Editors’ Note appended.
On March 1st, Wikipedia, the online interactive
encyclopedia, hit the million-articles mark, with an entry on
Jordanhill, a railway station in suburban Glasgow. Its author, Ewan
MacDonald, posted a single sentence about the station at 11 P.M.,
local time; over the next twenty-four hours, the entry was edited more
than four hundred times, by dozens of people. (Jordanhill happens to be
the “1029th busiest station in the United Kingdom”; it “no longer has a
staffed ticket counter.”) The Encyclopædia Britannica, which for more
than two centuries has been considered the gold standard for reference
works, has only a hundred and twenty thousand entries in its most
comprehensive edition. Apparently, no traditional encyclopedia has ever
suspected that someone might wonder about Sudoku or about prostitution
in China. Or, for that matter, about Capgras delusion (the unnerving
sensation that an impostor is sitting in for a close relative), the
Boston molasses disaster, the Rhinoceros Party of Canada, Bill Gates’s
house, the forty-five-minute Anglo-Zanzibar War, or Islam in Iceland.
Wikipedia includes fine entries on Kafka and the War of the Spanish
Succession, and also a complete guide to the ships of the U.S. Navy, a
definition of Philadelphia cheesesteak, a masterly page on Scrabble, a
list of historical cats (celebrity cats, a cat millionaire, the first
feline to circumnavigate Australia), a survey of invented expletives in
fiction (“bippie,” “cakesniffer,” “furgle”), instructions for curing
hiccups, and an article that describes, with schematic diagrams, how to
build a stove from a discarded soda can. The how-to entries represent
territory that the encyclopedia has not claimed since the eighteenth
century. You could cure a toothache or make snowshoes using the original
Britannica, of 1768-71. (You could also imbibe a lot of prejudice and
superstition. The entry on Woman was just six words: “The female of man.
See HOMO.”) If you look up “coffee
preparation” on Wikipedia, you will find your way, via the entry on
Espresso, to a piece on types of espresso machines, which you will want
to consult before buying. There is also a page on the site dedicated to
“Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in
Wikipedia” (Stalin’s birth date, the true inventor of the safety razor).
Because there are no physical limits on its size, Wikipedia can
aspire to be all-inclusive. It is also perfectly configured to be
current: there are detailed entries for each of the twelve finalists on
this season’s “American Idol,” and the article on the “2006
Israel-Lebanon Conflict” has been edited more than four thousand times
since it was created, on July 12th, six hours after Hezbollah militants
ignited the hostilities by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers. Wikipedia,
which was launched in 2001, is now the seventeenth-most-popular site on
the Internet, generating more traffic daily than MSNBC.com and the
online versions of the
Times and the
Wall Street Journal
combined. The number of visitors has been doubling every four months;
the site receives as many as fourteen thousand hits per second.
Wikipedia functions as a filter for vast amounts of information online,
and it could be said that Google owes the site for tidying up the
neighborhood. But the search engine is amply repaying its debt: because
Wikipedia pages contain so many links to other entries on the site, and
are so frequently updated, they enjoy an enviably high page rank.
The site has achieved this prominence largely without paid staff or
revenue. It has five employees in addition to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s
thirty-nine-year-old founder, and it carries no advertising. In 2003,
Wikipedia became a nonprofit organization; it meets most of its budget,
of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, with donations, the bulk of
them contributions of twenty dollars or less. Wales says that he is on a
mission to “distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person on
the planet in their own language,” and to an astonishing degree he is
succeeding. Anyone with Internet access can create a Wikipedia entry or
edit an existing one. The site currently exists in more than two hundred
languages and has hundreds of thousands of contributors around the
world. Wales is at the forefront of a revolution in knowledge gathering:
he has marshalled an army of volunteers who believe that, working
collaboratively, they can produce an encyclopedia that is as good as any
written by experts, and with an unprecedented range.
Wikipedia is an online community devoted not to last night’s party or
to next season’s iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more immune
to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness, idiocy, and
vulgarity are regular features of the site. Nothing about high-minded
collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse.
Senators and congressmen have been caught tampering with their entries;
the entire House of Representatives has been banned from Wikipedia
several times. (It is not subtle to change Senator Robert Byrd’s age
from eighty-eight to a hundred and eighty. It is subtler to sanitize
one’s voting record in order to distance oneself from an unpopular
President, or to delete broken campaign promises.) Curiously, though,
mob rule has not led to chaos. Wikipedia, which began as an experiment
in unfettered democracy, has sprouted policies and procedures. At the
same time, the site embodies our newly casual relationship to truth.
