The computer-to-phone service does have a fee but it still costs less than rates on a normal telephone, although my friend says that quality isn't as good as other Skype method yet. What does this mean for future communication in our world? It means eventually telephone companies will probably have to become Internet communication providers, and by that stage they will probably raise prices, as they will be losing so much of revenue that they make now from overcharging on telephone services. It's kind of like situation we have with fossil fuels versus environmentally friendly energy production. Even though technology exists, oil companies aren't going to bring it out until they've made every cent they can from old technology.

However, as Internet is a new medium where general public has much more power and freedom from corporation and government constraints, this new technology has a much better chance of being implemented into our society straight away. 115 million downloads of Skype alone means that if phone companies try and block this sort of communication completely, people probably won't stand for it. This is also an important fact as it means that Internet nerds have a much better chance of bringing their ideas to reality, compared with nerds in other areas of human progress that are controlled more by big money-makers. As for now, if I were you I'd get onto Skype or another Internet voice communication provider and save your hard earned cash for as long as you can.

There is also a current events section that reads a lot like a newspaper but is actually written by people from general community in a kind of blog format. This is a step forward in hearing whole story about an event. You can look at previous dates like an archive that sure beats having to keep your old newspapers.

There are also some ‘sister’ projects being constructed by Wikipedia group such as Wiktionary (dictionary and thesaurus), Wikibooks (free textbooks and manuals), Wikiquote (collection of quotations), Wikisource (free source documents), Wikispecies (directory of species), Wikinews (free content news source), Commons (shared media), and Meta-Wiki (Wikimedia).

In site’s Community Portal section they actively ask visitors to help research specific topics as well work in collaborations. They need people to copy-edit articles as well as expanding, cleaning up and updating pages. I think it is a definite opportunity for people who would like to be writers, researchers, editors and like to get some real practice in their preferred trade.

“Imagine a world in which every person has free access to sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.” This is Wikipedia’s message and it’s quite an altruistic one. As they are a non-profit organisation they rely on participants’ donations to buy servers and bandwidth, discspace etc that they need to keep up with growing amount of users. So, if you think it’s a great idea, get on boat, tell us what you know, and share your wealth with all.