We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.

Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration.

The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.

[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.