The Wikipedia is beautiful

Recently, there has been a lot of controversy regarding the accuracy and accountability of the Wikipedia. It mostly boils down to whether or not the Wikipedia is an authoritative and trustworthy source.

This really is a meaningless discussion. Predefining a fixed level of authority and trust for any given source is simply impossible. The only thing that makes sense, is trying to assess the accuracy and trustworthiness of your source as it relates to a specific piece of information. You do this by comparing the information with what you got from as much other sources as you could possible find.

The only remark worth quoting in all of this comes from Tim Bray:

The Wikipedia is beautiful. It’s an unexpected and unexplainable triumph of collective creativity and of order over entropy.

It is. It’s just as unexpected and unexplainable as the bazaar-style development of the Linux kernel. The internet has proven that meaningful collaboration can work on a much, much larger scale than anyone could have imagined and that the results are sometimes amazingly beautiful.