Of course there’s no way you could engage thousands of people world-wide in creating a comprehensive, up-to-date, on-line encyclopedia. If you simply opened up the system, so anybody could contribute to any subject, it would be completely impossible to protect the system against vandalism, jokes and random errors. Such an encyclopedia could never work.

Except it does: The Wikipedia may be the coolest application of the internet so far. I use it constantly and I find it to be incredibly comprehensive. But don’t take my word for it.