20110623

Review of "The Wikipedia Revolution"

The Wikipedia Revolution by Andrew Lih

I thought I knew everything worth knowing about Wikipedia already. Of course, I was wrong.

More importantly, I learned things about the rest of the internet:
* Slashdot pioneered meta-moderation, a powerful tool for self-policing a comment-driven community (pg 68)
* Japanese internet culture is much more anonymous; the canonical example is a site called 2channel. (pg 145)
* Chinese writing was simplified after WWII, but not in Taiwan and Hong Kong. A Wikipedia user built a system to automatically translate Wikipedia pages back and forth between the simplified and traditional systems, which was not trivial (pg 153).
* Spanish wikipedia broke off and started their own non-wikipedia wiki encyclopedia after Larry Sanger suggested that wikipedia might carry advertising.
* Larry Sanger strongly regrets that Wikipedia did not give experts a greater role in the system. His attempt to build such a system is called Citizendium. As of June 23, 2011 they have ~16,000 articles, ~160 of which are expert-approved.

Bottom line: if you're interested in understanding how the wikipedia miracle happened, this will give you some insight.

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