The Book Stops Here

Wikipedia anyone? A free encyclopedia created by community effort and sharing is a great idea. The all for one approach discussed in the Wired article, although not the most reliable or accurate method for created a mass amount of knowledge, is the most cost effective way to create an even larger mass of knowledge than a typical encyclopedia. The corrective system is also genius and an average fix time of about 3min. is amazing. There are obviously way too many people out there with a little too much time on their hands. Personally, I see wikipedia as simply other step toward converting all print publications into an online/interactive format. Who knows, maybe novels will be written using wiki software in the future?

The unchecked potential to create mayhem on the site is somewhat troublesome, as is the creating of random, meaningless articles. I recently read in the local paper that Wikipedia is looking to put a system in place in order to discourage malicious behavior. However, the proposed measure is simply to allow only registered members to create articles, which seems almost pointless to do. Unregistered users are still free to edit any article they wish, they simply couldn’t create a new article. Why implement such a useless policy? Now, I'm not suggesting that they put in strict policies, because that would defeat the purpose of an all for one encyclopedia. I'm simply questioning putting any policy in place at all.