Text A

Miss Brill is a middle-aged woman who spends her days as a teacher for children and as a reader
for an old man who hardly recognizes her existence. Every Sunday she wears her shabby fur
coat to the French public park called Jardins Publiques. She speaks to the coat as if speaking to
another person—an act that becomes the reader’s first indication of her true loneliness and
alienation. Miss Brill sits in the stands watching and listening to the band and to the people who
sit around her in the stands and play on the grass nearby. All the things she sees and overhears
fascinate her, and she is so curious as to eavesdrop on people without their knowing. This week
however, a fine old man and a big old woman sitting near her do not speak, and she notices how
the people in the stands with her all look kind of the same, all of them “odd, silent, nearly all
old.”
Continuing to eavesdrop on people nonetheless, she sees a gentleman in grey and a woman who
is identified by her clothing: an ermine torque. This couple makes small talk while Miss Brill
thinks of what they might say, what might happen, even as she realizes the woman’s hat is
“shabby”. However, the couple does not satisfy her, because they part ways before anything
meaningfully interesting can be said. Immediately she notices an old man who nearly gets
knocked down by a group of young girls. At this point Miss Brill marvels at how “fascinating”
her eavesdropping is, and she begins to develop a theory that encompasses everyone in front of
her. She thinks that everyone is “all on the stage”, and that everyone here is an actor. She
believes that she herself also plays a role in this play, an important role that would be missed
were she not there to play it. She thinks about telling the old man to whom she reads: “Yes, I
have been an actress for a long time.”

Text B

An ongoing feud between the Capulets and the Montagues breaks out again on the streets of
Verona. Both sides are warned by Prince Escalus that they must not disturb the peace again, on
pain of death.

Romeo, love-sick for Rosaline, is comforted by his friend Benvolio. Capulet tells Paris that he
may not marry his daughter Juliet until she is older. Romeo and his friends learn of a party being
held by the Capulets, and decide to go to it as masquers. At the party, Tybalt sees Romeo, but is
prevented from fighting him by Capulet. Romeo meets Juliet, and they instantly fall in love.
After leaving the party, Romeo eludes his friends, returns to meet Juliet, and they exchange vows
of love. Romeo tells Friar Laurence what has happened and he consents to marry them.

Benvolio tells Mercutio that Tybalt has sent Romeo a challenge. Romeo joins them, and is
visited by the Nurse, who is told the marriage plan. She tells Juliet, who then goes to Friar
Laurence’s cell, and the lovers are married. Tybalt, looking for Romeo, finds Benvolio and
Mercutio. Romeo returns, and is challenged by Tybalt, but refuses to fight. Mercutio draws on
Tybalt and is fatally wounded. Tybalt then fights with Romeo, and is killed. Romeo flies, and
Benvolio reports what has happened to the Prince, who banishes Romeo. The Nurse tells Juliet
of Romeo’s banishment and promises to bring him to her. The Friar tells a distraught Romeo he
is banished, but advises him to visit Juliet secretly, then to leave for Mantua.

Capulet tells Paris he may marry Juliet in three days, and Lady Capulet brings the news to Juliet,
who has just bid Romeo a hasty farewell. Juliet refuses to marry Paris, persisting in the face of
her father’s anger. She goes to the Friar for help, and finds Paris there arranging the marriage.
After he leaves, the Friar devises a plan: he will give her a drink that will make her appear dead
and thus avoid the marriage, and will write to Romeo to tell him; they can then elope to Mantua.

Juliet tells her father she will now marry Paris, and Capulet brings the wedding forward to the
next day. Juliet retires, and drinks the liquid. When her ‘body’ is discovered, all mourn, and she
is taken to the family crypt. In Mantua, Balthasar tells Romeo that Juliet is dead. He vows to lie
dead next to her that night, and obtains a poison from an apothecary. Friar John tells Friar
Laurence that he was unable to deliver Laurence’s letter to Romeo. Realizing the danger,
Laurence leaves to tell Juliet what has happened.

Paris goes to Juliet’s tomb to mourn her, and encounters Romeo. They fight, and Romeo kills
Paris. Romeo then drinks the poison and dies by Juliet. The Friar arrives to see Romeo dead and
Juliet waking. She refuses to leave, and kills herself with Romeo’s dagger. Officers arrive, and
rouse the families and the Prince. The Friar explains what has happened. Montague and Capulet
agree to make peace with each other.

