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Diamond
18th August 2007, 09:04 AM
...produce a "novel"

The world's first open collaborative effort to write a novel using a wiki has come to an end :(

But as a celebration of the true result of open collaborative effort, there can be no better example of why the paradigm cannot help but produce nonsense - which explains Wikipedia.

Here is the novel (http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) and here is my favourite part:

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day... a swim, perhaps, but not a walk - for Artie was a whale, a humpback whale, to be precise,at least in these moments. It was a sunny day, and Artie would have worn his sunglasses, but being a whale meant he didn't have ears, which made it difficult for his sunglasses to stay on. No matter, he thought, at least he was young and strong. He reveled in the feeling of the water - jumping, splashing, rolling, frolicking. He wondered what it must be like for beings that weren't whales; it was a hard concept to understand, and thinking about it made him feel a little dizzy, but Artie liked to think - and eat krill. Not necessarily at the same time though.

Shakespeare eat your heart out...

geni
18th August 2007, 04:07 PM
Wikipedia has a few advantages:

Articles are small enough chunks for one person to copyedit

The wikipedia house style while somewhat odd tends to be fairly robust.

UnrepentantSinner
18th August 2007, 07:28 PM
It can't be any worse than some of the non sequitors I've seen in the Three Word Story thread.

Diamond
20th August 2007, 03:52 AM
I think someone should have submitted the "Artie the Whale" beginning to the "Bulwer-Lytton" contest.