Alan Jacobs celebrates Wikipedia's anniversary:
No one understands the true genius of Wikipedia if they look only at the current version of any given page. James Bridle makes this clear when he explains why he decided to record the Wikipedia debate about how to recount the story of the Iraq war: "Wikipedia is a useful subset of the entire Internet, and as such a subset of all human culture. It's not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot." (The books are cool, but they are frozen in time: who knows how Wikipedia's account of the war may change in the coming years or even decades?)