Wikipedia - so good that it's crazy

That is pretty good.

All you need with wikipedia is one devoted fan. Look at the authors of the article (under “history”). It was mainly written by a guy that calls himself “GreenReaper” who’s homepage is *surprise* *surprise* partly about WindowsBlind (Link)

Wow. Too bad it don't have anything on me.

If you look at the history of that page: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stardock&action=history ...you'll see that GreenReaper is responsible for most of it.

I'm really surprised that they allow anonymous people to create stuff. How do they keep abuse from doing it? I made the WinCustomize entry last night. I didn't even create a UserID.

Well, the system is actually pretty well made. Your IP is tracked. Checking the history of the Wincustomize entry, I saw the IP address of the person who created it (since it was as you said an anonymous entry, otherwise I would have seen his username). Then checking that IP, I saw that you also created the Windowblinds entry, and I would have seen any other activity of yours as well. Second, there are discussions for every entry, and a person can request that an entry or a whole article be deleted. For example, if you look at this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livingod , you'll see that it has been requested to be deleted and there is a discussion about it. I think it's well organized so there is very little abuse, and when there is there are ways in place to deal with it.

Allowing anyone to change anything is one of the wiki dogmas. The idea is that there are always more people interested in being constructive than in being destructive and that the constructive people will roll back any destructive alterations (keeping a changelog being one of the other foundations of this system).

The social aspect of wikis is quite cool. When enough people are involved they actually work quite well, although they do get chaotic fast.

The first ever wiki has more info on some of the underlying principles: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks

Wiki sites are the new fad. It really allows members to feel like they're part of the "community" since they can all collectively decide what stays and what gets deleted.

Even your good friends at Democratic Underground started their own (Link)

SkinWiki http://www.skinyourscreen.com/skinwiki is another free Wiki (yup, anybody can edit it) dedicated solely to skinnable software and the tools and techniques for making skins. WE NEED CONTRIBUTORS!!!

BTW: we're using exactly the same software as Wikipedia/MetaWiki - no learning curve whatsoever. SkinWiki's been up for over a month and has most of the categories, rules, and even software titles already in place - we just need contributors to help flesh it out.

SkinWiki: http://www.skinyourscreen.com/skinwiki

When i first heard of wiki, I was very sceptical of it's accuracy, but now it is one of my favorite sites to go to look up stuff.

Hehe, yes, I decided that the Stardock article needed a bit of expansion (if you're interested, it looked like this before I had at it). So I added stuff! It's that simple.

Wikis are very, very cool. I have spent a very significant amount of the last two months developing the Creatures Wiki to the point where it has become the first Featured Wikicity on Wikicities, the site which is hosting us (they happen to be the same people who do Wikipedia, just a for-profit division trying to figure out ways of making money out of it). I learnt a lot about how fun/challenging it is to write good promotional material while doing so!

I recommend you have a look and see what you can do with a Wiki to drive a community; the Creatures Wiki reached 1000 pages in about 6 weeks, has had at least 40 contributors and gets quite a good ranking from alexa, being second in their list of Creatures sites - not bad for two months' work. I'm tempted to suggest one for Stardock products, although I fear I might spend too much of my time there! It would be a neat way of having a user-generated, self-policing FAQ and general answers database, though . . .

Amusing note, the guy who marked that article as a vote for deletion is the same guy (or at least has the same name) as the co-founder of Creatures Wiki. Small world . . . though Wikipedia has on the order of 35,000 contributors.

Oh, and these might be interesting: WhyNobodyDeletesWiki and WhyWikiWorks. Those two wikis are some of the best developed in the world on the MetaWiki topic, you can learn a lot about user communities just by browsing for a few hours.

After reading a story about Wikipedia in Wired(a partial version is here), and as days go by, it seems to me to be becoming more and more a credible source to turn to when you want to investigate something. I wonder if the wikipedia's increasing legitimacy can be matched with the increasing legitimacy of blogging as a news source?