week2: Reading Impressions -- LAOXINYI

This preface mainly talks about why the author Joseph M. Reagle Jr. wrote this book about Wikipedia, and how this book is available online for free in the form of open content in addition to the printed version.

1）Summary

The author worked at W3C and studied Internet technology, and later returned to academia to find a research topic. He initially focused on blog culture, but found that blog discussions were often full of arguments and narcissism, and was attracted by the cooperative spirit of Wikipedia. So he decided to study Wikipedia's collaborative model and make it the theme of a book.

Most books have strict copyright restrictions, but the author believes that open sharing, like Wikipedia, can make knowledge spread more widely. Therefore, he made the online version of this book available for free under the Creative Commons license so that more people can read and quote it.

The writing, editing and publishing of this book rely on many open source tools, such as Markdown, Pandoc, LaTeX, etc. Many technical experts helped him, and he also thanked many academic colleagues, friends and family for their support.

Although many people think that writing an encyclopedia is boring, the author feels that Wikipedia is like a "quirky but lovable character" and its collaborative model and historical background are worth further study.


2）Interesting Point

After reading the preface, I found the author's views on blog culture very interesting. He believes that discussions on blogs are prone to "fractious narcissism", but although discussions on Wikipedia are also controversial, they are more collaborative overall. In the article, the author quoted the idea of ​​"The perfect is the enemy of the good", which means that if you pursue perfection too much, it will hinder the completion of things. Wikipedia is the same, it allows imperfect content to be continuously iterated, thereby continuously improving.


3）Discussion

The author believes that Wikipedia's collaborative model is a unique way of collaboration. Is this model applicable to other fields, such as business decision-making or political consultation? Why?

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