Wikipedia Laudation

Filed in archive Technology on March 10, 2005

In case you missed it - Wired had this laudation on Wikipedia:

"Recovery may take 12 steps, but becoming a junkie requires only four. First comes chance - an unexpected encounter. Chance stirs curiosity. Curiosity leads to experimentation. And experimentation cascades into addiction.

For Danny Wool, chance arrived on a winter afternoon in 2002, after an argument about - of all things - Kryptonite. Googling the term from his Brooklyn home to settle the debate, he came upon the Wikipedia entry. He looked up a few more subjects and noticed that each one contained a mysterious hyperlink that said Edit. Curious but too nervous to do anything, he returned to Wikipedia a few more times. Then one night he corrected an error in an article about Jewish holidays. You can do that?! It was his first inhalation of Wiki crack. He became one of Wikipedia's �earliest registered users and wrote his first article - on Muckleshoot, a Washington state Indian tribe. Since then, he has made more than 16,000 contributions."

Read on.