Sometimes you gotta pay attention to what the Internet oracle is saying, and right now it’s apparently saying "wiki!"

We’ll start with yesterday, when I was pointed to the corollary to my science fiction about search engines post by boingboing: science fiction about wikis! Specifically, the story Wikiworld by Paul Di Filippo:

Realizing that such a task was beyond my
own capabilities, I called in my wikis: The
Dark Galactics. The PEP Boyz. The Chindogurus. Mother Hitton’s
Littul Kittons. The Bishojos. The Glamazons. The Provincetown
Pickers. And several more. All of them owed me simoleons for the
usual—goods received, or time and expertise invested—and now they’d
be eager to balance the accounts.

Then a friend pointed my at a cartoon that summed up the problem with wikipedia.

Finally, Dahlia Lithwick at Slate explained to me — and i think she’s right — that babies invented community-based collaborative authorship:

I took my small sons to visit family over the holidays. As invariably
happens when one wants to show off one’s young, the smaller one’s face
exploded into great green ropes of snot only seconds after deplaning.
The consumptive Victorian wheeze followed mere hours later. And
suddenly, he was no longer my baby. He was a server-side wiki.

So there you go. I’m not sure why the Internet decided it’s wiki zeitgeist week, but it clearly must be.