The true story of how nobodies made everybody an expert
Published: May 03, 2009, 12:30 am
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There’s no denying that Wikipedia is an Internet sensation. Wikipedia is the seventh most globally visited site, according to Alexa.com, which measures Internet traffic.
Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that allows users to collaborate and create encyclopedia-style entries for everything under the sun. Any topic imaginable is there, and any person with a computer and online connection can view it, and, yes, even edit it.
“The Wikipedia Revolution” chronicles the rise of the site, from the earliest iterations into what we know today.
Wikipedia in its conceptual beginnings was the hobby of a computer programmer who used a freeware application by Apple called Hypercard to build a solitary collection of linkable information. It was powerful enough to inspire a small group of people who envisioned what would become Wikipedia.
One of the conceptual progeny was a site called Nupedia, a for-profit project which tapped contributors with advanced degrees to write and edit entries. The entries were authoritative; however, the creation of pages was achingly slow due to the bottleneck of writing, editing and approving entries before allowing them to go live. The slow pace doomed Nupedia as a viable online encyclopedia.
Nupedia begat Wikipedia, and its founders were determined not to repeat Nupedia’s mistakes. But even with the best of intentions, Wikipedia stumbled.
Author Andrew Lih discusses some of the ways that Wikipedia has struggled, particularly with the perception that it is not a reliable source. While discussing the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary through solicitation for entries — which included contributions from an imprisoned murderer — Lih defends Wikipedia’s many contributors and their credentials, or lack thereof.
Wikipedia’s founders envisioned an encyclopedia unlike any other, in that no original research was to be done, and therefore credentials weren’t necessarily important. Entries were compiled from existing, verifiable sources — with attribution
and links — and were to be written with neutrality. Each entry would be dynamic, allowing anyone to tweak as they saw fit. Every edit would be logged and easily reversed if deemed erroneous or biased.
This is where “Revolution” starts to become interesting, in discussing some of the famous editing wars between members, one of the most heated being over the city of Gdansk, or Danzig, which changed hands/names during wars, but has history and relevance under each name. Polish and German editors waged battle for months before a compromise.
The biggest area of interest to me, however, was its brushes with cyber-vandalism and attempts to control it.
As a professional librarian, I have mixed feelings about the rise and pervasive use of the site as an “authoritative” source for general research or homework.
Print encyclopedias are expensive and dated, even before a student opens one. That is one of their downsides, obviously, but they do have a pedigree you can trust. What makes Wikipedia appealing to the masses is that it is free and considered “up-to-date.”
But Wikipedia is a site, as Lih points out, that has more information about Britney Spears than it does Socrates. It is a site where cybervandalism is common, as pranksters slip misinformation into entries simply because they can.
One well-publicized act of cybervandalism involved journalist John Seigenthaler Sr., who penned a column for USA Today in which he shredded Wikipedia for a slanderous line in his biography that linked him to the Kennedy assassinations. It was a joke by a prankster who thought the line would be caught and removed, yet it stayed in Seigenthaler’s profile for months, casting serious doubts on Wikipedia’s credibility.
(Recently The News reported that the biographical entry for Bills owner Ralph Wilson had been edited to declare him dead.)
Lih also discusses the revelation made by The New Yorker after a cover story about Wikipedia and its community of contributors later revealed that one of the sources had fabricated his credentials. The poster child of Wikipedia interviewed for the story had claimed to be a professor holding four advanced degrees, but later admitted to being a fraud, with no advanced degrees.
While Wikipedia has adopted new protective measures to decrease the likelihood of such things happening again, the nature of the site makes it an unreliable source for scholarly research.
Every search performed by a user is a snap-shot of a particular entry, that will morph with good and bad information coming and going.
One Wikipedia critic quoted by Lih compares the site to a public rest-room — it may appear clean, you really have no idea who was there before you — questioning whether an entry contains credible, verifiable information, suitable for use in research. Perhaps it was changed for the worse and is hours away from being corrected; and unless one returns, how will they know?
Lih is not an apologist or cheerleader for Wikipedia. He does take a critical view of the site at the end of his book, questioning many of the policies and principles behind the site; and where it goes from here.
However, “Revolution” is pretty dry reading, even for a tech-savvy person who will recognize the Internet jargon of the past 20 years, as Lih charts the Wikipedia timeline.
Because many of the principal personalities involved in the site are anonymous users, Lih struggles to personalize Wikipedia at times. Lih interviews a handful of people, but frequently resorts to quoting archived Internet posts, which tend not to be very good at capturing the drama or personalities behind important events.
“Revolution” is itself a snap-shot of Wikipedia, outdated by their standards. There have been nearly 600,000 new entries added since a March 2008 estimate of 2.2 million articles. But even still, Wikipedia remains a phenomenon that any Internet junkie ought to explore, and dryness aside, “Revolution” does a fine job detailing the origins and personalities that brought Wikipedia to life.
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