When confronted with evidence of errors or bias, Wikipedians invoke a
favorite excuse: look how often the mainstream media, and the
traditional encyclopedia, are wrong! As defenses go, this is the
epistemological equivalent of “But Johnny jumped off the bridge first.”
Wikipedia, though, is only five years old. One day, it may grow up.
The encyclopedic impulse dates back more than two
thousand years and has rarely balked at national borders. Among the
first general reference works was Emperor’s Mirror, commissioned in 220
A.D. by a Chinese emperor, for use by civil servants. The quest to
catalogue all human knowledge accelerated in the eighteenth century. In
the seventeen-seventies, the Germans, champions of thoroughness, began
assembling a two-hundred-and-forty-two-volume masterwork. A few decades
earlier, Johann Heinrich Zedler, a Leipzig bookseller, had alarmed local
competitors when he solicited articles for his Universal-Lexicon. His
rivals, fearing that the work would put them out of business by
rendering all other books obsolete, tried unsuccessfully to sabotage the
project.
It took a devious Frenchman, Pierre Bayle, to conceive of an
encyclopedia composed solely of errors. After the idea failed to
generate much enthusiasm among potential readers, he instead compiled a
“Dictionnaire Historique et Critique,” which consisted almost entirely
of footnotes, many highlighting flaws of earlier scholarship. Bayle
taught readers to doubt, a lesson in subversion that Diderot and
d’Alembert, the authors of the Encyclopédie (1751-80), learned well.
Their thirty-five-volume work preached rationalism at the expense of
church and state. The more stolid Britannica was born of cross-channel
rivalry and an Anglo-Saxon passion for utility.
Wales’s first encyclopedia was the World Book, which his parents
acquired after dinner one evening in 1969, from a door-to-door salesman.
Wales—who resembles a young Billy Crystal with the neuroses neatly
tucked in—recalls the enchantment of pasting in update stickers that
cross-referenced older entries to the annual supplements. Wales’s mother
and grandmother ran a private school in Huntsville, Alabama, which he
attended from the age of three. He graduated from Auburn University with
a degree in finance and began a Ph.D. in the subject, enrolling first
at the University of Alabama and later at Indiana University. In 1994,
he decided to take a job trading options in Chicago rather than write
his dissertation. Four years later, he moved to San Diego, where he used
his savings to found an Internet portal. Its audience was mostly men;
pornography—videos and blogs—accounted for about a tenth of its
revenues. Meanwhile, Wales was cogitating. In his view, misinformation,
propaganda, and ignorance are responsible for many of the world’s ills.
“I’m very much an Enlightenment kind of guy,” Wales told me. The promise
of the Internet is free knowledge for everyone, he recalls thinking.
How do we make that happen?
As an undergraduate, he had read Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 free-market
manifesto, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which argues that a
person’s knowledge is by definition partial, and that truth is
established only when people pool their wisdom. Wales thought of the
essay again in the nineteen-nineties, when he began reading about the
open-source movement, a group of programmers who believed that software
should be free and distributed in such a way that anyone could modify
the code. He was particularly impressed by “The Cathedral and the
Bazaar,” an essay, later expanded into a book, by Eric Raymond, one of
the movement’s founders. “It opened my eyes to the possibility of mass
collaboration,” Wales said.
The first step was a misstep. In 2000, Wales hired Larry Sanger, a
graduate student in philosophy he had met on a Listserv, to help him
create an online general-interest encyclopedia called Nupedia. The idea
was to solicit articles from scholars, subject the articles to a
seven-step review process, and post them free online. Wales himself
tried to compose the entry on Robert Merton and options-pricing theory;
after he had written a few sentences, he remembered why he had dropped
out of graduate school. “They were going to take my essay and send it to
two finance professors in the field,” he recalled. “I had been out of
academia for several years. It was intimidating; it felt like homework.”
After a year, Nupedia had only twenty-one articles, on such topics as
atonality and Herodotus. In January, 2001, Sanger had dinner with a
friend, who told him about the wiki, a simple software tool that allows
for collaborative writing and editing. Sanger thought that a wiki might
attract new contributors to Nupedia. (Wales says that using a wiki was
his idea.) Wales agreed to try it, more or less as a lark. Under the
wiki model that Sanger and Wales adopted, each entry included a history
page, which preserves a record of all editing changes. They added a talk
page, to allow for discussion of the editorial process—an idea Bayle
would have appreciated. Sanger coined the term Wikipedia, and the site
went live on January 15, 2001. Two days later, he sent an e-mail to the
Nupedia mailing list—about two thousand people. “Wikipedia is up!” he
wrote. “Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of
five or ten minutes.”
