Wikipedia: Further Reading

While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics shows this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success

We have access to more information than ever before. Yet rather than ushering in a new era of enlightenment, the information age has helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues.

The book is the first complete discussion of the genre of online encyclopedias.

The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argues that activities which appear to be timeless - gathering knowledge, analysing, disseminating and employing it - are in fact time-bound and take different forms in different periods and places. The second part tries to counter the tendency to write a triumphalist history of the 'growth' of knowledge by discussing losses of knowledge and the price of specialization. The third part offers geographical, sociological and chronological overviews, contrasting the experience of centres and peripheries and arguing that each of the main trends of the period - professionalization, secularization, nationalization, democratization, etc, coexisted and interacted with its opposite.

The vision statement of the Wikimedia Foundation states, "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." Libraries need not see Wikipedia as competition; rather, failing to leverage its omnipresence in the online world constitutes a missed opportunity.