wales has started working on Wikiasari, a wiki-style search engine.

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