Using Wikis for online collaboration

I've made an inspiring discovery. I've seen references often to Web 2.0, but I never knew what it was referring to. So I finally did a Google search and came up with the Wikipedia (of course) article right at the top (how ironic). It turns out Wikipedia is the poster child for Web 2.0. Web 1.0 (read-only web) was just geeks in the background creating all these web pages and content and the rest of us were passive viewers, not much better than watching TV. Now with Web 2.0 (read-write web), we are all participants in the content (thanks to those same geeks who wrote the software). And wikis are really the tool that makes it happen. Blogging is part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, but blogging is essentially just writing. Nothing new. A wiki is a "collaborative web space where anyone can add content and anyone can edit content that has already been published" (Richardson, 2006). And the most well-known wiki is the aforementioned Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, created by a collaboration of tens of thousands of individuals. It is a revolutionary concept, and it has become so popular, that it has spawned a whole wikipedia of offshoots, to where the entire Internet is moving toward becoming a shared universe, a One World Order.
This story really slapped my face about the power of Wikipedia: During the uprising in Iran following the contested elections, one of the best places to get the latest information was at, you guessed it, Wikipedia. In the first week of protests, the article on the "2009 Iranian Election Protests" was updated almost 2,000 times (as of today 2,314 edits) by hundreds of contributors who left over 145 citations at the bottom of the page (as of today there are 230 citations). Wikipedia became a clearinghouse of information based on the work of concerned citizens. It has created millions of amateur editors who are, in blogging parlance, ready to "fact-check your a**". Today Wikipedia has 3,587,529 articles, in English. It is published in 279 languages.
"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." - Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder
The implications of this are tremendous.