I make good use of Wikipedia as a resource, both here and in the Longevity Meme daily news; I'm usually pleasantly suprised to find that even comparatively obscure bioscience terms and references have comprehensible entries for the layman. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a large-scale wiki, it is essentially the gift economy of open source applied to reference materials. Everyone can edit, so - in theory, over time - the best and most accurate knowledge is accumulated into a sparkling whole; the wisdom of crowds at work. While this doesn't tend to work so well for contentious items - such as present day politics - or soft fields where truth is less important than oratory, the scientific community has gardened its sections of Wikipedia well.

The healthy life extension community should do the same. Many people will use Wikipedia to read up on present day efforts to extend the healthy human life span, or to understand the science and biotechnology that will shape our future longevity. All it takes is a little effort from each of us to keep things truthful, accurate, up to date and up to scratch - so make that effort the next time you're clicking through to Wikipedia. See something wrong? Correct it. Lacking a reference you know of? Add it. Missing an entry you'd like to see? Take a few minutes to start a stub article.

Wikipedia is a widely used resource; it greatly helps our cause to have it record the present state of our community and research towards healthy life extension technology.

Technorati tags: activism, life extension, Wikipedia