Putting information into the hands of the people was among the original, lofty aims of the Internet easy to forget amid the forests of e-boutiques and subscription-only sites. But an online encyclopedia where all entries are written, maintained and vetted by Web surfers themselves is trying to recapture those early democratic ideals. Called
Wikipedia.org
(wiki means "superfast" in Hawaiian and is also the name of the collaborative software upon which the site is built), the encyclopedia features more than 700,000 hypertexted articles on
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