Wikipedia





Introduction
This IAE-pedia page makes use of the MediaWiki software, as does the Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia. The Wikipedia is a huge success story. It represents the work of many thousands of volunteer writers and editors. Quoting from History of Wikipedia:


 * Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, but its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this. The earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, but the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia (as distinct from mere open source or freemium was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000.

Personally, I make frequent use of the Wikipedia. Sometimes I include the word Wikipedia in my search terms, because I am confident that the Wikipedia contains the information I seek. Other times a Wikipedia document is within the first 10 of my hits. Likely I will browse the Wikipedia document along with a number of the other documents in this short list of hits.

Wikipedia collects and publishes a large amount of data about the Wikipedia. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics. For example, there were about 3,300 active volunteer editors in March of 2013. On 7/26/2013, the English version of Wikipedia contained nearly 4.3 million articles. Currently it is getting about a half-billion unique viewers a month. (That is, in a month, a half-billion different people visit the Wikipedia. This is about 1/14 of the world's population.) Wikipedia is published in a number of different languages. For details on this and other Wikipedia statistics see http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/.

The following 2007 article captures the essence of a large-scale, open-source project such as the Wikipedia:


 * Knapp, Sue (10/17/07). Dartmouth Researchers Confirm the Power of Altruism in Wikipedia. Dartmouth News. Retrieved 11/11/2013 from http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2007/10/17.html. Quoting from the article:


 * The beauty of open-source applications is that they are continually improved and updated by those who use them and care about them. Dartmouth researchers looked at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to determine if the anonymous, infrequent contributors, the Good Samaritans, are as reliable as the people who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain.


 * The answer is, surprisingly, yes. The researchers discovered that Good Samaritans contribute high-quality content, as do the active, registered users.

As Wikipedia grew in size and gained in quality, it began to a major impact on the "traditional" hard copy encyclopedias. Here is an example:


 * Read, Brock (4/14/09). Microsoft's Encarta, Rendered Obsolete by Wikipedia, Will Shut Down. The Chronicle of Higher education. Retrieved 11/7/2013 from https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/microsofts-encarta-rendered-obsolete-by-wikipedia-will-shut-down/4629. Quoting from the article:


 * Microsoft has announced that it will soon euthanize Encarta, the onetime encyclopedia-of-the-future that has lost much of its luster in the last decade. But the company really didn’t have much choice in the matter: For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia had fatally shivved Encarta some time ago.


 * And Microsoft admits that. In recent years, “the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed,” the company said in a statement on the shutdown. “People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.” So there’s really only one question left to be answered: Should Encarta be mourned?


 * Christopher Dawson of ZDNet certainly doesn’t think so. The demise of the encyclopedia, he argues, should simply galvanize educators into teaching the research skills students need to wade through “brutally powerful knowledge sources” like Wikipedia and Google. “The encyclopedia is dead,” Mr. Dawson writes. “Long live critical thinking.”

History of Encyclopedias
Historically, the contents of encyclopedias were written by experts and edited by professional editors. Quoting from History of Encyclopedia Britanica:


 * Encyclopedias of various types had been published since antiquity, beginning with the collected works of Aristotle and the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, the latter having 2,493 articles in 37 books. Encyclopedias were published in Europe and China throughout the Middle Ages, such as the delightful Satyricon of Martianus Minneus Felix Capella (early 5th century), the Speculum majus (The Great Mirror) of Vincent of Beauvais (1250), and Encyclopedia septem tomis distincta (A Seven-Part Encyclopedia) by Johann Heinrich Alsted (1630). Most early encyclopedias did not include biographies of living people and were written in Latin, although some encyclopedias were translated into English, such as De proprietatibus rerum (On the properties of things) (1240) by Bartholomeus Anglicus. However, English-composed encyclopedias appeared in the 18th century, beginning with Lexicon technicum, or A Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences by John Harris (two volumes, published 1704 and 1710, respectively), which contained articles by such contributors as Isaac Newton. Ephraim Chambers wrote a very popular two-volume Cyclopedia in 1728, which went through multiple editions and awakened publishers to the enormous profit potential of encyclopedias. Although not all encyclopedias succeeded commercially, their elements sometimes inspired future encyclopedias; for example, the failed two-volume A Universal History of Arts and Sciences of Dennis de Coetlogon (published 1745) grouped its topics into long self-contained treatises, an organization that likely inspired the "new plan" of the Britannica. The first encyclopedia to include biographies of living people was the 64-volume Grosses Universal-Lexicon (published 1732–1759) of Johann Heinrich Zedler, who argued that death alone should not render people notable.

