No, really. Go to any Wikipedia entry you choose—"Hindu philosophy," "drunk driving," "pataphysics"—and click on the Edit This Page tab. Bingo: Whatever you write immediately becomes the last word on the subject. And if this sounds like a recipe for mob rule, that's because it is. But mob rule turns out to be a surprisingly good way to write an encyclopedia. Typos abound, and especially in articles on controversial topics like the Armenian genocide or George W. Bush, the constant wars between opposing camps of revisers can reduce texts to a state of almost Heisenbergian indeterminacy. But outright factual errors generally get corrected fast (within minutes, on average), and in the range and depth of its articles, Wikipedia handily holds its own against encyclopedias produced the old-fashioned way. Funny: It's almost as if the great intellectual unwashed could be trusted to manage its own culture.