I'd seen something like this once before for some other news event (Saddam's hanging?) and, as I suspected, someone has one again created a time lapse of how the Wikipedia article for the VT shootings developed over its first 12 hours.
Kinda interesting watching the article grow/change/mutate in a very organic fashion.
Actually, that makes me wonder – does anybody know a good book about the idea of information as a living entity?
Richard Dawkin's “The Selfish Gene” is where the idea of the meme, a unit of cultural meaning that gets transferred from person to person like physical things such as genes or viruses, originated but that book is 30 years old. Surely somebody must have taken this idea further or simply updated it for the Internet age?
[Edit: Somebody has done a video which is like an academic lecture on a Wikipedia article's development over time including an analysis of vandalism, language, tone and more. The subject they look at? The Heavy Metal Umlaut. Very interesting and well worth checking out! (via Running with Scissors)]
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