The Issue of Expertise
In its initial years, the Wikipedia encouraged people with a high level of expertise to develop entries on their areas of expertise. However, the Wikipedia's "open" submission and review process allowed people from all walks of life and with varying levels of expertise to submit and edit entries. Early criticisms of the Wikipedia argued that the overall quality of the content was not as good as that of well-established print encyclopedias such as the Encyclopædia Britannica. Over time the Wikipedia increased the quality of its content and far surpassed printed encyclopedias in total breadth.

The following 2009 article discusses the issue of expertise:


 * Sanger, Lawrence (February 2009). The Fate of Expertise after WIKIPEDIA. Episteme. Retrieved 11/11/2013 from http://www.eupjournals.com/doi/abs/10.3366/E1742360008000543. Here is an abstract of the article:


 * Wikipedia has challenged traditional notions about the roles of experts in the Internet Age. Section 1 sets up a paradox. Wikipedia is a striking popular success, and yet its success can be attributed to the fact that it is wide open and bottom-up. How can such a successful knowledge project disdain expertise? Section 2 discusses the thesis that if Wikipedia could be shown by an excellent survey of experts to be fantastically reliable, then experts would not need to be granted positions of special authority. But, among other problems, this thesis is self-stultifying. Section 3 explores a couple ways in which egalitarian online communities might challenge the occupational roles or the epistemic leadership roles of experts. There is little support for the notion that the distinctive occupations that require expertise are being undermined. It is also implausible that Wikipedia and its like might take over the epistemic leadership roles of experts. Section 4 argues that a main reason that Wikipedia’s articles are as good as they are is that they are edited by knowledgeable people to whom deference is paid, although voluntarily. But some Wikipedia articles suffer because so many aggressive people drive off people more knowledgeable than they are; so there is no reason to think that Wikipedia’s articles will continually improve. Moreover, Wikipedia’s commitment to anonymity further drives off good contributors. Generally, some decision making role for experts is not just consistent with online knowledge communities being open and bottom-up, it is recommended as well.

This 2007 article captures the essence of the expertise issues of the open submission and editing process.


 * Giles, Jim (9/20/07). Wikipedia 2.0 – Now with Added Trust. NewScientistTech. Retrieved 10/2/07: http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg19526226.200-wikipedia-20--now-with-added-trust.html. Quoting from the article:


 * It is a problem that dogs every Wikipedia entry. Because anyone can edit any entry at any time, users do not generally know if they are looking at a carefully researched article, one that has had errors mischievously inserted, or a piece written by someone pushing their own agenda. As a result, although Wikipedia has grown in size and reputation since its launch in 2001 - around 7 per cent of all internet users now visit the site on any given day - its information continues to be treated cautiously.


 * That could be about to change. Over the past few years, a series of measures aimed at reducing the threat of vandalism and boosting public confidence in Wikipedia have been developed. Last month a project designed independently of Wikipedia, called WikiScanner, allowed people to work out what the motivations behind certain entries might be by revealing which people or organisations the contributions were made by (see "Who's behind the entries?"). Meanwhile the Wikimedia Foundation, the charity that oversees the online encyclopedia, now says it is poised to trial a host of new trust-based capabilities.

The two following articles discuss the changes implemented by Wikipedia:


 * Martin, Nicole (9/21/07). Wikipedia Clamps Down on 'Unreliable' Editors. Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 9/21/07: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/20/wiki120.xml. Quoting from the article:


 * Ordinary users will no longer be able to edit information and to see those changes appear instantly on the screen.


 * Under plans being considered they will have to submit changes to a team of “trusted editors” who would then decide whether to update the entries.


 * The move follows complaints that the site is open to abuse from individuals and organisations wanting to slander their rivals or competitors.




 * Under the proposed changes, a group of editors will moderate the entries and decide what should be posted.


 * These trusted editors will have to have proved their commitment to Wikipedia by posting 30 reliable changes within 30 days.


