, founded by dissidents in China and other nations, plans to post secret government documents and to protect them from censorship with coded software.īut wikis are merely one way to assemble dispersed knowledge. The Autism Wiki, produced mostly by adults with autism and Asperger's syndrome, contains material on autism and related conditions. In the private domain, businesses are adopting wikis to compile information about products, profits and new developments.

NASA officials have adopted a wiki site to program NASA software, allowing many participants to make improvements. The agency hopes to use dispersed information to reduce the risk of intelligence failures. The Central Intelligence Agency disclosed the existence of its top-secret Intellipedia project, based on Wikipedia software (and now containing more than 28,000 pages), in late October. In this respect, Wikipedia is merely one of many experiments in aggregating knowledge and creativity, that have been made possible by new technologies.

Wikipedia's entries are not exactly prices, but they do aggregate the widely dispersed information of countless volunteer writers and editors. he magic of the system of prices and of economic markets is that they incorporate a great deal of diffuse knowledge. Hayek insisted that the knowledge of individuals, taken as a whole, is far greater than that of any commission or board, however diligent and expert. Such astounding growth and success demonstrate society's unstoppable movement toward shared production of information, as diverse groups of people in multiple fields pool their knowledge and draw from each other's resources.ĭeveloping one of the most important ideas of the 20th century, Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek attacked socialist planning on the grounds that no planner could possibly obtain the 'dispersed bits' of information held by individual members of society. In just two years, YouTube has become a household word and one of the world's most successful Web sites.

In the past year, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that 'anyone can edit,' has been cited four times as often as the Encyclopedia Britannica in judicial opinions, and the number is rapidly growing.

A brave new world wikipedia