Text C

The successful ruler of the Danes, Hrothgar, builds a great mead hall called Heorot. Soon after
the hall is built, a monster named Grendel begins to plague Hrothgar's kingdom. Emerging from
the darkened marsh, Grendel regularly invades the hall, attacking and killing Hrothgar’s sleeping
warriors. The fierce Grendel devours as many as 30 warriors at one time. Grendel's attacks on the
mead hall and his devouring of Hrothgar's warriors continue for twelve years.

News of Grendel's attacks spreads to the land of the Geats, ruled by Hygelac. After hearing of
Hrothgar's misfortune, Beowulf, a mighty Geat warrior, decides to travel to Denmark to destroy
Grendel. Beowulf and fourteen other warriors make the journey to Denmark. One of Hrothgar's
coastal guards questions Beowulf as he arrives at the Danish shore, so Beowulf states his purpose
and asks to be led to Hrothgar’s hall. Hrothgar gladly welcomes Beowulf and his men.

A feast is held to honor Beowulf. Unferth, one of Hrothgar's men, questions Beowulf's ability to
defeat Grendel by reminding him of a swimming contest that Beowulf apparently lost. Beowulf
responds that he was attacked by many sea monsters during the contest and killed them all.
Beowulf then questions Unferth's character, in part by reminding him that Unferth killed his own
brother. After the feast, Hrothgar and his men leave the hall to sleep; Beowulf and his warriors
remain to guard the hall. In the night, Grendel enters the hall, attacking and devouring one of the
sleeping warriors. Beowulf, without weapon or armor, grabs Grendel's hand and tears off the
monster's right arm. The injured monster flees back to his den in the nearby marsh. Beowulf
hangs Grendel's severed arm in Hrothgar's hall to announce the victory.

Hrothgar celebrates Grendel's defeat, but Grendel’s mother attacks the hall the next night to
avenge the death of her son. She enters the hall at night and seizes Aeschere, one of Hrothgar’s
most valued warriors, fleeing with him. Grendel's mother also steals the severed arm of her son.
Beowulf is not sleeping in the hall that night and does not find out about the attack until the next
morning. In the morning, Hrothgar leads Beowulf and the other warriors to the marsh. Near the
marsh, the men discover Aeschere's severed head. Beowulf decides to seek the den of Grendel's
mother to avenge Aeschere's death. Unferth then offers Beowulf the use of Hrunting, the Danes'
mightiest sword

Beowulf descends into the murky waters and is attacked by monsters. Beowulf finally finds the
den of Grendel’s mother. Beowulf attacks Grendel's mother but fails to wound her with the
sword, so he engages in a fierce hand-to-hand battle. As the monster begins to overwhelm
Beowulf, the warrior sees an old sword in the lair. Beowulf grabs the sword and stabs Grendel’s
mother, killing her. He then sees the weakened Grendel lying nearby. Beowulf uses the sword to
sever Grendel’s head and takes the head and the mighty sword with him as he swims back to the
surface of the marsh. As Beowulf swims to the surface, the sword begins to melt until only the
head and hilt remain. The Danes rejoice when they find out about Beowulf's victory, honoring
Beowulf with another feast. Beowulf returns Unferth’s sword and offers Hrothgar the hilt of the
sword discovered in the den. Beowulf then leaves Denmark for his own homeland. Once back to
the land of the Geats, Beowulf is rewarded with riches and is honored by Hygelac, the leader of
the Geats.

Many years pass, and Beowulf himself eventually become the leader of the Geats. One of
Beowulf's men discovers a treasure hoard guarded by a dragon and steals a golden goblet, which
he gives to Beowulf. Angered by the theft, the dragon ravages Beowulf's land. Although he is
old, Beowulf decides to fight the dragon. Beowulf's weapons prove useless against the dragon, so
Beowulf attacks the dragon with his bare hands. All but one of Beowulf's warriors flee from the
scene; only the devoted Wiglaf remains. The dragon bites and injures Beowulf, but after Wiglaf
attacks the dragon with his sword, Beowulf is able to stab and kill the dragon.

