Hmm, very interesting.
Matt reminded me about WikiBooks, which I hadn’t peeked at in a while.
The last time I looked there was when I was reading “The Science of Getting Rich”, by Wallace D. Wattles. Despite the assumptions you might make from the title, it’s a pretty neat book. Whether you want to swallow it whole I don’t know, but there are a number of great little nuggets in there.
So when I went to look at WikiBooks again, I saw that the book had been marked for “speedy deletion”. Huh. There was no explanation given by the person who marked it such, but other commenters on the site provided a plausible reason: some scammer was trying to keep the book from free circulation (it’s in the public domain), because they wanted to sell “their” program for getting rich based on the book.
Oh, yeah, now I remembered. When I first noticed the book I did some searching around the web, and indeed, there are like a bazillion people trying to make money off the book with little additional work of their own in the package.
That’s probably a big problem with a Wiki-type system for collaborative knowledge gathering. Gotta have a mechanism for allowing people to remove unauthorized material, but discerning whether a given person really has the associated copyright/etc. is not easy to do through an automatic interface. So jerks can go around deleting (or modifying) things they don’t like to hear, regardless of whether they really have any say in the matter.
Weird situation… OK, now I have to try to find a good copy of the book and mirror it on my site to save it from the world.
Oh, looks like WikiSource has a copy, still.