Knowledge out of chaos

This picture of Monument Valley (looking southward) was taken on my flight from Las Vegas to Cedar Rapids.



Last night when we were looking at the picture, we went to the Wikipedia to find out more about Monument Valley. We found this handy illustration there (click to enlarge, as always):



This picture is rotated about 45 degrees counterclockwise because the photographer was flying from San Francisco to Houston and the view is looking more westward. I thought it was cool.

Anyway, we spent another half-hour just randomly looking up whatever came into our heads. I'm adding the Wikipedia to my links (on the right) because I find it totally fascinating. Here is how it describes itself:

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is a multilingual "copyleft"
encyclopedia that is editable by anyone. It is collaboratively edited and maintained by thousands of users via wiki software, and is hosted and suported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to typical encyclopedia entries, Wikipedia includes information more often associated with almanacs, gazetteers, and specialist magazines; and coverage of current events.

I could go there right now and add my knowledge of TiVo or whatever.

This is democracy (or anarchy?) applied to product development. It is the same philosophy that gave birth to Mozilla Firefox and Linux, which gave birth to TiVo!