Beowulf's injuries from the battle with the dragon are fatal. Dying, Beowulf looks upon the
dragon's treasure and gives some of his own golden armor to Wiglaf. Beowulf's funeral follows,
with the hero's body ritually burned. In a burial mound, the Geats bury Beowulf's ashes with the
treasures gained from the dragon’s lair. The poem ends with the Geats mourning the death of
their great leader.
 Text D

Insane and determined to destroy evil and defend the downtrodden, Alonso Quixano, calling
himself Don Quixote of La Mancha (a region of central Spain), sets out to follow the heroic life
he has read of in literature and with which he is obsessed. With the promise of future riches, he
enlists a simple laborer, Sancho Panza, to be his squire. The two volumes of the episodic novel
by Miguel de Cervantes were published in 1605 and 1615 respectively, and it is generally agreed
that Don Quixote is the most important work of Spanish literature. It is among the texts that serve
as a foundation for modern Western literature.

About fifty years old when the story begins, Alonso is a reasonable man afflicted only by lack of
sleep caused by the amount of time he spends reading. Because of this, he is easily angered. He
believes everything he reads in fiction that is concerned with chivalry to be real. Stepping into
the role of a protagonist such as would be found in his beloved fiction, he decides he will
become a knight-errant and go seeking adventure. He takes the name Don Quixote, names his
old, run down horse Rocinante, obtains a suit of armor, and although she is unaware, he selects a
nearby farm girl, Aldonza Lorenzo, to be his Lady, naming her Dulcinea del Toboso. He sets out
and arrives at a “castle,” which in reality is an inn. The “ladies” he finds there are actually
prostitutes and the “lord” the innkeeper. He requests that the lord dub him a knight. He spends
the night and becomes embroiled in a fight with some mule drivers. In the morning, the
innkeeper, in an effort of be rid of Don Quixote, feigns a knighting ceremony, and Quixote
continues on his way.
His next adventure finds him defending a young boy who was being beaten by his master. Later,
Quixote is beaten by traders whom he attacked thinking they had insulted the honor of Dulcinea.
A local peasant returns him to his home. While he is recovering, but still unconscious, his niece
and his housekeeper with whom he lives along with a couple of other locals destroy his chivalric
books. This plot event allows for a subtle examination of censorship by the author Cervantes. A
priest who is one of those destroying the books is focused upon in much of the narrative as he
determines which books should be burned and which destroyed. Once the deed is done, the room
where the library had been located is sealed, and Quixote is told that it was done by a wizard.
Shortly thereafter, he brings Sancho Panza into his adventure, and the duo sets off at dawn.
The most famous portion of the novel occurs at the beginning of the journeys of Quixote and
Panza with the self-proclaimed knight errant fighting what he perceives as dangerous giants and
which in reality are windmills. As the quest continues, the pair comes upon a group of friars with
a lady in a carriage. Quixote believes the friars are holding the lady against her will and a scuffle
ensues. There is an aside story followed by the woman asking her travelling companions to give
themselves up to Don Quixote. Presently, the “knight” and his “squire” meet some goat herders.
The herders invite them to the funeral of Grisostomo, a student who turned into shepherd after
reading pastoral novels, echoing Quixote’s reading of novels of chivalry. Ultimately, events
result in another beating for the heroes. Their next stop is an inn, again presumed to be a castle,
where Quixote believes a servant girl named Helen is a princess. He frightens her when he asks
her to sit on his bed, and a muleteer comes to her defense, leading to yet another fight and more
injuries for both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
In the opening of the second part of the novel, strangers who encounter the two main characters
know of their exploits. Some mock Quixote with practical jokes. Others devise “tests” to
challenge his chivalry and his devotion to Dulcinea. When Sancho is unable to locate Dulcinea at
Quixote’s request, he finds three peasant girls and tries to convince him that they are Dulcinea
and her ladies in waiting. Quixote is not convinced they are anything but peasants, so Sancho
tells him they look different due to a spell. After additional events, Quixote is defeated in battle
by the Knight of the White Moon and, due to earlier agreed upon terms, must give up chivalry
for a year, during which time it is possible that he will be cured of his madness. Upon his return
to his village, he is struck with a serious illness, wakes up from a dream, and finds that he is once
again sane. He reclaims Alonso Quixano as his name, and when he dies, Cervantes says that
there are no further adventures to share and should any more books about Don Quixote appear,
they would be illegitimate.

