Rhetorical Outbursts

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, was on C-Span last week. The interview was fascinating. Wales explains how the site functions with a vibrant community of all-volunteer writers and editors massively collaborating to create this extremely useful encyclopedia. Anyone can write an article. Anyone can edit an article.

I know, it sounds like it would chaos, but it actually works very well, and the end-product is amazingly good. It seems to be another example of the phenomenon of collective intelligence that James Surowiecki wrote about in The Wisdom of Crowds.

So, below are some links to Wikipedia articles related to topics from this blog (and others I’ve commented on). Take a look and if you see something that needs to be corrected, correct it! If something needs to be added, add it! Or submit your own article, so long as it conforms to the principles of objectivity and verifiability.

• Ordination of Women
• Sola Scriptura
• The Restoration Movement
• Gillian Welch
• Harding University
• Ann Coulter
• The Red Cross
• The Star of David
• The Crescent >>
• North Korea
• Chuck Colson
• Post-modernism
• The Reformation
• Nihilism
• Afghanistan
• Christopher Hitchens
• George Galloway
• C.S. Lewis
• Nazism
• Fascism
• Secularism
• Pluralism
• David Horowitz
• Anti-Communism
• Venona Decrypts
• Intelligent Design

Whew! I could make a longer list. Maybe I’ll come back and add to it later. It is fun to browse through and follow the internal links to other Wikipedia articles. I recently heard about one Know-It-All who wrote a book about reading all the way through the Encyclopedia Britannica. Dare you to try that with Wikipedia.