The wiki principle

WHEN people express scepticism about participatory media, they usually have people like Brian Chase in mind. Mr Chase is a 38-year-old from Nashville, Tennessee, who until recently worked in the middle-management layers of a courier firm called Rush Delivery and seemed destined to remain entirely unremarkable. For reasons known only to himself, however, Mr Chase last May decided to play a joke, “a joke that went horribly, horribly wrong”, as he would later tell his local newspaper, the Tennessean.