The Book Stops Here

Wikipedia is a decentralized form of an encyclopedia that takes advantage of all the quick-and-easy information exchange features of the internet. Literally anyone who has internet connection can contribute to the knowledge pool on whichever topic and however they like. The idea was first sought to be purely experimental but Wikipedia's revolutionary success proves that this model does actually work for practical purposes.

Wikipedia demonstrated a revolutionary way of how information is exchanged. it's not only an online encyclopedia that has a fairly quick and easy keyword searching feature, it also avoided the credit attribution problem all together by simply allowing the information provider to eitehr reveal his/her user account name or post anonymously. Wikipedia inspired many other applications based on the same principle.