MEETING DATE: Friday July 21, 2006  --  Postponed to Aug 18

“Wiki-wiki” is an adjective and adverb in native Hawaiian meaning “quick” or “fast.” Wiki in webspeak “is a type of website that allows users to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change all content very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing.”

Wikipedia is “an international Web-based free-content encyclopedia. It exists as a wiki, a website that allows visitors to edit its content; the word Wikipedia itself is a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia.  Wikipedia is written collaboratively [and anonymously – Lee] by volunteers, allowing articles to be changed by anyone with access to the website.” (All definitions courtesy of Wikipedia.)

I will discuss Wikipedia and other projects created by the Wikimedia Foundation, including Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikinews and others. Like thousands of other Wikipedians, I have written some articles and edited many others. Yet I’ve only been using Wikipedia off-and-on for about a year, and I am always learning something new about the project and other Wikimedia projects.

I think Wikipedia is fascinating, in part because of the philosophical assumptions behind it: that everyone has a right to contribute, that most contributors will do the best they can to write informatively and accurately, and that the openness of Wikipedia helps ensure its accuracy, the same concept of excellence behind open-source software like Linux and Mozilla. As Larry Sanger, former Wikipedia editor, is quoted by Wikipedia, “Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow,” that eventually the Wikipedia community finds and corrects errors.

I look forward to discussing Wikipedia with you at the July general meeting.