Daniel Terdiman writes on CNET today about Open Source magazine writing.
“When Esquire magazine writer A.J. Jacobs decided to do an article about the freely distributable and freely editable online encyclopedia Wikipedia, he took an innovative approach: He posted a crummy, error-laden draft of the story to the site.
Wikipedia lets anyone create a new article for the encyclopedia or edit an existing entry. As a result, since it was started in 2001, Wikipedia has grown to include nearly 749,000 articles in English alone–countless numbers of which have been edited by multiple members of the community. (There are versions of Wikipedia in 109 other languages as well.)
The idea is that, despite the fact that anyone can work on any article, Wikipedia’s content is self-cleaning because its community keeps a close eye on the accuracy of articles and, in most cases, acts quickly to fix errors that find their way into individual entries.
“The idea I had–which Jimmy (Wales, Wikipedia’s founder) loved–is that I’d write a rough draft of the article and then Jimmy would put it on a site for the Wikipedia community to rewrite and edit,” Jacobs wrote on the page introducing the experiment. Esquire “would print the ‘before’ and ‘after’ versions of the articles. So here’s your chance to make this article a real one. All improvements welcome.’
The article was edited 224 times in the first 24 hours after Jacobs posted it, and another 149 times in the next 24 hours. The final draft, which was locked on Sept. 23 to protect it from further edits, reflects the efforts of the many users who worked on it.
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