Written by David Tebbutt in January 2005

The hippies, the early personal computer enthusiasts, the early advocates of the web, the shareware publishers, the open source movement and, now, the bloggers all share a similar revolutionary zeal. They have all been convinced that they're part of a new order which will overthrow the old.

In fact, the old order is pretty resilient. It might take the odd knock or, in the case of IBM, a pretty huge one and then pick itself up and absorb that which is absorbable and either fight or ignore that which isn't.

Having said that, each of these movements has contributed significantly to the culture and commerce of the day. Who would have ever imagined the computing power that individuals now have, or the ability to communicate, which is transforming every aspect of our lives?

The present order (publishers of all kinds, indexers, the upper reaches of organisations) is probably studying the present 'grass roots' movements with great interest. Linux was a largely collaboratively authored operating system, the folksonomies are user-defined categories and tags and wikipedia is an encyclopaedia created by anyone who feels moved to make a reasonably impartial contribution or to correct or embellish an existing one. Control appears to be moving to the lower orders.

Each of the above examples threatens someone: the big operating systems companies, the information professionals and the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, respectively. Although each relies completely on voluntary effort, they have come an astonishing distance. And, unlike the traditional methods, these peoples' movements are actually delivering results very quickly. How long do you have to wait for changes to a taxonomy, a new encyclopaedia or to software?

Go to wikipedia and look up anything you like. As long as it's there, and this is an issue, you are likely to find it is up to date and factual. I read ten thousand words in the wiki instructions about how to avoid bias. If every author reads and follows those guidelines, then I think we can guarantee an absence of bias on the part of the contributors. However, just as taxonomies have an inherent bias, so does wikipedia. It's inevitable that something will be biased if it is created by a group of westerners who have computer equipment and can afford to spend their time on such an activity.

Having said that, I headed for 'Israel', 'Palestine', 'Islam', 'MMR', 'Pat Boone', 'Jerry Lee Lewis' and 'Clive Sinclair' and all the entries struck me as fairly balanced. They had plenty of authoritative cross-references. And my overall feeling was that, as long as you bring your scepticism with you, the wikipedia is a good starting point for learning the basics of any subject. Its bias, if it has one, will be the result of omission.

At least if people are paid to research and write about something like the nematode worm, an entry will materialise. I guess no-one fancies putting in the effort on this one for wikipedia despite the fact that this worm has an illustrious history in research.

The dream is that as contributions pour in from other countries and other cultures, wikipedia will just get stronger and stronger. And it will always be more up to date than physically published volumes.

The principle of collaborative authoring is a good one. Whether wikipedia will ever become an authoritative global source is anyone's guess. But we shouldn't sneer at the wiki principles. The hosting and editing systems, many of them open source, have been battle-tested. You may find that within your organisation this is a much lower cost and natural way of enabling staff to create documents collaboratively.