"The world’s most ambitious vanity press"

There's a terrific article in the most recent Journal of American History (June 2006) by Roy Rosenzweig: "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past." Available here. Or, try this New Yorker take.

Particularly interesting is how much time appears to be devoted to discussions about how to manage the new beast, as opposed to, as the kids say, creating (or editing) content.

In some ways it's hard to know how to think about it, but increasingly difficult, as both these articles suggest, not to see that there's something genuinely radical about the manner in which it compiles and disseminates knowledge (although it, so far, forbids as a matter of policy the dissemination of new, unpublished scholarship, and thus the creation of new knowledge).

But the next time I need to explain what Anarchy is, and that, as a form of government, it doesn't necessarily mean chaos, I'm likely to simply point students to Wikipedia.

This is what anarchy looks like, and it's not all bad.