Wikipedia - Being Bold
2006.04.24
Over at the Orielly radar, there’s an insightful post, Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture.
The secret of Wikipedia’s content-generating process, Wales explained, is the nurturing and shaping of trust, instead building everything around distrust. He said that most social software systems are designed around expected problems. “Suppose you ran a restaurant that way. If you serve steak, that means steak knives, which are really dangerous in the wrong hands, so you need to put barriers between the tables.”
“If you prevent people from doing bad things, you prevent them from doing good things, and it eliminates opportunities for trust.”
Wikis were there long before Wikipedia. It took a visionary to use that tool to make a difference.
