Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia created and diligently monitored by scores of regular users mass collaborating over the internet, has been a source of immense controversy since it first appeared online seven years ago.
While most of us (I think) regard the online encyclopedia as a very useful resource for initial research into an unfamiliar topic (not to mention one of the world’s greatest time killers), and see its method of creation (mass collaboration) as both novel and strikingly accurate, there has been no shortage of bluster from both sides of the aisle to just how best to describe/exalt/deride the online phenomenon.
The staunchest self-described ‘Wikipedians’ see their community as the first real democracy, a new egalitarian mode of production and a nation online.
Critics argue that Wikipedia is, quite literally, the death of knowledge. Wikipedia embodies a generation (mine) of lazy cheaters – using half-baked, ‘user-generated’ (re: inaccurate) articles written by computer-nerds and other weirdos that skew the truth and focus only on the trivial. Wikipedia is lowering our standards for accuracy and simultaneously lowering our collective IQ.
Describing Wikipedia as either a Virtual Utopia or The Death of Knowledge is reductionism at its finest. While I am generally skeptical of these far-flung metaphors that try to pin down the online encyclopedia, I was intrigued by one recent attempt by Noam Cohen in the New York Times. He says Wikipedia most closely resembles a vast, diverse, online fact city- and quite a creative one at that.
Cohen adapts a Socratic tone in asking a number of thought provoking questions. He says:
“Wikipedia encourages contributors to mimic the basic civility, trust, cultural acceptance and self-organizing qualities familiar to any city dweller. Why don’t people attack each other on the way home? Why do they stay in line at the bank? Why don’t people guffaw at the person with blue hair?”
He could just as easily ask: why don’t people sabotage Wikipedia pages? Why don’t people post misinformation?
The reality, of course, is that they do. Just as sometimes in our real cities, people are attacked, lines are budded, and people with blue hair get ridiculed- occasionally. But the stronger the city and the sense of community, the stronger the social forces that combat devious behavior. The same is true for Wikipedia.
To support his claim, Cohen consults the writings of Urban Oracle Jane Jacobs. He quotes the prolific Wikipedian Andrew Lih (who paraphrases Jacobs) saying she “argued that sidewalks provided three important things: safety, contact, and the assimilation of children.” He continues, “She may as well have been talking about wikis. A wiki has all its activities happening in the open for inspection, as on Jacobs’s sidewalk. Trust is built by observing the actions of others in the community and discovering people with like or complementary interests.”
So is Wikipedia perfect? Or another question: will we (because it really is we) ever ‘finish’ Wikipedia? The same question could be posed for Chicago, Paris, or Toronto. Of course it isn’t perfect and it will probably never be finished – just as a city is constantly changing, evolving, and reinventing itself.
For the sake of all people who can access this vast, unprecedented body of knowledge, I hope Wikipedia grows – especially in the 100+ versions that exist now in other languages. Never before have we been given such a low barrier – the internet – to access this vast canon of human knowledge.
So forget the controversy, the metaphors, and the bluster and take a stroll down one of the long, wide information boulevards of the online city – you never know what side street you may end up on, or what secrets you might find.
On a lighter note: College Humor’s take on the Wiki-phenomenon.
April 12th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
If you Wikipedia (adjective) the word Wikipedia (noun) you are told that “it is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet”. Of course, like all things “Wiki”, we cannot be certain if this is fact. After all, Wikipedia is more democratic than absolutist; it favours “consensus over credentials in its editorial process”. The lack of fact does not diminish from the greatness of Wikipedia. If you want fact (or a closer representation of fact), check out Britannica or Encarta. Wikipedia is something different and yet even more valuable. Wikipedia has billions of editors comprising of a Virtual City. As each day passes, Wikipedia approaches absolute fact (although it will never actually arrive there) and the fact-building is happening at an exponentially rapid rate.
As Tappscott points out, Wikipedia has striking similarities to a city. As long as those who govern it are responsible, the things it can achieve are boundless.
In the meantime, like all things in life, you have to challenge the “truth” behind queries. But what is “truth”? According to Wikipedia, “The term has no single definition about which a majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree, and various theories of truth continue to be debated.”
April 13th, 2009 at 11:57 am
“If you want fact (or a closer representation of fact), check out Britannica…”
That Britannica – or any of its type – are “right” is doubtless less true than we imagine. Our reverence for academia and our conviction that everything can be reduced to a “correct” logical presentation have probably fooled us into overstating the accuracy of such tools and placing Wikipedia further from them than it really need be. Britannica information should be regarded as less than gospel, too.
Thanks for allowing some wiggle room in your comment.
April 15th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
The book “The Professor and the Madman” tells the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, in its time the greatest reference in the English language. It was generated by hundreds of contributors sending definitions through the mail to be sorted into cubbyholes.
When Henry Louis Gates set out to create the Encyclopedia of Africa and African-Americans he did much the same with newer technology.
The accumulation of knowledge from multiple sources isn’t new, the community editing is, and it works. A 2005 study reported in Nature compared Wikipedia and Britannica for accuracy and found them roughly equivalent. The difference is Wikipedia gets better daily, encyclopedias annually or less.
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:29 pm
I really like Wikipedia. I agree that it is a useful source for initial research; it helps answer questions and provides a reasonable approximation to satisfy one’s curiosity. I also love that it is always being edited and open for improvement, as I think everything should be. I find Wikipedia socially intriguing, and frankly, I’m quite amazed of its existence. Economics usually operates under several assumptions, one of them being that economic agents are selfish, which is arguably quite reasonable. So why is it that people spend so much time doing something for free and for the benefit of everyone else? Is it that online media is allowing us to return to the so called gift economy? People want to participate and the internet has made this possible. It has allowed the little people to contribute and compete face to face against the big ones, just as with Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. There have been made a few studies comparing these two, and it turns out that they both contain about the same number of “serious” mistakes! I guess we can’t expect any encyclopaedia to be perfect, but the fact that Wikipedia is of comparable quality considering how it’s made, is simply astonishing.
July 27th, 2009 at 3:48 am
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October 21st, 2010 at 11:57 pm
In my daughter’s elementary school, they can’t even use Wikipedia as a reference for their reports. There’s too much variance going on there for the comfort of the teachers. I believe in crowd-sourcing for reaching consensus to a degree, but the editors at Wikipedia can easily override a smart edit. Overall, it is not much more than a general reference resource that needs severe fact-checking IMO.