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World of wikis

By Tom Chatfield  
November 9, 2007

Like many web users, I’m a frequent user of the variously reliable wonders of wikipedia (not least as a topic for blog posts). Or rather, I’m a frequent user of the English version. For there are a quite astonishing number of wikipedias in other languages that are, by definition, opaque not only to myself but to most English-speaking users of the web: 253 at the time of typing, ranging from Afrikaans to Zulu via Kashubian. And because most wikipedias are generated from scratch, they represent an intriguingly autonomyous, if overlapping, compendium of web worldviews.

As you might expect, the oldest…

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Tom Chatfield

Tom Chatfield is an associate editor at Prospect. His latest book is "How to Thrive in a Digital Age" (Pan Macmillan)

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