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Socientists & Thinkers
Whether by harnessing the power of the Internet or probing the mysteries of the mind, they have come up with the big ideas of our time.

BY CHRIS ANDERSON
"Edit this page." Just three little words, but what a miracle they have wrought. Just about every entry on Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia, invites visitors to fiddle. Is the every incomplate? Add something. Is it wrong? Correct it. Is it biased? Edit away. That such a remarkable open-door policy has resulted in the biggest(and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world in the vision of one man, Jimmy Wales.

Wales,39,is a former options trader who in 1999 set out to reinvent the encyclopedia for the Internet age--free,up-to-date and available to all. He started the way most encyclopedists start, by commissioning articles from experts and subjecting them to peer review. After 18 months, he had a pitiful 12 entries; at that rate, it would take a few millenniums to equal Encyclopedia Britannica. So Wales credited a free-foem companion site based on a little-known software program called a wiki(the Hawaiian term means quick) that makes it easy--with the "edit this page" button--to enter and track changes to Web pages.

The effect was explosive. That simple button turned readers into contributors into evangelists. Wikipedia now has more than a million articles in English, nearly 10 times as many as in Britannica. That number nearly doubles each year. And most extraordinarily, The site has not been defaded by vandales or hijacked by zealosts. Or more precisely, it is vandalized every day but is usually repaired within minutes by any one of the millions of users who are motivated to protect and nurture the site.

Today Wales is celebrated as a champion of Internetenabled egalitarinizm. He describes himself not as "anticredentialist"
. That's a key distinction. It means that amateurs can have as much to contribute as professionals and that talent can be found anywhere.Everyone predicted that mob rule would lead to chaos. Instead it has led to what may prove to be the most powerful industorial model of the 21st century: peer production. Wikipedia is proof that it works, and Jimmy Wales is its prophet.