Text E

Based on a biblical model of taking forty days to develop new patterns for ministry, Rick
Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life is divided into forty chapters, one for each day of a spiritual
pilgrimage toward better understanding God’s purpose in the reader’s life. The first seven days
are devoted to examining the purpose and meaning of life. To signal how this volume contrasts
with many works that are focused on making people feel good and be successful, Warren begins
with a clear statement that the purpose of life is much larger than personal fulfillment, peace of
mind, or happiness. The meaning and purpose of life come not from focusing on the self but
from knowing and working with the author of life, namely God. This seven-day segment of the
book emphasizes the providence of God in creating people to enjoy God’s fellowship forever
through faith in Jesus Christ. Life on earth is intended by God as a preparation for eternity, and
this process is part of God’s purpose for each human being.

The second seven-day segment of the book treats the first purpose of life that Warren has
identified: People are planned for God’s pleasure. People please God first of all through
worship—through singing, praising, praying, giving, and honoring God with trust and adoration.
Such worship involves surrendering to God as one learns to walk in friendship with God. God
also takes pleasure in helping people discover their gifts or abilities and use them for God’s
glory.

The third segment treats the second purpose: People are formed for God’s family, or the church.
Warren argues that because God is love, God values relationships. Even the nature of the Trinity
reveals this relational quality in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Those who accept the Son,
Jesus Christ, become adopted members of the family of God. Learning to be a loving member of
this community on earth is central to life and a vital preparation for eternity with God in the
community of heaven.
 Text F

The Philippines is the only country in Southeast Asia that requires 10 years of combined
elementary and secondary education prior to entering a college or a university. This relatively
short period of time spent in school has been said to contribute to graduates’ unpreparedness for
work and to poor recognition of college degrees that consequently curtail their contributions to
overall national development. The Department of Education (DepEd), through the National
Education For All Committee (NEC), adopted Critical Task No. 5 of the Philippine EFA Plan of
Action 2015, which mandated the expansion of basic education so that by 2015, the Philippines
will have lengthened its cycle of basic education to 12 years. As an input to its curriculum reform
efforts, the DepEd engaged SEAMEO INNOTECH to conduct a comparative analysis of the
Philippine education system with that of selected Southeast Asian countries that follow a 12-year
basic education cycle and are recognized for meeting international standards. Moreover, the four
benchmarked countries (Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong) have also
undergone reviews and modifications of their curriculum to align them with the requirements of
the twenty-first century. This report aims to map the way toward implementing K to 12
educational reforms based on the chosen benchmarks aligned with the country’s national
development priorities. It recommends curriculum and policy options based on the experiences
of Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, and Singapore. It specifically addresses the following
questions: A. How do the Philippine preschool, elementary, and secondary education system
compare with those of the benchmark countries in terms of?

1. Input conditions

1.1 Aims of education

1.2 School Calendar

1.3 Access, diversification, and progression

1.4 Teacher-pupil ratio

1.5 Medium of Instruction

2. Curriculum

2.1 Curriculum structure (duration and time allocation)

2.2 Curriculum organization (curriculum content, scope, and sequence as well as type)

2.3 Curriculum framework and design

2.4 Assessment and Testing

B. What are the curriculum and policy options to align Philippine basic education with regional
standards?

Scope and Methods of Study

The study gathered comparative information from the education ministries of Brunei
Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines using a range of methodologies including:
• Review of related literature, which involved the collection of secondary data from reports,
education statistics databases, curriculum reform studies, and UNESCO education reports
examining Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines • Curriculum survey
guided by the stated objectives of this research; survey questions were disseminated to education
ministry officials who also submitted and presented country papers during a regional curriculum
meeting • Regional BEC experts meeting, which convened representatives of the education
ministries of Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, and the Philippines; Singapore’s education ministry,
meanwhile, sent general information about its education system and participated in the field
study • Field study and validation meeting, which involved a presentation of preliminary studies
by education ministry representatives and consultative dialogs on important data outputs;
comments and additional data generated from the visits were also included in this report Apart
from the Philippines, Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, and Singapore, the study also used Hong
Kong as a benchmark for the upper secondary education curriculum and assessment scheme.
Reviewing the education systems of these countries played an important part in forming the
research team’s K to 12 reform recommendations.
 Text G

This project involved the design and construction of a Rube Goldberg device - an excessively
complex system of chain reactions engineered to complete a relatively simple task. The primary
aim of the task was to design and construct such a device which functioned to successfully
trigger a party popper after exactly sixty seconds of operation, including a range of energy
transfers between components of the device.

