The Blogs, Wiki & RSS track opens with a session with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia - the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Here is an introduction to the concept of Wikipedia, which makes an interesting point:

Lots of people are constantly improving Wikipedia, making thousands of changes an hour, all of which are recorded on the page history and the Recent Changes page. Nonsense and vandalism are usually removed quickly, and their creators banned.

This is somewhat counter-intuitive for most people I tell about wikipedia - after they grasp the enormity of 'anyone can edit', they move onto 'but that must be total chaos' or 'how do you know what they write is right'. Not unreasonable points, however, Wikipedia has proved that collaboration driven by the right motivation, in the right context works better than a top down project. Obviously, the $64,000 question is what is that motivation and the context - working that out is what I find most interesting about my work.

They say that picture speaks a thousand words, imagine what moving pictures, i.e. a screencast can tell! John Udell of InfoWorld, who came up with a genius idea of playing a series of screenshots accompanied by an audio commentary, did one about a Wikipedia entry. He traced the 'history' and evolution of Heavy Metal umlaut page in 8.5-minute screencast, which scrolls forward and backward along the timeline of the document, and follows the development of several motifs, including attempted vandalism. Enjoy.