The internet: from Auburn to Wales

I recommend Mick Brown’s article on Wikipedia and its founder Jimmy Wales in today’s Telegraph magazine. (It’s long: go out and buy the newspaper.) Here’s Wales’s vision of the internet, as a place where:

people can communicate from all over the world and build knowledge and share information. We went through the whole dot-com boom and bust, and the internet seemed to be about pop-up ads and spam and porn and selling dog food. And now Wikipedia kind of harks back to the original vision.

The discussion on authority, editing and a neutral point of view is helpful.