 * The German-language version of the site has been chosen to test the changes first because of its high regard for accuracy, but if the feedback is positive they might also be applied to the English-language one.

Read, Brock (10/3/07). A War of Words on Wikipedia. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 10/3/07: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2426?=atwc. Quoting from the article:


 * When Wikipedia was just a wee Web site with lofty goals, contributors worked feverishly to create articles on just about everything under the sun. But now that the encyclopedia’s English-language version boasts over two million entries, its administrators can stop wondering if the site is comprehensive enough. Quality, not quantity, has become priority number one.


 * Editors are now fanning out across Wikipedia, deleting uncited claims, re-writing knotty passages, and identifying articles that seem trivial or otherwise unworthy. Their efforts may well enhance Wikipedia’s status in academe. But the encyclopedia’s shift in priorities has also led it into an “awkward adolescence,” writes K.G. Schneider in CIO. According to Ms. Schneider, Wikipedia’s “inclusionists” (who argue that the site should continue to encourage new entries) and its “deletionists” (who advocate cutting articles deemed fatuous or picayune) are now engaged in a pitched battle.

Problems and Challenges
This open writing and editing process has not been without its difficulties. Thus, there is a growing amount of literature on the trials and tribulations, and the changes that had to be made to deal with certain difficult situations. Some of these are presented here.

Editing by Special Interest Groups
The following article provides some historical background.


 * Read, Brock (8/14/2007). Tracking Wikipedia's Not-So-Neutral Editors. Retrieved 11/7/2013 from http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Tracking-Wikipedia-s/3257. Quoting from the article:


 * When word spread last year that Congressional staff members were feverishly editing their bosses’ Wikipedia entries, Virgil Griffith asked himself a sensible question: How many company spokesmen and campus officials were doing the same thing?


 * The answer, as it turns out, is quite a lot. And the proof is in Mr. Griffith’s Wikipedia Scanner, a searchable database that links anonymous Wikipedia edits with the businesses and organizations from which those markups came.


 * The result is a pretty entertaining Web site — and a useful tool for students looking for insight into the inner workings of Wikipedia. Web surfers can watch as an editor from Bob Jones University calls the campus museum “the great collection of religious art in the Western Hemisphere.” And they can gasp as an official with Diebold, the company that makes a controversial line of e-voting machines, deletes wholesale a 15-paragraph section describing computer scientists’ concerns with the devices.

The article goes on to point out that often these one-sided editing efforts are quickly edited by other people, tending to lead to articles that present a somewhat less biased point of view.

Here is a reference that discusses another Wikipedia problem:


 * West, Andrew and Insup, Lee (October, 2011). What Wikipedia Deletes: Characterizing Dangerous Collaborative Content. Retrieved 10/27/2011 from http://www.cis.upenn.edu/%7Ewestand/docs/wikisym_11_revdel_final.pdf. Quoting from the abstract of the article:


 * Collaborative environments, such as Wikipedia, often have low barriers-to-entry in order to encourage participation. This accessibility is frequently abused (e.g., vandalism and spam). However, certain inappropriate behaviors are more threatening than others. In this work, we study contributions which are not simply “undone” – but deleted from revision histories and public view. Such treatment is generally reserved for edits which: (1) present a legal liability to the host (e.g., copyright issues, defamation), or (2) present privacy threats to individuals (i.e., contact information).


 * Herein, we analyze one year of Wikipedia’s public deletion log and use brute-force strategies to learn about privately handled redactions. This permits insight about the prevalence of deletion, the reasons that induce it, and the extent of end-user exposure to dangerous content. While Wikipedia’s approach is generally quite reactive, we find that copyright issues prove most problematic of those behaviors studied.

Lie Detectors
Anything that a person tells you, writes for you to read, videos for you to view, and so on is suspect. Even the best of modern lie detector systems used by the police are not very reliable. We have always had the difficulty that self-interest is reflected in every form of communication.

In the distant past, people received some protection from lies and from other misleading information because they lived in small hunter-gatherer groups where everybody knew everybody and all had long-term involvement in the group.

Reading and writing changed that. The challenge to dealing with misrepresentations and outright lies in writing grew as printing presses were developed and then as mass education began to occur. The people who controlled the press and the schools had the power to broadly disseminate their points of view.