Initially, individual components of the device were designed separately. Team members
brainstormed and integrated ideas for components. Sketches were created and discussions were
held regarding the proposed function of the components and the overall device.

Following development of these designs, some components were constructed and tested both
individually and in combination with other components. Early prototypes of these components
included the use of pendulums, pulleys and marbles on ramps.

After testing of prototypes, the device was modified to improve efficiency and overall
functionality. Some components were removed and replaced by more efficient processes, such as
the swapping of the 'Marble Roll Device' for a 'Magnetic Device'. In order to meet the time
criterion and to include a sufficient number of energy transfers, additional components were
added during early testing of the prototype device, such as the inclusion of dominos and a spiral
ramp.

In construction of the final device, some changes were made to improve stability, reliability and
effectiveness. Supportive timber structures were added to the final device to provide a rigid,
stable frame for components, while a stable wooden board was used as a base. Similarly, some
materials used in the prototype were replaced with stronger, longer lasting materials. A number
of existing components were arranged on and around this frame. The method of triggering the
popper was also altered in the final device, with a weighted trapdoor attached to the string of the
popper.

The average operating time in testing of the final device was 54.37 seconds. Tests conducted on
the final device also yielded consistent results in terms of functionality and time taken for the
party popper to be triggered effectively.

As such, the performance of the device during formal assessment is expected to be successful,
and of a similar time, providing no damage or unknown alterations occur prior to the final
competition.
 Text H

The Latitudinal Defense Hypothesis predicts that levels of defense are highest near the equator
and decrease toward the poles. This hypothesis is based mainly on insect herbivory that occurs
during the summer. Mammilian herbivory in the winter is a more likely driver of plant defense
levels in northern latitudes. Early successional trees such as birches are favored by fire and
provide an important food source for mammals like snowshoe hares. In order to test the
Latitudinal Defense Hypothesis, we collected birch seeds from eight locations in northwestern
Canada and grew seedlings in a common garden. We assessed levels of defense by counting
resin glands because resin glands are negatively correlated with snowshoe hare preference. This
research will provide valuable information regarding the biogeography of defense and address
the role of fire in plant-mammal interactions on a continental scale.

Text I
Dew-flecked grass rippled in the breeze. The morning air chilled me through my thick clothes. I
should've worn a jacket, but I wasn't going inside to get one.
The woods surrounding the cabin were quiet. I sat on the steps, sheltered from the wind. The sky
was crisp, ice blue.
After a long time, the door opened. I held my breath, resolved not to look.
Something landed behind me with a soft thud. I turned to find my jacket within arm's reach. I
looked up, caught a glimpse of his eyes.
The door rattled closed, then gave way to silence.
 One Sentence Summary

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, lives in a house fit for a grandmother. The progenitor
and public face of one of the 10 most popular websites in the world beds down in a one-story
bungalow on a cul-de-sac near St. Petersburg, Florida. The neighborhood, with its scrubby
vegetation and plastic lawn furniture, screams "Bingo Night." Inside the house, the décor is
minimal, and the stucco and cool tile floors make the place echo. A few potted plants bravely
attempt domesticity. Out front sits a cherry red Hyundai.

I arrive at Wales' house on a gray, humid day in December. It's 11 a.m., and after wrapping up
some emails on his white Mac iBook, Wales proposes lunch. We hit the mean streets of Gulf
Coast Florida in the Hyundai, in search of "this really great Indian place that's part of a motel,"
and wind up cruising for hours-stopping at Starbucks, hitting the mall, and generally duplicating
the average day of millions of suburban teenagers. Wal-Marts and Olive Gardens slip past as
Wales, often taciturn and abrupt in public statements, lets loose a flood of words about his past,
his politics, the future of the Internet, and why he's optimistic about pretty much everything.
Despite his modest digs, Wales is an Internet rock star. He was included on Time's list of the 100
most influential people of 2006. Pages from Wikipedia dominate Google search results, making
the operation, which dubs itself "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," a primary source of
information for millions of people. (Do a Google search for "monkeys," "Azerbaijan," "mass
spectrometry," or "Jesus," and the first hit will be from Wikipedia.) Although he insists he isn't a
"rich guy" and doesn't have "rich guy hobbies," when pressed Wales admits to hobnobbing with
other geek elites, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and hanging out on Virgin CEO Richard
Branson's private island. (The only available estimate of Wales' net worth comes from a now-
removed section of his own Wikipedia entry, pinning his fortune at less than $1 million.) Scruffy
in a gray mock turtleneck and a closely cropped beard, the 40-year-old Wales plays it low key.
But he is well aware that he is a strangely powerful man: He has utterly changed the way people
extract information from the chaos of the World Wide Web, and he is the master of a huge,
robust online community of writers, editors, and users. Asked about the secret to Wikipedia's
success, Wales says simply, "We make the Internet not suck."

