The Wikipedia is a collective effort to create a multilingual, complete, free online encyclopedia. A Wiki is a document where anyone can contribute, add content, edit, and format. This is an encyclopedia implemented as a wiki (hence the name). There are over 150000 articles in the english version now, and it's growing.
The neat part about an encylopedia is that it's high density information. There's no room for fluff, usually just the facts. On top of that this encyclopedia has terms linked, so you can jump from topic to topic. It highlights what good about the web, open source, and collaborative projects all at once. Check it out next time you need to look a general topic up and a Google search would be too specific and a directory (dmoz, Yahoo) search will probably lead you to half dead and half not-so-informative sites.
I've known about it for a while, but I got more interested today. It seems like a quarter of the posts on /. are some sort of inside joke, and I was trying to find out what a reference that kept popping up was. (Natalie Portman and hot grits if you are wondering.) So I did a Google search as most would, and I ended up with just what I was looking for, an article on /. trolling phenomena at the Wikipedia.
(Edit: 11/26)
Jackson has just pointed a really cool link on the left side of the wikipedia page - a link to a random page of the wikipedia. It's pretty neat.
Another funny entry, l337.
Posted by ramk at November 25, 2003 09:14 PM