Brokekid.net

Lifehacker has a great tutorial on how to contribute to Wikipedia.

Someone told me, “well, can’t anyone contribute to Wikipedia and screw it up?”

Well, yes, they can. But my arguement to that question relates to what happens with the stockmarket. When you aggregate information as is done in the stockmarket, over-compensations as to what the value of the stock ought to be cancels out the under-compensation of the price of that stock, bias in one direction cancels out bias in the other direction.

The stockmarket aggregates all sorts of information from stockholders, insiders, people that think they know and people that know nothing and averages out that data in the form of the price. And the accumulative knowledge of a group tends to be very accurate. This is also why Futures Markets work so well.

The same sort of thing holds true with Wikipedia, when you have a number of people dictating the content of an entry on Wikipedia. Their are experts in each category and folks that know less than they think they know and it averages out to the truth. It’s a pretty interesting concept but for the most part, Wikipedia works. Check it out.