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defacing or deleting it. 

It is authorship without editorship. Or authorship fused with editorship. Whichever, it works, though it requires effort. The Internet, like all human places and things, is fraught with spoilers and vandals who deface whatever they can. Wiki pages are routinely replaced with obscenities, with links to spammers\' websites, with junk and crap and flames. 

But Wikis have self-defense mechanisms, too. Anyone can \"subscribe\" to a Wiki page, and be notified when it is updated. Those who create Wiki pages generally opt to act as \"gardeners\" for them, ensuring that they are on hand to undo the work of the spoilers. 

In this labor, they are aided by another useful Wiki feature: the \"history\" link. Every change to every Wiki page is logged and recorded. Anyone can page back through every revision, and anyone can revert the current version to a previous one. That means that vandalism only lasts as long as it takes for a gardener to come by and, with one or two clicks, set things to right.

This is a powerful and wildly successful model for collaboration, and there is no better example of this than the Wikipedia, a free, Wiki-based encyclopedia with more than one million entries, which has been translated into 198 languages [fn: That is, one or more Wikipedia entries have been translated into 198 languages; more than 15 languages have 10,000 or more entries translated]

Wikipedia is built entirely out of Wiki pages created by self-appointed experts. Contributors research and write up subjects, or produce articles on subjects that they are familiar with. 

This is authorship, but what of editorship? For if there is one thing a Guide or an encyclopedia must have, it is authority. It must be vetted by trustworthy, neutral parties, who present something that is either The Truth or simply A Truth, but truth nevertheless.

The Wikipedia has its skeptics. Al Fasoldt, a writer for the Syracuse Post-Standard, apologized to his readers for having recommended that they consult Wikipedia. A reader of his, a librarian, wrote in and told him that his recommendation had been irresponsible, for Wikipedia articles are often defaced or worse still, rewritten with incorrect information. When another journalist from the Techdirt website wrote to Fasoldt to correct this impression, Fasoldt responded with an increasingly patronizing and hysterical series of messages in which he described Wikipedia as \"outrageous,\" \"repugnant\" and \"dangerous,\" insulting the Techdirt writer and storming off in a huff. [fn: see http://techdirt.com/articles/20040827/0132238_F.shtml for more]

Spurred on by this exchange, many of Wikipedia\'s supporters decided to empirically investigate the accuracy and resilience of the system. Alex Halavais made changes to 13 different pages, ranging from obvious to subtle. Every single change was found and corrected within hours. [fn: see http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=794 for more] Then legendary Princeton engineer Ed Felten ran side-by-side comparisons of Wikipedia entries on areas in which he had deep expertise with their counterparts in the current electronic edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His conclusion? \"Wikipedia\'s advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren\'t for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica\'s advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries.\" [fn: see http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000675.html for more]  Not a complete win for Wikipedia, but hardly \"outrageous,\" \"repugnant\" and \"dangerous.\" (Poor Fasoldt -- his idiotic hyperbole will surely haunt him through the whole of his career -- I mean, \"repugnant?!\")

There has been one very damning and even frightening indictment of Wikipedia, which came from Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of the GeekCorps group, which sends volunteers to poor countries to help establish
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