Progress Daily

Wikipedia.org is a free online encyclopedia that anybody — anybody at all — can edit, simply by clicking on a button that says “edit this page.”

Wikipedia’s promise is nothing less than the liberation of human knowledge — both by incorporating all of it through the collaborative process, and by freely sharing it with everybody who has access to the internet. Wikipedia’s English-language version doubled in size last year and now has over 1m articles. By this measure, it is almost 12 times larger than the print version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Taking in the other 200-odd languages in which it is published, Wikipedia has more than 3m articles. Over 100,000 people all over the world have contributed, with a total of almost 4m “edits” between them. Wikipedia already has more “visitors” than the online New York Times, CNN and other mainstream sites. It has become a vital research tool for huge numbers of people. And Wikipedia is only five years old.

This success has made Wikipedia the most famous example of a wider wiki phenomenon. Wikis are web pages that allow anybody who is allowed to log into them to change them. The word “wiki” comes from the Hawaiian word for “quick,” but also stands for “what I know is.”

Whereas blogs contain the unedited, opinionated voice of one person, wikis explicitly and literally allow groups of people to get on the proverbial “same page.”

Jimmy Wales started the (not-for-profit) Wikimedia Foundation that operates Wikipedia, as well as lesser-known sites such as Wiktionary, Wikinews and Wikibooks. He says Wikipedia’s editing process “is much more traditional than people realise.” Fewer than 1% of all users do half the total edits. They add up to a few hundred committed volunteers who know each other and value their reputations. Besides “democracy” on the site, Mr. Wales says, there is occasional “aristocracy” (when editors with superior reputations get more say than others) and even occasional “monarchy” (”that’s my role”) when quick intervention is needed.

The journal Nature recently commissioned a study to compare the accuracy of a sample of articles drawn from Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica respectively. Nature’s experts found 162 errors in Wikipedia’s articles and 123 errors in Britannica’s.

“The Wiki Principle,” The Economist

Just 30 minutes of brisk walking can immediately boost the mood of depressed patients, giving them the same quick pick-me-up they may be seeking from cigarettes, caffeine or binge eating, a small study found. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that people suffering from depression who walked on a treadmill for 30 minutes reported feeling more vigorous and had a greater sense of psychological well-being for up to an hour after completing the workout. Those patients and another group that sat quietly for 30 minutes both reported reductions in negative feelings such as tension, depression, anger and fatigue. But only the group that exercised said they felt good after the session, according to the study, published in the December issue of the journal, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.

Lead researcher John Bartholomew said the study reinforces past research that has found consistent exercise, along with medication and counseling, can help people overcome depression. “It’s not something you have to do for 10 weeks and it’s not something you have to do at a high intensity.”

The study, funded by Future Search Trials, an Austin medical research company, involved 40 people between the ages of 18 and 55. All were recently diagnosed with major depressive disorder, were not taking antidepressants and did not regularly exercise. Twenty patients were assigned to exercise for 30 minutes, while the others sat quietly for the same amount of time. They were surveyed five minutes before the session and five, 30 and 60 minutes afterward. The positive mood effects from walking were sizable, lifting their feelings of vigor to near-normal levels. But the results were short-lived, returning to pre-exercise levels within an hour.

“Depressed? Take a Hike” by Liz Austin

The next big thing in 1448 was a technology called “movable type,” invented for commercial use by Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from Mainz (although the Chinese had thought of it first). The clever idea was to cast individual letters (type) and then compose (move) these to make up printable pages. This promised to disrupt the mainstream media of the day — the work of monks who were manually transcribing texts or carving entire pages into wood blocks for printing. By 1455 Mr Gutenberg, having lined up venture capital from a rich compatriot, Johannes Fust, was churning out bibles and soon also papal indulgences (slips of paper that rich people bought to reduce their time in purgatory). The start-up had momentum, but its costs ran out of control and Mr Gutenberg defaulted. Mr Fust foreclosed, and a little bubble popped.

Even so, within decades movable type spread across Europe, turbo-charging an information age called the Renaissance. Martin Luther, irked by those indulgences, used printing presses to produce bibles and other texts in German. Others followed suit, and vernaculars rose as Latin declined, preparing Europe for nation-states. Religious and aristocratic elites first tried to stop, then control, then co-opt the new medium. In the centuries that followed, social and legal systems adjusted (with copyright laws, for instance) and books, newspapers and magazines began to circulate widely. The age of mass media had arrived. Two more technological breakthroughs — radio and television — brought it to its zenith, which it probably reached around 1958, when most adult Americans simultaneously turned on their television sets to watch “I Love Lucy.”

Last November, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers create content for the internet — from text to pictures, music and video. In this new-media culture, says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in California, people no longer passively “consume” media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but actively participate in them, which usually means creating content, in whatever form and on whatever scale.

As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for society will become visible gradually over a period of decades. With participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible. The mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, “don’t get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations.” That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility.

Young people today, and most people in future, will be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and what is not. They will have plenty of help. Sometimes they will rely on human editors of their choosing; at other times they will rely on collective intelligence in the form of new filtering and collaboration technologies that are now being developed.

The obvious benefit of this media revolution will be what Mr. Saffo calls a “Cambrian explosion” of creativity: a flowering of expressive diversity on the scale of the eponymous proliferation of biological species 530m years ago. “We are entering an age of cultural richness and abundant choice that we’ve never seen before in history,” says Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine.

“Among the audience,” by Andreas Kluth