I’m about half way through Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams and came across this article today.

The age of public collaboration over the Internet is still only in its infancy, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told AFP in an interview.

The 42-year-old web guru, in an effort to show Wikipedia’s impact thus far, referenced a recent trip to a slum in India where he “met this young man on the street who told me that he had used Wikipedia to pass his 11th grade exams.”

I was glad to see Wales acknowledge that for certain creative processes, the individual is still the best way. I am all for collaborative work, but as humans we are made to create, so it is naive to think that anything will replace that.

He acknowledged collaboration has its limits, noting that if “we said we want to write a novel about loss, and redemption, probably not so much public collaboration, that’s really an individual vision and a view of the world.”

“But for basic factual information, I think having an open public dialogue and debate and democratic process, seems to be very powerful.”