User:Catdude
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My interests
As for me, I'm interested in higher education, architecture, urban planning, consumer finance, and linguistics. I also enjoy reading about political science, especially about the ways that my native USA differs from other English-speaking (or heavily English-speaking) countries such as Canada, Britain, and Australia. I also like to read about the history of these countries. Plus, I am interested in other countries' cultures (not just English-speaking ones), as well as interested in many other often-obscure topics.
The potential of Wikipedia
I am interested in how this great experiment in worldwide, radical informational democracy called Wikipedia affects the areas of library and information science, general knowledge by many non-academics of history/politics/culture/much else, and virtual community-building. I think that the biggest mistake that could be made about Wikipedia is to not take its culture-changing potential seriously. (And besides, where else in the universe are you going to get what you really need to know quickly about, say, crushing by elephant?)
Wikipedia and community-building
As for Wikipedia's community-building potential, I think that it can't be underestimated. Where else, with a few arguable exceptions, do you find Americans, Brits, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Irish...and French, Slovakians, Chinese, Iranians, Ecuadorans, Jamaicans, and so on...all chatting away at each other in such an invigorating manner? Never mind the occasional edit war or other occasional incivility — the sense of worldwide community that I see here is startling. Well, Wikipedia got a Webby Award for Community in 2004...maybe it'll get a Nobel Peace Prize in 2029? Well, even if that doesn't happen, I think that Wikipedia is certainly a prototype in community-building.
Peer review
Something that could probably be a valuable adjunct to Wikipedia someday is some method of peer review for many articles (maybe even all of them if this is reasonably possible). This is much different than censorship or restricting Wikipedia's general ability to be edited by the public. Already, there exist some pages (such as the Main Page) that are "edit-restricted"; peer-reviewed, restricted-editing pages as an adjunct to corresponding general Wikipedia articles would be similar in spirit. Such peer-reviewed pages, however, would need to be updated, in many instances, frequently. I don't have a thorough answer as to how this could be done; if I come up with good ideas, I'll post them here.
In conclusion...
And, if anyone has any ideas he or she wants to share with me, feel free to post them on my Talk page. Thanks for stopping by.