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tal letters in the middle of words make them look like humped
camels.) At the bottom of it appears this legend: “Edit this page.”
Click on “Edit this page” and the text appears in an editable
field. Revise the text to your heart’s content and click “Publish”
and your revisions are live. Anyone who visits a Wiki can edit any
of its pages, adding to it, improving on it, adding camel-cased
links to new subjects, or even defacing or deleting it.
It is authorship without editorship. Or authorship fused with
editorship. Whichever, it works, though it requires effort. The
Internet, like all human places and things, is fraught with spoil-
ers and vandals who deface whatever they can. Wiki pages are
routinely replaced with obscenities, with links to spammers’ web-
sites, with junk and crap and flames.
But Wikis have self-defense mechanisms, too. Anyone can
“subscribe” to a Wiki page, and be notified when it is updated.
Those who create Wiki pages generally opt to act as “gardeners”
for them, ensuring that they are on hand to undo the work of the
spoilers.
In this labor, they are aided by another useful Wiki feature: the
“history” link. Every change to every Wiki page is logged and re-
corded. Anyone can page back through every revision, and anyone
can revert the current version to a previous one. That means that
vandalism only lasts as long as it takes for a gardener to come by
and, with one or two clicks, set things to right.
This is a powerful and wildly successful model for collabora-
tion, and there is no better example of this than the Wikipedia,
a free, Wiki-based encyclopedia with more than one million en-
tries, which has been translated into 198 languages [fn: That is,
one or more Wikipedia entries have been translated into 198
languages; more than 15 languages have 10,000 or more entries
translated.]
Wikipedia is built entirely out of Wiki pages created by self-ap-
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