The world of research and academia developed a peer reviewing system that has proven very useful. This, along with the cost of publishing journals, has helped to keep published research articles reasonably "honest." Even there, however, from time to time we encounter situations in which researchers fake their data. More often, it is a case of detecting researcher bias in the interpretation of the data.

Now we have a variety of communication and publication vehicles facilitated by progress in the field of Information and Communication Technology. Literally anyone can communicate or attempt to communicate with large groups of people. For example, I am writing this material directly onto a page that has already been posted to the Web. When I click on Save, this new material will immediately be posted to the Web.

Perhaps the worst example of this is the spam that we receive. Note, however, that ads on radio and television are a somewhat similar, but a more regulated form of spam. We accept that form of spam because it allows us to receive free radio and television broadcasts.

Thus, we are bombarded with false and misleading information even if we do not make use of the Web. A very important component of an Information Age education is to teach students to deal with life in a world where we continually are exposed to false and/or purposely misleading information.

We each need to become skilled in being a lie detector. This is a difficult learning challenge. A young child has little ability for self-protection from false claims or from excessive violence, pornography, etc. That is why, for example, we make an effort to protect young children from inappropriate television programming and advertising. As a child gains in maturity and in informal and formal education, the child can become much better at coping with such programming. Helping children learn to do so is a responsibility of home, school, and the community.

The Wikipedia represents an interesting compromise between Web publication with no review process, and publication based on a carefully controlled peer reviewing process. Most of the articles in Wikipedia undergo the scrutiny of good-hearted, honest volunteers who do a type of peer reviewing and editing. The overall result is a relatively good. I personally make very frequent use of the Wikipedia.

However, when I use the Wikipedia I do so in a context of my having a great deal of knowledge and experience gained over the years. I also tend to do so in the context of seeking and using multiple sources of information, and I have a suspicious mind. The multiple sources of information—including what is in my head, access to many different Web materials, access to my personal library of books and journals, and access to other people are all important aspects of screening what I read on the Web. In journalism, they call it "fact checking." I call it using common sense. We need to help all students learn to develop this type of common sense.

Here is a more positive spin on the information given in this section. Often one receives information from sources that are quite trustworthy. For example, you go to a doctor, tests are run, a diagnosis is made, and a treatment is recommended. Of course, you can seek a second opinion from another doctor. In addition, you can do research through talking to people you know, making use of hardcopy library materials, and using the Web. A great many people now make use of the Web for such information.

The following article presents information on one of the Wikipedia's approaches to publishing valid and reliable information.


 * Naone, Erica (9/4/2009). Adding Trust to Wikipedia, and Beyond: Tracing Information Back to Its Source Could Help Prove Trustworthiness. Technology Review. Retrieved 11/7/2013 from http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23355/?a=f. Quoting from the article:


 * The official motto of the Internet could be "don't believe everything you read," but moves are afoot to help users know better what to be skeptical about and what to trust.


 * A tool called WikiTrust, which helps users evaluate information on Wikipedia by automatically assigning a reliability color-coding to text, came into the spotlight this week with news that it could be added as an option for general users of Wikipedia. Also, last week the Wikimedia Foundation announced that changes made to pages about living people will soon need to be vetted by an established editor. These moves reflect a broader drive to make online information more accountable. And this week the World Wide Web Consortium published a framework that could help any Web site make verifiable claims about authorship and reliability of content.


 * WikiTrust, developed by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, color-codes the information on a Wikipedia page using algorithms that evaluate the reliability of the author and the information itself. The algorithms do this by examining how well-received the author's contributions have been within the community. It looks at how quickly a user's edits are revised or reverted and considers the reputation of those people who interact with the author. If a disreputable editor changes something, the original author won't necessarily lose many reputation points. A white background, for example, means that a piece of text has been viewed by many editors who did not change it and that it was written by a reliable author. Shades of orange signify doubt, dubious authorship, or ongoing controversy.

For more information about WikiTrust, see http://www.wikitrust.net.

Multilingual Challenge
The Wikipedia is a multilingual publication. The following article discusses the multilingual challenge:


 * arXiv (12/13/2013). Wikipedia's secret multilingual workforce. MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 12/23/2013 from http://www.technologyreview.com/view/522681/wikipedias-secret-multilingual-workforce/.

