"’I've seen things like this happen once or twice before,’ observed Mitch Kapor, software pioneer and head of the Open Source Foundation. ‘We’re at the Big Bang of the next information revolution.’
Ground Zero, at least last week, was Frankfurt, Germany, site of Wikimania, the first global gathering of the self-styled ‘wikipedians’ who collectively are well on their way to the goal of providing free online encyclopedias in every language on earth.
Created at virtually no cost by citizen-volunteers working collectively and using an innovative new tool called a wiki, which enables anyone to write and edit on a web page, the wikipedia site has experienced explosive growth in the past two years and now ranks among the top 50 most-visited websites in the world, according to alexa.com.
If it were a commercial venture, that means the valuation of the site would now be in excess of half a billion dollars, according to some estimates. But commerce doesn’t enter into the wikipedia equation–in fact it’s almost universally considered anathema among this crowd, whose most commonly articulated statement of ethos is ‘Free as in speech–not as in beer!’…
If wikis could be used to create a high-quality reference work like an encyclopedia, might the next step be to make an online dictionary and thesaurus? Enter the Wiktionary. How about a better Bartlett’s? Enter Wikiquote. Want a repository of source text in any language? Wikisource … All are now available via the parent organization, the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, whose stated goals are to promote the creation of free educational content — and to make it available to the public free of charge."