Sociate

Last night I had the great pleasure to hear Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales talk about the project's origins, workings and dynamics as part of Howard Rheingold's Toward a Literacy of Cooperation class at Stanford.

Among other things, he drew a great distinction between two ways of looking at what makes Wikipedia work.

• If it's an emergent phenomenon, merely the product of people trying to work together, none of whom are particularly significant, then it probably needs an explicit reputation system like eBay's.
• If it's a community at work, where some members are powerful and should be respected, then reputation is just a natural outcome of everyone's interactions and needs no explicit subsystem.
  

Jimmy believes the second perspective fits Wikipedia best. I agree.

Then Geoff Cohen sent me a link to Infoworld's Jon Udell doing a brilliant commentary on a topic you might never have imagined there'd be an encyclopedia entry on: the heavy metal umlaut.

Check it out. Everything about it is brilliant, including Jon's execution of the tour + voiceover.