On other occasions, Wales has offered a more erudite account of the site's origins and purpose.
In 1945, in his famous essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society," the libertarian economist F.A.
Hayek argued that market mechanisms serve "to share and synchronize local and personal
knowledge, allowing society's members to achieve diverse, complicated ends through a principle
of spontaneous self-organization." (These are the words not of the Nobel Prize winner himself
but of Wikipedia's entry on him.) "Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own thinking
about how to manage the Wikipedia project," Wales wrote on the blog of the Internet law guru
Lawrence Lessig. "One can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding
Hayek." Long before socialism crumbled, Hayek saw the perils of centralization. When
information is dispersed (as it always is), decisions are best left to those with the most local
knowledge. This insight, which undergirds contemporary libertarianism, earned Hayek plaudits
from fellow libertarian economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman as the "most
important social thinker of the 20th century." The question: Will traditional reference works
like Encyclopedia Britannica, that great centralizer of knowledge, fall before Wikipedia the way
the Soviet Union fell before the West?
When Wales founded the site in 2001, his plan was simple yet seemingly insane: "Imagine a
world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human
knowledge. That's what we're doing." In case that plan didn't sound nutty enough on its own, he
went on to let every Tom, Dick, and Friedrich write and edit articles for that mystical
encyclopedia. "Now it's obvious that it works," says Wales, "but then most people couldn't get
it." And not everyone gets it yet. Wales has his share of enemies, detractors, and doubters. But he
also has a growing fan club. Wikipedia, which is run by Wales' nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation,
is now almost fully supported by small donations (in addition to a few grants and gifts of servers
and hosting), and many of its savviest users consider it the search of first resort, bypassing
Google entirely.

Wikipedia was born as an experiment in aggregating information. But the reason it works isn't
that the world was clamoring for a new kind of encyclopedia. It took off because of the robust,
self-policing community it created. Despite its critics, it is transforming our everyday lives; as
with Amazon, Google, and eBay, it is almost impossible to remember how much more
circumscribed our world was before it existed.

Hayek's arguments inspired Wales to take on traditional encyclopedias, and now they're inspiring
Wales' next big project: Wikia, a for-profit venture that hopes to expand the idea beyond
encyclopedias into all kinds of Internet-based communities and collaborative projects. If Wikia
succeeds, it will open up this spontaneously ordered, self-governing world to millions more
people. Encyclopedias aren't the only places to gather knowledge, and by making tools available
to create other kinds of collaborative communities, Wales is fleshing out and bringing to life
Hayek's insights about the power of decentralized knowledge gathering, the surprising strength
of communities bound only by reputation, and the fluidity of self-governance.

Jimbo
Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1966, the son of a grocery store manager. He was
educated at a tiny private school run by his mother, Doris, and grandmother, Erma. His
education, which he has described as "a one-room schoolhouse or Abe Lincoln type of thing,"
was fairly unstructured: He "spent many, many hours just pouring over the World Book
Encyclopedia." Wales received his B.A. in finance from Auburn University, a hotbed of free
market economists, and got his master's degree in finance from the University of Alabama. He
did coursework and taught at Indiana University, but he failed to complete a Ph.D. dissertation-
largely, he says, because he "got bored."
Wales moved to Chicago and became a futures and options trader. After six years of betting on
interest rates and currency fluctuations, he made enough money to pay the mortgage for the rest
of his life. In 1998 he moved to San Diego and started a Web portal, Bomis, which featured,
among other things, a "guy-oriented search engine" and pictures of scantily clad women. The en
déshabillé ladies have since caused trouble for Wales, who regularly fields questions about his
former life as a "porn king." In a typically blunt move, Wales often responds to criticism of his
Bomis days by sending reporters links to Yahoo's midget porn category page. If he was a porn
king, he suggests, so is the head of the biggest Web portal in the world.
Bomis didn't make it big-it was no Yahoo-but in March 2000 the site hosted Nupedia, Wales'
first attempt to build a free online encyclopedia. Wales hired Larry Sanger, at the time a doctoral
candidate in philosophy at Ohio State, to edit encyclopedia articles submitted voluntarily by
scholars, and to manage a multistage peer review process. After a slow start, Wales and Sanger
decided to try something more radical. In 2001 they bracketed the Nupedia project and started a
new venture built on the same foundations. The twist: It would be an open-source encyclopedia.
Any user could exercise editorial control, and no one person or group would have ultimate
authority.

