The Wikipedia, perhaps one of the greatest testaments to the generosity on the Web, has just hit a milestone of 100,000 articles, a week after its second birthday.
Written by thousands of volunteers around the world, in 30 languages, the Wikipedia is run on a system that allows anyone to edit any page or create one.
That might seem a little surprising, but it's the key to the way the Wikipedia works. Any vandalism is rapidly edited away and, far from repelling the most learned, the volunteer aspect and the way the entries are available free for all seems to attract an excellent level of authorship.
It's so successful that its founders, internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger, have started Wiktionary.org - a dictionary version.
What makes the Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) so compelling - and this article so hard to finish - is the way everything is so massively linked.
You read one entry, and before you know it, you're reading up on Anne Boleyn or Italian greyhounds.
But more than that, anyone can add to or edit an entry, or even create another one. Edit that page, create a link, save it, click on the new link, and edit the empty page you get to.
"Unless we really are experts on a subject," says the Wikipedia Responses to Critics page, "or we want to do a huge amount of research (which some of us seem to do!), we cannot easily state what is known on a given subject. But if we put our heads together, we manage - over time - to create surprisingly balanced treatments of various subjects."
Everything can be refined by every reader and nothing is ever lost to the Wikipedia. All changes can be rolled back again by anyone, back to the first version of a page. The Wikipedia is not unique in this system.
The first such site, the WikiWikiWeb, was written by Ward Cunningham in March 1995, as an add-on for the Portland Pattern Repository, as a place to discuss Design Patterns, a powerful programming idea gaining popularity at the time.
WikiWiki, which became a generic term for user editing, is the Hawaiian word for "quick".
The WikiWikiWeb's popularity soon outgrew the need for discussions on programming techniques and today, there are many Wiki clones written in many languages, and many Wikis set up for groups to share their knowledge.
Wikis are also popular because of something known as WikiStyle. For a start, you do not need to know code, HTML, or how to upload files.
You just hit 'edit' and type ordinary text. Links are automatically created when the Wiki sees two capitalised words placed together LikeThis.
That phrase, or WikiWord, automatically becomes a link to the page with that WikiWord as its title. If the page does not exist, it is created as a blank sheet, and instead of a link, you see a small question mark.
Click on the question mark, and you can edit the new page.
Because it allows for very fast creation of hyperlinked ideas, many people install Wikis on their own machines to act as notebooks.
You can throw things into them very quickly, and create vast swathes of interlinked research and material without really thinking about it. Writing WikiWords - missing out the spaces - becomes second nature.
It's a cool habit you might not want to get into. Read this article online, and you might wish it was editable. You might find yourself with the rest of the newspaper's readership, editing and clarifying, annotating and expanding, on each day's issue. First an encyclopaedia; next, perhaps, a newspaper. - (Guardian Service)
