Nov. 16, 2010
A Wiki is a collaborative effort to make a better encyclopedia.
Wikipedia was invented by James Wales. He got the idea after a discussion with Mises Institute's resident economist, Mark Thornton. Wales was a student at Auburn University. He read about Hayek's idea of the division of intellectual labor. He came to the Mises Institute to get more information.
Inspired by Hayek's 1945 essay, entrepreneur Jimmy Wales recruited Larry Sanger and founded Wikipedia, the online, collaborative encyclopedia, in 2001. Since then, Wikipedia has exploded. What is amazing is that it did so, not under the guidance of any particular person, but as a result of collaboration and arbitration between the thousands of editors who make up the Wikipedia community. It was not a top-down effort; the founders did not subcontract to one group of individuals, who then subcontracted to another, who then subcontracted to another, so on and so forth. It was a bottom-up genesis, in which it was the users who created the varying levels of management and job specialization. One could be tempted, in fact, to consider Wikipedia almost a test-lab recreation of a division of labor virtually from scratch.
Now we can all get more information. We don't have to live in Auburn.
Wiki has already changfed the way we do research. It has changed the world. I think it will still be around in a hundred years. It is just too convenient.
You can see how a Mises Wiki article is created here.
The idea behind this is to get specialists in Austrian economic themes to create lots of content.
If this works, it will serve as a model for other groups, associations, and interest groups to create their own Wiki sites, with their own slant.
Here is the new site: http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Main_Page
I think this will work.
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