Linus's law, named after Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, states that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". More formally: "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone." The name was coined by Eric S. Raymond.
The Wikipedia itself can be viewed as an attempted implementation of this principle in the realm of encyclopedia writing.
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wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump