Twitter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

I find the topic and whole concept of “Twitter” quite fascinating and this is why I searched the word “Twitter” on Wikipedia.com and stumbled upon this article. This linked article above is about the social networking site called Twitter and gives information about the history of it, the technology behind it and examples of what a “Tweet” is used for (along with other random information and links). The origin date of the article was March 11, 2007… and at that point in time, the article read: “Twitter is a web 2.0 social web service that lets people share what they are currently doing.” It quickly went from that simple sentence to pages and pages of information, ideas, thoughts, and corrections about Twitter. There have been over 500 contributers to this website since March 2007, the latest two being written today (April 19, 2010). I was shocked with the number of people who not only read but also contributed to this wiki article about Twitter. Clearly it is a popular site and many people have gone through the article with a fine toothcomb. There are edits and additions to the article almost every other day since 2007.
Twitter is a pretty wild and liberal idea and clearly is used by out of the box thinkers and generation X type people. The article gives examples of situations Twitter was used in, explains about the creation of the site, discusses Twitters financial situation and much much more. The information about Twitter is presented in a straight-forward manner. The only bias I found that was that the article did say mostly good things about the site, and never discussed any critiques or problems people face while using the social networking site. As I continued to read the discussion section of the article, one of the comments was “I am glad to see that a criticism section was finally integrated into this article. Twitter sucks”. I chuckled to myself as I read this because clearly someone was angry at the format of the article and wanted to make an area where people could complain about and write negative comments about Twitter. This was the most controversial posting on the discussion board… everything else was either a correction or a comment adding to the information already available. Everything else in the discussion section that I came across was politely stated and there were no rude “call outs” about specific information stated.

Reading this wiki about Twitter gave me a whole new appreciation and amazement for Wikipedia as a whole. I think wikis (for the most part… obviously there are some articles that are exceptions to the statement) are an awesome form of technically-organized, collaboratively-produced knowledge. I was so surprised with how correct the information was and how eager and excited people were to share their knowledge with the world. Obviously not all of these articles on Wikipedia are totally accurate, but for the most part, people visit the different articles… sharing little pieces of their knowledge as they go.

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