Why is Wikipedia so amazing?

Clay Shirky brought up an interesting point on the recently released ETech panel about Folksonomies on IT Conversations regarding the motivations of people who organize things.  I think I heard Stewart Butterfield say that you could never get a bunch of paid employees to generate the organization and categorization sophistication that has evolved naturally from the Wikipedia.  Clay then added that the motivations of those who build the Wikipedia's structure are more purely routed in accomplishing the task the "right" way, implying that the intentions of someone getting paid to organize things is defined by the system which is paying that person.  Chomsky would agree, I'm sure, and it brings up a key ingredient in defining why certain things become successful on the Internet.  

There is some essence of art in the tools and technologies being developed online these days.  Why is it that del.icio.us and Wikipedia and flickr inspire awe?  And why does it feel so reminscent of my first exposure to the web browser and these crazy web pages that I could jump to all around the world?  Seeing large groups of people coordinate their efforts to create something bigger than the sum of their individual efforts in this way conjures some memories of college anthro classes.  I've pointed to this before, but Jon Udell's Screencast about del.icio.us closes with a comment on the evolution of language where he points out that pidgeon languages form when groups of people need to communicate but have no common language to share.  The children of that generation then patch together a new, more fluid and sophisticated language.  

Now, I'm no less impressed by the accomplishments of for-profit efforts like Google Maps.  And I'm sure Joshua Schachter would be glad to make a nice chunk of change for his efforts.  But to see the fruits of unified and simultaneously diverse motivations form something as rich as Wikipedia without economics playing even a tangential role in the creation of that system invites so many questions about what the Internet means and what it can become over time.  Tim Bray has a clear view of how to decide when something is hot or not. "You know something is important when, all of a sudden, a huge number of people start using it. Not because they’re told to, not because management says so, not because the analysts and prognosticators think it’s going to be hot, but because it does something they like or need."  That's an interesting way to look at the result of something successful in hindsight.  But I can't help but begin wondering if one can predict ways in which other online tools and services may fuel natural human behavior to accomplish similarly important outcomes.  My guess is that there are a lot of VCs asking the same question these days.

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