Kim H. Vetman has written an interesting paper that illustrates how distributed resources are changing not only the nature of knowledge, but the ways of knowing. Vetman points out that knowledge may be more than something dynamic that changes over time:
"A deeper implication of this revolution is a new kind of digital bridge whereby even illiterate persons can be included within the knowledge loop of collective memory institutions."
I think the most interesting feature of a knowledge pool like the Wikipedia is the rapid post editing process, which may prove more efficient than the peer-review techniques that have been used so far by scientific journals. In terms of Cybernetics, "feedback" is the only error-correction and navigation system we have in nature, and even space vehicles rely on that for accuracy. Then why not history?
The Wikipedia enables history to be updated to a moment where it starts kissing daily news, but that doesn't mean it fills the 'gap'. I have this beautiful excerpt from Eric Hobsbawm's The Age Of Empire:
"For all of us there is a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalised record which is open to relatively disspassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one's own life. For individual human beings this zone stretches from the point where living family traditions or memories begin - say, from the earliest family photo which the oldest living family member can identify or explicate - to the end of infancy, when public and private destinies are recognised as inseparable and as mutually defining one another."
One can easily sense that non-scholarly people, sometime in the future, and once the writers of Wikipedia reach a critical mass, will try to directly update the existing knowledge and bypass scientific journals. This may also happen when someone mathematically demonstrates the veracity of "peer-reviewed, post-editing" publishing systems. Or, some wise men might campaign to promote an ideology through changing a historical record, which is quite commonplace. In reaction to this, the dedicated protectors of Wikipedia will put up defenses, making the system stronger. That's a brilliant mechanism.
It has been mentioned in Brenkler's "Coase's Penguin" that - perhaps the only information product that can't be peer-produced is a novel. I'm not so sure now. The Wikipedia seems to be writing a collective autobiography of the human race.