Sanger resigned from the project in 2002 and since then has been in an ongoing low-grade war
with Wales over who founded Wikipedia. Everyone agrees that Sanger came up with the name
while Wales wrote the checks and provided the underlying open-source philosophy. But who
thought of powering the site with a wiki?

Wikis are simple software that allow anyone to create or edit a webpage. The first wikis were
developed by Ward Cunningham, a programmer who created the WikiWikiWeb, a collaborative
software guide, in 1995. ("Wiki wiki" means "quick" in Hawaiian.) Gradually adopted by a
variety of companies to facilitate internal collaboration (IBM and Google, for instance, use wikis
for project management and document version control), wikis were spreading under the radar
until Wikipedia started using the software.

Wales characterizes the dispute with Sanger as a fight over the "project's radically open nature"
and the question of "whether there was a role for an editor in chief" in the new project. Sanger
says he wanted to implement the "common-sense" rules that "experts and specialists should be
given some particular respect when writing in their areas of expertise." (Sanger has since
launched a competitor to Wikipedia called Citizendium, with stricter rules about editors'
credentials.) They also differed over whether advertising should be permitted on the site. Not
only does Wikipedia allow anyone to write or edit any article, but the site contains no ads. Yet it
allows others to use its content to make money: The site Answers.com, for example, is composed
almost entirely of Wikipedia content reposted with ads.

When Nupedia finally shut down for good in 2003, only 24 articles had completed its onerous
scholarly review process. In contrast, Wikipedia was flourishing, with 20,000 articles by the end
of its first year. It now has 6 million articles, 1.7 million of which are in English. It has become a
verb ("What exactly is a quark?" "I don't know. Did you Wikipedia it?"), a sure sign of Internet
success.
The Troublemaker
An obvious question troubled, and continues to trouble, many: How could an "encyclopedia that
anyone can edit" possibly be reliable? Can truth be reached by a consensus of amateurs? Can a
community of volunteers aggregate and assimilate knowledge the way a market assimilates price
information? Can it do so with consistent accuracy? If markets fail sometimes, shouldn't the
same be true of market-based systems?
Wikipedia does fail sometimes. The most famous controversy over its accuracy boiled over when
John Seigenthaler Sr., a former assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wrote about his
own Wikipedia entry in a November 2005 USA Today op-ed. The entry on Seigenthaler included
a claim that he had been involved in both Kennedy assassinations. "We live in a universe of new
media," wrote Seigenthaler, "with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and
research-but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects."
The false claim had been added to the entry as a prank in May 2005. When Seigenthaler
contacted Wikipedia about the error in October, Wales personally took the unusual step of
removing the false allegations from the editing history on the page, wiping out the publicly
accessible records of the error. After the USA Today story ran, dozens of the site's contributors
(who call themselves "Wikipedians") visited the page, vastly improving the short blurb that had
been put in place after the prank entry was removed. As in a market, when a failure was detected,
people rushed in to take advantage of the gap and, in doing so, made things better than they were
before. Print outlets couldn't hope to compete with Wikipedians' speed in correcting, expanding,
and footnoting the new Seigenthaler entry. At best, a traditional encyclopedia would have pasted
a correction into a little-consulted annual, mailed out to some users many months after the fact.
And even then, it would have been little more than a correction blurb, not a dramatic rethinking
and rewriting of the whole entry.
But well-intentioned Wikipedians weren't the only ones attracted to Seigenthaler's Wikipedia
entry. Since the article appeared, Seigenthaler says, he has been a constant target for vandals-
people whose only goal is to deface an entry. He has been struck by the "vulgarity and
meanspiritedness of the attacks," which included replacing his picture with photos of Hitler,
Himmler, and "an unattractive cross dresser in a big red wig and a short skirt," Seigenthaler
tells me. "I don't care what the hell they put up. When you're 80 years old, there's not much they
can say that hasn't been said before. But my, they've been creative over the last months."