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By Randy A. Salas Star Tribune 08/04/07 4:00 AM PT At 6:29 p.m. Wednesday, an unknown computer user in Lakeville, Minn., added this sentence to Wikipedia's two-paragraph description of the bridge: "The bridge collapsed on Aug. 1, 2007, at approximately 6:00 p.m. Several vehicles went into the water." The updates came minutes and even seconds apart. In the next 12-hour period, people from around the world updated the entry more than 450 times. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed Wednesday at about 6:05 p.m. Within 22 minutes, the Star Tribune updated its Web site with the news. Within 24 minutes, the Internet's go-to reference site, Wikipedia , added the information to its entry for the bridge. The difference: The Star Tribune's news site is run by a staff of professional journalists, while Wikipedia is a publicly maintained site to which anyone can contribute and no one is really in charge. Race for Updates At 6:29 p.m. Wednesday, an unknown computer user in Lakeville, Minn., added this sentence to Wikipedia's two-paragraph description of the bridge: "The bridge collapsed on Aug. 1, 2007, at approximately 6:00 p.m. Several vehicles went into the water." Three minutes later, John Warkel, a student at Henry Sibley High School in Eagan, Minn., added an update, citing KARE-11's Web site as a source. Then the updates came minutes and even seconds apart. In the next 12-hour period, people from around the world updated the encyclopedic entry more than 450 times to reflect the changing news and to edit other peoples' work. No Longer a Stub Before the collapse, Wikipedia's short entry for the I-35W bridge was classified as a "stub," rudimentary information about a minor subject -- basically, a side note to bigger articles on the site. The stub was created in May 2006 and edited only five times before Wednesday. During the night, the entry became a full-blown page, with Wikipedia users adding information about the bridge's construction and history, as well as photos and updates about the collapse. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is a self-policing online encyclopedia with nearly 8 million reference articles in 253 languages. Collaboration Is Key Considered the Internet's grandest community service project, it operates under the premise that because anyone can contribute, users will edit and monitor one another's work to ensure accuracy . The site came under fire a few years ago for errors and poor writing, but it has overcome that reputation to become an oft-cited resource online.

[Consumer] Can Wikipedia Cover News Better?