Yipee!! Wiki

A Wiki is really good tool for collaborative working. Its basically a collection of webpages that can be edited by anyone. I think Wikis became popular with open source projects because it took the concept of freedom to another level. If anybody could modify the source of the actual thing why not the documentation. Its one more way of trusting your fellow beings to do the right thing. Centralized control, approval process etc really belong to the feudal age. The actual proof of the pudding is that it actually works and is more efficient. If I find a broken link on a wiki, I just fix it rather than curse the author and move on. Even if I were to take the pains of sending a mail to the author and then he would fix it, its so much more inefficient.

The Mozilla site takes this concept a step further. Their main site itself is editable (unlike most other projects who keep a read-only website and a separate wiki). Just go to this page and scroll to the bottom - you will see a edit this page link.

Another website which really illustrates the success story that wiki is - wikipedia. This online encyclopedia has now become my reference of choice. Its free, fair and huge. It just completed three years of existence and has already surpassed encyclopedia Britannica. The articles in wikipedia really seem fair, uptodate, correct and unbiased. With anybody having edit rights people would probably not let incorrect stuff remain there for long. Here is some info that you will find new - the name Mozilla wasn't derived from Godzilla :-) Go here and add wikipedia to your list of search engines in firefox (and get firefox if you haven't already).

BTW wikipedia has a cousin called wikiquote too.