Wikipedia and the Future of Libraries

Aaron Swartz (Open Library)

3:40pm Tuesday, 02/12/2008

Broadway North

The stunning success of Wikipedia—in which an organization with just four full-time employees managed to become one of the top ten sites on the Web—has gotten lots of people thinking about wikis. In this talk, we’ll look at the social and technical factors that made Wikipedia a success, review new research challenging conventional wisdom about how its articles are authored, and discuss Open Library, a new project to extend Wikipedia’s reach into the publishing world by creating a wiki with a page for every book ever published.

Aaron Swartz

Open Library

Aaron Swartz is a writer, hacker, and activist currently living in San Francisco. He co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification, helped develop standards for the Semantic Web, and designed the metadata system for Creative Commons. He co-founded online news startup Reddit.com, which was purchased in 2006 by Condé Nast, and currently manages the non-profit Open Library Project which is building a wiki with a page for every book ever published. His writing has appeared in a variety of magazines and journals and he has been profiled in Wired and Newsweek.

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