Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

A while back, I did a series on web sites I couldn't live without. One site that I use more and more that I failed to mention is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is fantastic. It's an online encyclopedia that has (right now) 1,368,541 English-language articles.

The amazing thing about Wikipedia is that it's a community-created encyclopedia. This means that anyone can add, edit and maintain the individual articles. This naturally leads to some pranks and graffiti from time to time, but overall this is the most comprehensive and up-to-date encyclopedia ever. I have personally added an entry and edited a few of them.

For me, Wikipedia is the first place I go now to find topical information. If Wikipedia weren't cool enough, there are several other wikis that I'm starting to use more often. Wiktionary is an online dictionary and Wikibooks has online editable books and manuals.

Again, if that weren't cool enough, the software engine that runs Wikipedia is open source so you can build your own wiki. The source is available at mediawiki.org. Collaborative editing and maintenance is so powerful. You could use it to create a resource for your company, your church or other organization. As with all technologies, wikis are so powerful they can seem daunting at first, but it's definitely worth the effort to figure them out now if you think you could use them in the future.

If you'd like me to write more about wikis or answer some specific questions, let me know. I think wikis are the sliced bread of the Internet right now.