Thursday, September 20, 2007

Digging deeper into the Floyd Landis story

Floyd Landis was stripped of this 2006 Tour de France victory on Thursday, bringing to an end (at least for the moment) a story that often sounded more like a soap opera than a news story.

If you want to learn more about that result, you can click on the link above and choose from any of the news stories there. But that's not really why I'm posting this.

I've written before about what a powerful force Wikepedia has become as an information resource. But simply quoting the number of pages it contains or the number of people who contribute or any of the other examples put forward don't really convey what I'm looking for.

The Landis story gives a dramatic example of Wikepedia in action. There is an extensive article on Floyd Landis' situation on the site, which appears to cover nearly every part of the story. There's also a story in Wikinews, which features the decision as one of its current events.

But what really captured my attention, and demonstrates the real power behind Wikipedia, is the Talk Page about the Floyd Landis article.

People that have questions or concerns about the stuff that's on the page can edit the content, of course, just like they can for any article on the site. But if their concerns are more about the nature of the information, or stuff that may be missing, or possible bias, etc., they can post their comments on this page and the editors who are tracking the story will respond.

It's a fascinating back and forth that makes for good reading on its own.

And of course, it's not just for this story. This kind of thing happens every day. To read more about it, check out this post I had about it a few months ago.

It's pretty common to hear that we're in the midst of an information revolution. This is the kind of thing that proves it. The revolution is now.

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