Stewart Brand & Wikipedia

Thinking about the concept of group-mind in class today, made me think about Wikipedia – which is founded in part on the idea that one can gather knowledge from the many rather than being limited to a few individuals as sources of information. There is still value associated with expertise but people can and do edit material at Wikipedia.

If you haven’t explored Wikipedia yet, try out this interesting link on Stewart Brand. If you click on the Whole Earth Catalog Link you get to a quote that equates the Whole Earth Catalog to Google:

Steve Jobs compared The Whole Earth Catalog to Google in his June 2005 Stanford University Commencement Speech [1]. “When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation…. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”

(Retrieved August 29, 2006 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog)

Do you think Jobs is accurate? What do you think about the concept of Wiki?