Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-09-26/Esquire article

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Esquire article

Wikipedia edits Esquire

This week, an

WP:ITAAW
before the article was frozen.

Editor

A.J. Jacobs
wrote the original article, which was riddled with deliberate errors. These errors were quickly corrected by users, who rewrote many sections from scratch. Jacobs said of the massive edits made by Wikipedians,

I just wanted to thank you all so much for participating in this experiment. It was absolutely fascinating. I was riveted to my computer, pressing refresh every 45 seconds to see the next iteration. And the next and the next.

Jacobs is no stranger to encyclopedias; he read all 32 volumes of the 2002 edition of the

The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
.

One minor source of controversy was the caveat that all edits to the page were officially released into the public domain, in order to avoid problems when using the article. However, this did not pose a legal problem for Wikipedia, since public domain content fits with GFDL.

The article will presumably run in the November 2005 issue.