On Life In Information

Imagine everything we know in one place. Jimmy Wales, Cofounder of Wikipedia, not only imagines it, he’s working on it.

By Tim Devaney and Tom Stein

JIMMY WALES has set himself the goal of accumulating all human knowledge in his online encyclopedia. And he says he’s getting close, at least in the English-language version, where there are now nearly two million articles.

Of course, Whales has a lot of help. Anyone with an Internet connection can contribute to Wikipedia, which is how the site has built a library of six million articles in 250 languages with just seven paid administrative employees.

Wales is bringing his all-comers approach to search. This year he’ll launch Search Wikia, an open-source search engine built and fine-tuned by users.

Do we really need another search engine?Wales thinks so. Search as it stands now is a cipher. Where do the results come from? Who decides how they’re ranked? “As citizens of the Internet we should be concerned about how much of a black box search is,” says Wales.

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[ON magazine, Number 2, 2008]

ENTERPRISE 2.0 McAfee and Davenport REVISITING THE DEBATE

Enterprise 2.0 is truly a transformative technology or just an incremental evolution of collaborative tools, Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport resume the conversation.

On June 18, 2007, at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Andrew McAfee, the associate professor at Harvard Business School who coined the term in 2006, debated the merits of Enterprise 2.0 with Thomas Davenport, who holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College. A year later, ON was curious to see if the two had reached any agreement on what Enterprise 2.0 is and whether it truly represents a powerful new IT toolset. The following are edited excerpts from their conversation.

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