Quoting from the article:


 * Wikipedia aims to provide free online access to all human knowledge. And a cursory look at its vital statistics appear to indicate that it’s well on its way to achieving that. The organisation has 77,000 active contributors working on over 22 million articles in 285 languages. All this attracts some 500 million unique visitors a month.


 * And yet a look beyond these figures reveals a subtle but important problem: there is surprisingly little overlap between the content in different language editions. No one edition contains all the information found in other language editions. And the largest language edition, English, contains only 51 per cent of the articles in the second largest edition, German.

The article then presents information about the volunteer editors.


 * Hale began by crawling the edits to Wikipedia between 8 July and 9 August this year, which are broadcast in near real-time over Internet Relay Chat. He excluded minor edits and those made by bots and unregistered users. That left 3.5 million significant edits by 55,000 editors.


 * Hale then looked for editors who were active in more than one language edition and found more than 8,000 of them or about 15 per cent of the total. It was these multilingual editors that he studied further.


 * It turns out that some editions have more multilingual editors than others and in general smaller editions have a higher percentage of multilingual editors. The most significant outliers with the highest proportion of multilinguals were Esperanto and Malay while Japan had significantly fewer multilingual editors than its size would suggest.


 * Significantly, these multilingual editors are more active than their monolingual counterparts making, on average, 2.3 times as many edits.

Boom, and Then Possibly a Bust?
Riding on the backs of dedicated volunteers, Wikipedia's history has been one of continual growth. Will it continue?


 * Giles, Jim (August 2009). After the Boom, Is Wikipedia Heading for Bust? NewScientistTech. Retrieved 11/7/2013 from http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17554-after-the-boom-is-wikipedia-heading-for-bust.html.

Quoting from the article:


 * Wikipedia has rapidly become one of the most used reference sources in the world, but a new study shows that the website's explosive growth is tailing off and also suggests the community-created encyclopaedia has become less welcoming to new contributors.




 * Launched in 2001, the English language Wikipedia grew rapidly to its current size of almost 3 million articles. However, when the Palo Alto team analyzed a downloaded version of the encyclopaedia they found its growth has peaked.


 * The number of articles added per month flattened out at 60,000 in 2006 and has since declined by around a third. They also found that the number of edits made every month and the number of active editors both stopped growing the following year, flattening out at around 5.5 million and 750,000 respectively.

The following article discusses the decline in the number of Wikipedia volunteers.


 * Angwin and Fowler (11/27/09). Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 11/7/2013 from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125893981183759969.html. Quoting from an ACM summary of the article:


 * Despite being the fifth-most popular Web site in the world, Wikipedia, which receives about 325 million visitors each month, is losing unprecedented numbers of its volunteers, who write, edit, and police its content. In the first three months of 2009, Wikipedia lost more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period in 2008. The exodus of editors has raised questions about the eight-year-old online encyclopedia's ability to continue expanding its breath and improving its accuracy. Executives at the Wikimedia Foundation, which funds and oversees the nonprofit encyclopedia, acknowledge the decline in editors, but believe that it is still possible to build a useful encyclopedia with a smaller pool of contributors. "We need sufficient people to do the work that needs to be done," says the foundation's executive director Sue Gardner. "But the purpose of the project is not participation." Wikipedia is still extremely popular among Web users, with visitors increasing by 20 percent over 12 months ending in September, according to comScore Media Metrix. A major reason behind the decline in editors may be that many topics have already been written about, and another may be the stringent rules that Wikipedia has been adopting to reduce infighting among contributors about articles on controversial subjects or individuals. Wikipedia's struggles call into question the validity of crowdsourcing principles. "People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen," says Carnegie Mellon University professor Aniket Kittur. "Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It's too many cooks in the kitchen."


 * Simonite, Tom (November/December 2013). The Decline of Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/7/2013 from http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/. Quoting from this article:


 * The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.


 * Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-ranking quality scores.

Implications for Information Age Education
This multiple-author, multiple-editor form of writing is a genre that is of growing importance. For example, see the list of IAE-pedia documents at the end of this IAE-pedia entry.

Thus, the Web as a whole adds one more challenge to designing and implementing a good educational system for the Information Age. How does a person making use of the Web (or, just the Wikipedia) know that the content is "good"? Indeed, what constitutes good? Students need to learn how to judge the quality of the information they are getting from the Web, and also information from other sources.

