![[WWW]](/www/moin/htdocs/classic/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
Wikipediholic. The Wikipedia is an amazing work in progress, and I daresay, a fount of ever-increasing authorative knowledge. A very attractive feature of the site is that one can contribute at many levels of effort and skill. I can check for spelling mistakes and guard the site against vandalism. I can correct facts. I can write entire new articles. This easy accessibility has got to be one of the keys to the Wikipedia's success. Let me now make a number of unrelated observations about the Wikipedia:
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At a meeting in Logan, Utah which involved representatives from both the Wikipedia and MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, I suggested putting all the materials from OCW into the Wikipedia. I've not checked on the licensing issues, but I think that there are no legal (copyright) barriers to running such an experiment. An important question is whether placing the course materials, which are refined products of a tightly controlled writing process, would increase the quality of the materials and/or make the materials more engaging to the reading/studying community.
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At some point, it might be interesting to meet up with
fellow Berkeleyan wikipediacs
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Some policies that have evolved at the Wikipedia might be very useful for other contexts. For instance, I've been studying the
Image use policy at the Wikipedia and Wikipedia:Fair use and to gain a better understanding of what might be legally allowed and advisable for the Scholar's Box.
