Wikimania, the Wikipedia conference, will be held in Taipei next August. Wikimania 2006 was held at Harvard and was a fascinating event. Wikipedia is one of those phenomena that seems to be without bottom: There’s always some group wrapped up in a level one deeper than you knew about. I don’t think I’ll make it to Taipei for this one, but I’m sure I’ll regret it.

Meanwhile, a happy front-page story by Robert Weisman in the Boston Globe touts the spread of wikis. It begins well with a quote from Dan Bricklin, but for some reason, it takes Wikipedia as an example of a wiki that “stumbled” and as a “fiasco.” Why? Because “it had to deputize a cleanup crew to enforce quality standards, catch mistakes, and restore stories altered by pranksters or partisans.” Isn’t that a bit like saying the Boston Globe is a fiasco because it has had to hire a cleanup crew to enforce quality standards, catch mistakes, and check facts? There are obviously problems with Wikipedia, and it’s subject to a type of error that mainstream encyclopedias are not, but it also has strengths, including its topicality, the amount it covers, its linked architecture, and its ability to correct itself quickly. I do not believe that history is going to put Wikipedia into the fiasco category. [Tags: wikipedia wikimania wikis]

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