For one reason or another, I’ve been talking to a lot of people about Wikipedia recently. I keynoted the WA Librarian’s Conference on the weekend and as part of the address, I talked about critical literacy and Wikipedia and mentioned the Nature paper from 2005 that compared errors in articles from both sources. It is an interesting paper for a number of reasons – not the least of which is the high number of errors in both. When I was at school, it would never have occurred to me that an encyclopaedia could have errors in it. Wikipedia has also been mentioned in a number of blogs I subscribe to – especially in the context of what Clay Shirky spoke about  at the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this year. His talk was entitled “Where do people find the time?”, which is well worth a watch on its own merits. Here, Shirky talks about how the time taken to produce Wikipedia has probably been carved out of the enormous “cognitive surplus” of TV viewing. He quotes some very large numbers about that.


But I guess the main point of his argument is the growth of participatory media. That Web 2.0 tools take us from being consumers to being creators and collaborators. I have been talking about that for a while now, but only from an Internet perspective. It’s interesting to think of how the same may be becoming true of mass media.