In addition, students need to learn to work in collaborative environments to produce materials that will be used by others. One way to give students practice in this endeavor is through the use of project-based learning in which teams have several or many members.

The members of a team may be in the same classroom, or may be much more widely dispersed. A variety of software now exists to facilitate members of a team interacting electronically as they jointly write and edit a report that is part of their project work. In many situations, it may be appropriate for the team to produce a Wiki page that goes on a website where it will be available to the rest of the class and to other people who are interested in the project topic. This type of collaborative writing for Web publication adds authenticity to the assignment.

The Future
Wikipedia is continuing to work on such challenges as:

1. Updating its content. Think about the challenge of regularly updating the more than 4 million articles in English, and the large number of articles in other languages. My personal experience in editing and updating articles in the IAE-pedia suggests that it can take several days or more to update a single entry. This is despite the fact that I wrote most of the articles and consider myself to have a high level of expertise in many of the areas that are covered in the IAE-pedia.

The typical IAE-pedia article is quite a bit longer than the typical Wikipedia article. To get a ballpark estimate of the revision/update task, suppose that a volunteer can revise/update two entries per day, or 10 articles per week. Suppose that the Wikipedia wants to revise and update each of its 4 million English language articles every two years. Then Wikipedia needs about 8,000 volunteer-years of contributed expertise/time over a two-year period, or the equivalent of 4,000 full-time volunteers. Currently it does not have this much volunteer time being contributed.

2. Expanding its breath and depth. WikiProject Medicine is an example of a new project. Quoting from the website:


 * Welcome to WikiProject Medicine! This is a place where people interested in medical and health content on Wikipedia can discuss things, collaborate, or debate related issues. This is done on our discussion page. Please join in, as everyone is welcome. You can also check out our goals, and the ways you could help. There's always somewhere to help out because Wikipedia is a work in progress. Related WikiProjects also exist, so a health-related article might not be technically labeled as part of our project, but we still care about its quality.


 * Many suggestions and guidelines have been developed since the project began. Our typical article style is described here; it contains details on issues that can arise. A guideline on what qualifies as reliable medical source is here, though these pages are not "laws": they are intended to give us focus, inspire us, and organize our contributions. They should not prevent anyone from writing and improving medical articles!

Final Remarks

 * “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” (Samuel Johnson; British author; 1709–1784.)

I am always impressed when I find a relatively old quote that really hits the nail on the head. The total amount of new information and knowledge being developed in the world each day is far far more than a person could learn in a lifetime. Thus, we need to design our schools so that students:


 * Learn to learn. Gain foundational knowledge and skills that support future learning. Develop habits of mind that support learning as a lifelong endeavor.


 * Learn to recognize when their current knowledge and skills are not adequate to a problem or task they are facing or will want to deal with in the future.


 * Learn to make use of the accumulated information, knowledge, and wisdom of the human race.

The Wikipedia provides a quick summary/overview of a huge number of topics. The Web, which contains the Wikipedia, is by far larger, and contains a great deal more information. The Internet, which allows the Web to operate, facilitates still more communication among people and machines. Learn more about the difference between the Web and the Internet at http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2002/Web_vs_Internet.asp.

Effective communication among people, among machines, and among the combination of people and machines is an ongoing educational challenge.

Suggested Readings from IAE Publications
Crowd Sourcing to Improve Education. See http://iae-pedia.org/Crowdsourcing_to_Improve_Education.

Education for Increasing Expertise. See http://iae-pedia.org/Education_for_Increasing_Expertise.

Fair Use. See http://iae-pedia.org/Fair_Use.

Information Underload and Overload. See http://iae-pedia.org/Information_Underload_and_Overload.

Meeting IAE Information Needs. See http://iae-pedia.org/Meeting_IAE_Information_Needs.

Open Content Libraries. See http://iae-pedia.org/Open_Content_Libraries.

Open Source Databases. See http://iae-pedia.org/Open_Source_Databases.

Open Source Software. See http://iae-pedia.org/Open_Source_Software_Packages.

Open Source Textbooks. See http://iae-pedia.org/Open_Source_Textbooks.

What the Future is Bringing Us. See http://iae-pedia.org/What_the_Future_is_Bringing_Us.

Authors of this Document
This page was created by David Moursund.