Week6- Wikipedia Edit- YU JIE 여결

 

Summary

Wikipedia does not have an editorial board, journalists, or traditional leaders to decide what can be published. There are no authoritative experts overseeing the content of every entry. Following conventional logic, such a loose and decentralized system should have collapsed long ago amid chaos and disputes. But surprisingly, it has become one of the largest and most trusted knowledge platforms in the world. This is a culture built on mutual trust. It believes that strangers can work together to build complex knowledge systems, that you won't maliciously disrupt but will instead come to help, and that consensus can be reached through debates. These ideas seem fragile, even somewhat idealistic. But they form the backbone of Wikipedia and have continued to function over the past two decades. Available for inquiry, learning, creation, and citation by many people around the world.


Interesting points

The most fascinating aspect of Wikipedia might lie in how it evolved from a simple project into its own community soul. It is precisely that unique community culture, particularly its values of kindness, inclusiveness, and collaboration, that sustains the functioning of this vast system. Of course, Wikipedia is never perfect, and disputes, misunderstandings, and judgment errors occur frequently. But its charm lies precisely in the perseverance within this imperfection. Those seemingly loose principles, such as encouraging new members, maintaining neutrality, and mutual respect, although lacking coercive power, have fostered an internalized gentle order within the community, becoming genuine forces driving collaboration. Even if it is no longer widely used in the future, Wikipedia itself will remain an important historical record, witnessing how humanity has collectively constructed and maintained knowledge systems on a global scale.


Discussion

Can we still trust cooperation between strangers in an era of mutual estrangement?

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