For 24 hours futurists from around the world will mount a “knowledge assault” on www.Wikipedia.org, the world's largest collaborative online encyclopedia. Their goal is simple: to improve public knowledge about the field of futures studies.

Futurists Raid Wikipedia

Wikipedia, “The free Encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” has grown in less than five years to include editions in 200 languages. The English language version alone contains over 790,000 articles. Articles from Wikipedia have been quoted by the media, referenced in scholarly journals and books, and even appeared as sources in governmental debates. As its popularity continues to grow collaborative knowledge making will become the norm. In the future, knowledge raids like this one, and even knowledge wars might be frequent occurrences. How these changes might impact the larger issues of culture, academics, and politics are just a few of the topics that futurists are working to better understand.

Those interested in observing the wiki raid as it takes place should visit www.Wikipedia.org. From the main page type “future studies” in the search box and click on “go.” (Or you can just click here.) The raid will be taking place from 00:01 GMT on 31 October, 2005 until 00:01 GMT 1 November, 2005.

UPDATE:

The wiki raid got off to a great start receiving some nice coverage on Library Stuff at Information Today (Thanks to Joe Tankersley) and on David Weinberger's blog, JoHo. APF member Randal Moss also has some thoughts here.