Share global information with Wiki encyclopedia

Vishnu K. Mahmud, Contributor, Jakarta, vmahmud@yahoo.com

Do you know the history of the airship? Or how to make a magnet?

In the "old days" (circa 1998), you would have had to open up a book or an encyclopedia to find the answers. Nowadays, however, you can simply "google" or web-search the answer with your computer and the Internet.

The World Wide Web is a massive network of virtual pages and hyperlinks, making it an ideal source of information. But its decentralized nature can also make it extremely difficult to find or upload data towards the advancement of knowledge. Is there a centralized website online where wisdom can be stored and shared?

Enter Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). Created by the WikiMedia Foundation (www.wikimediafoundation.org), this free online encyclopedia allows everyone to access, edit and share informational content in a variety of languages.

From the Hawaiian word for "quick", Wiki is also the name for the collaborative software utilized to create such Internet information suppositories.

Each indexed article is crossed-referenced with other topics within the website. For example, under "Indonesia", you would see underlined links and "natural gas" as they have their own pages that you can immediately access.

Like a mini World Wide Web, the Wikipedia is a living document and is unlikely to be out of date as data is entered by volunteers from around the world.

While some enter new terminologies or information such as Dionysius Exiguus, a 6th century Dacian monk, others are translating it into their local language. There are over 450,000 articles in English, while the Indonesian pages has fewer than 10,000. There is even a Javanese and Sundanese version!

Considering the open nature of the website, allowing anyone to edit any particular topic online can be an invitation to disaster. During the 2004 U.S. Presidential race, for example, supporters from both camps provided "contributions" to the opposing candidate's profile pages, including, in some cases, the content.

However, this peer-review is also the Wiki's strength, as it strives towards neutrality, or at least allows the posting of all possible viewpoints of a particular subject matter. An open editorial process ensures that articles would not be under the influence of dominant individuals or parties, and thus, history will not be written solely by the victors.

Only in extreme cases could topics be locked, which is against the spirit of this web collaboration. Moreover, the software can easily revert to the previous versions of each article, making a total eradication of information impossible.

Apart from this digital encyclopedia, Wiki Media is also developing free multilanguage dictionaries, e-books and even a news website known as Wikinews.org. The software, called MediaWiki, is open-source and can be used for private or even corporate databases.

Such professional collaboration in a commercial context would be ideal for knowledge management or business intelligence practices, with managers or division leaders taking the role of editors.

Processes, or even client contact information on a corporate scale (such as name, date of meeting and topic discussed) would allow everyone in the company to be updated on the level of progress in the sales cycle.

If a contact person is replaced, he or she would have adequate information to immediately pick up where the previous employee left off. Having the best information allows leaders to make proper business decisions.

While Internet blogs provide individuals with an outlet to publish their own thoughts, Wikis are making it easier for groups of people -- if not the whole world -- to share their thoughts and knowledge. Just imagine the amount of information if every person in the planet contributed/edited just one segment or article: It could rival the famed lost libraries of Alexandria!

The encyclopedias of old are still available (such as Britannica.com, World Book Online and Encarta) but are, in most cases, subscription-based. However, as a good researcher, you should never use only one source for information.

Wikipedia, like its traditional counterparts, can provide a good starting point to explore further avenues. It may even provide insights that were previously unknown.

For example, do you know how important bee pollination is for apples?