The Atlantic tech has a great feature for Wikipedia's 10th anniversary, featuring thoughts from a number of excellent contributors, including Shirky, Benkler, Zuckerman, Rosen and more. Check it out.
A common complaint about Wikipedia during its first decade is that it is "not authoritative," as if authority was a thing which Encyclopedia Britannica had and Wikipedia doesn't. This view, though, hides the awful truth — authority is a social characteristic, not a brute fact.
Authoritativeness adheres to persons or institutions who, we jointly agree, have enough of a process for getting things right that we trust them. This bit of epistemological appraisal seems awfully abstract, but it can show up in some pretty concrete cases.DARPA, the Pentagon's famous R&D lab, launched something in late 2009 called "The Red Balloon Challenge." They put up ten red weather balloons around the country, and said to contestants "If you can tell us the latitude and longitude of these balloons, within a mile of their actual positions, we'll give you $40,000." However, because the Earth is curved, DARPA also had to explain the Haversine forumla, which converts latitude and longitude to distance.
Shirky's account strikes me as the kind of pragmatism advocated by Richard Rorty, of whom I'm a big fan. What makes something true in a post-metaphysical world? Well, how about whether or not it helps you track down the balloons and win $40K? Hurray, pragmatism!
That, to me, is the biggest gift Wikipedia has given us; a way of looking at the world around us and seeing the possibility of effective human cooperation, on really complex, large projects, without relying on either market or government processes.