infobong.com

Over on Many 2 Many, there's an older post about how an Esquire writer posted an article about Wikipedia to the site itself for participants to edit. The final product will be published in the print version of the magazine. It's an interesting little experiment, and I can't say that some of the results surprise me. Andrew Lih says, "Let’s just say it can be hard to get “neutral point of view” encyclopaedists to liven up their writing style."

It is interesting to think about using Wikipedia articles in print - since Wikipedia articles should be read as a dynamic text in constant flux, what happens when the text is frozen? Some articles are often frozen in order to curb vandalism or maintain a known-good version, and I remember reading that Jimmy Wales had planned a frozen CD-ROM version of the encyclopedia. Regardless, I wonder if as Wikipedia scales, it will become standard for articles to become frozen, and as new information surfaces or errors are caught, the article is temporarily thawed to make changes. In this scheme, only stubs and new articles will be open as a matter of course.