Craig Newmark — Wikipedia: the first draft of history
“It’s an exemplar and test platform for large-scale, global collaboration. By that I mean large numbers of people working together for common goals. Wikipedia, in that sense, is a major advance for all humanity.
“It’s also dramatic proof of the supreme effectiveness of collaboration: people work together on Wikipedia to build articles, often in collaboration across the world, and often over long periods of time.
“The style of collaboration is novel in that it balances expert work with that of talented citizens. That’s the same balance we see emerging all over the Net. It’s also the same balance between representative democracy and grassroots democracy. In that sense, Wikipedia is a democratic system, reflecting the best of what we see in all human endeavors.”