The day a wiki harnassed the goodwill of unknown colleagues...

In 2005 with help from my school I created Beyond Borders to facilitate collaborative online projects between students around the globe.

I'm very proud that we now have almost 2,500 users, over 50 projects, with schools in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Korean, Saudi Arabia, Canada and America.

Many of the projects run in a nominated language, which is not necessarily English.

To help teachers use Beyond Borders, I created a DVD with tutorial videos.

I wanted to subtitle it in as many languages as possible. Now, although Beyond Borders has won funding, it hasn't won enough to professionally subtitle it.

So I set up a wiki! (What is a wiki? Click here, it is a simple document that anyone can edit.) You can set up a wiki in a minute or two, for free. I used the wikispaces website.

You can see the wiki I set up here: http://beyondbordersdvd.wikispaces.com/

The wiki is not locked. Anyone at all can just show up at the page and contribute anonymously. The wiki has an English transcript of the DVD. Anyone at all can just show up and replace the English with the translation.

I sent out word as far and wide as I could to colleagues. Please, if you could just translate a sentence or two into one of a number of languages?


That was about 8 weeks ago.

Over that time, a pool of unseen labour has sprung up and gotten a lot of the work done as if by magic. The Indonesian and Korean translations are done, and much progress has been much in French, Italian and Chinese versions.

Another advertisement for some more help, and a few more weeks, and the job will be done!

Wikis are revolutionary, powerful, democratic. Wikis harnass goodwill. Thanks to everyone who helped !