I thought Jonathan Zittrain was a huge fan of Wikipedia because he talks about it so extensively in his book, but his crush is nothing compared to that of Andrew Lih, who has written a whole “history” of Wikipedia. Lih recently gave a talk at the Harvard Law School (Lokman Tsui live-blogged the whole thing; reads like a transcript!)efffand though the basic stuff was pretty familiar to me, I’m sure a bunch of people “out there” would be interested in the details.

I asked Lih if he thought Wikipedia would have been as successful had it been a company instead of a non-profit org and he said no, giving the example of the Spanish fork, in which the idea of possible ads being run on Wikipedia made Spanish users lift their info and move to another site. I didn’t ask, however, if he thought Wikipedia users would be opposed to him making money off writing about Wikipedia. Why not just let Wikipedia users write the history of Wikipedia? Okay, I’m being sour, but Wikipedia sometimes annoys me because it never seems to have the information I really want– like blastomere transfers.

Here’s a menu from Uno’s. As a journalist, I have issues using Wikipedia as a reliable source, but to the general public, it is really replacing the Brittanica. (!)