Wikipedia = pre-cursor to Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Troy Angrignon

Oct 12, 2004 • 1 min read

Am I the only person who seems to see the connection between the Wikipedia and the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

From the current Wikipedia definition:

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is a “copyleft” encyclopedia that is collaboratively developed using wiki software. Wikipedia is managed and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to standard “encyclopedic” knowledge, Wikipedia includes information more often associated with almanacs and gazetteers, as well as coverage of current events.

All original material contributed to Wikipedia is deemed to be free content under the GNU Free Documentation License, meaning that it may be freely used, freely edited, freely copied and freely redistributed subject to the restrictions of that license.

Wikipedia’s content is created by its users. Pages are always subject to editing, so no article is ever finished. As such, Wikipedia is subject to some unique “hardships” . It has “self-healing” systems in place to deal with these challenges, and even a page designed to explain them .

Wikipedia began as an English language project on January 15, 2001, and soon gained its first other language, French, on March 23, 2001. There has since been a great deal of effort devoted to making it multilingual, and it currently contains over 350,000 articles in English and over 650,000 in other languages (as of September 2004).

On September 20, 2004, Wikipedia announced one million articles in one hundred languages.

UNQUOTE

One million articles in one hundred languages, all created by anybody who wants to contribute. Sounds a lot like the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide. And sounds to me like the only way we can build such a repository going forward because the collective intelligence is far far smarter than the individual or group.

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