Wiki Correction-Stream

The other day Wikipedia had an open house for their move to San Francisco. Their new digs are cozy, funky, and just right. They had a number of public screens on display in corners of their offices, but one caught my eye. This screen showed a log of edits to Wikipedia in real time. The edits were happening about one per second, almost faster than you could follow. As you watched the improvements to the ultimate book would scroll up off the screen in a blur. That’s the speed of correction. It gave me a sense of the almost animal-like power of the hive mind behind the Wikipedia — a constant ceaseless buzz of diligence.