Wales braced himself for “complete rubbish.” He figured that if he
and Sanger were lucky the wiki would generate a few rough drafts for
Nupedia. Within a month, Wikipedia had six hundred articles. After a
year, there were twenty thousand.
Wales is fond of citing a 1962 proclamation by Charles Van Doren, who
later became an editor at Britannica. Van Doren believed that the
traditional encyclopedia was defunct. It had grown by accretion rather
than by design; it had sacrificed artful synthesis to plodding
convention; it looked backward. “Because the world is radically new, the
ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too,” Van Doren wrote. “It should
stop being safe—in politics, in philosophy, in science.”
In its seminal Western incarnation, the encyclopedia had been a
dangerous book. The Encyclopédie muscled aside religious institutions
and orthodoxies to install human reason at the center of the
universe—and, for that muscling, briefly earned the book’s publisher a
place in the Bastille. As the historian Robert Darnton pointed out, the
entry in the Encyclopédie on cannibalism ends with the cross-reference
“See Eucharist.” What Wales seems to have in mind, however, is less Van
Doren’s call to arms than that of an earlier rabble-rouser. In the
nineteen-thirties, H. G. Wells lamented that, while the world was
becoming smaller and moving at increasing speed, the way information was
distributed remained old-fashioned and ineffective. He prescribed a
“world brain,” a collaborative, decentralized repository of knowledge
that would be subject to continual revision. More radically—with
“alma-matricidal impiety,” as he put it—Wells indicted academia; the
university was itself medieval. “We want a Henry Ford today to modernize
the distribution of knowledge, make good knowledge cheap and easy in
this still very ignorant, ill-educated, ill-served English-speaking
world of ours,” he wrote. Had the Internet existed in his lifetime,
Wells might have beaten Wales to the punch.
Wales’s most radical contribution may be not to have made information
free but—in his own alma-matricidal way—to have invented a system that
does not favor the Ph.D. over the well-read fifteen-year-old. “To me,
the key thing is getting it right,” Wales has said of Wikipedia’s
contributors. “I don’t care if they’re a high-school kid or a Harvard
professor.” At the beginning, there were no formal rules, though Sanger
eventually posted a set of guidelines on the site. The first was “Ignore
all the rules.” Two of the others have become central tenets: articles
must reflect a neutral point of view (N.P.O.V., in Wikipedia lingo), and
their content must be both verifiable and previously published. Among
other things, the prohibition against original research heads off a
great deal of material about people’s pets.
Insofar as Wikipedia has a physical existence, it
is in St. Petersburg, Florida, in an executive suite that serves as the
headquarters of the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of
Wikipedia and its lesser-known sister projects, among them Wikisource (a
library of free texts), Wikinews (a current-events site) and Wikiquote
(bye-bye Bartlett’s). Wales, who is married and has a five-year-old
daughter, says that St. Petersburg’s attractive housing prices lured him
from California. When I visited the offices in March, the walls were
bare, the furniture battered. With the addition of a dead plant, the
suite could pass for a graduate-student lounge.
The real work at Wikipedia takes place not in Florida but on
thousands of computer screens across the world. Perhaps Wikipedia’s
greatest achievement—one that Wales did not fully anticipate—was the
creation of a community. Wikipedians are officially anonymous,
contributing to unsigned entries under screen names. They are also
predominantly male—about eighty per cent, Wales says—and compulsively
social, conversing with each other not only on the talk pages attached
to each entry but on Wikipedia-dedicated I.R.C. channels and on user
pages, which regular contributors often create and which serve as a sort
of personalized office cooler. On the page of a twenty-year-old
Wikipedian named Arocoun, who lists “philosophizing” among his favorite
activities, messages from other users range from the reflective (“I’d
argue against your claim that humans should aim to be
independent/self-reliant in all aspects of their lives . . . I don’t
think true independence is a realistic ideal given all the inherent
intertwinings of any society”) to the geekily flirtatious (“I’m a
neurotic painter from Ohio, and I guess if you consider your views
radical, then I’m a radical, too. So . . . we should be friends”).
Wikipedians have evolved a distinctive vocabulary, of which “revert,”
meaning “reinstate”—as in “I reverted the edit, but the user has simply
rereverted it”—may be the most commonly used word. Other terms include
WikiGnome (a user who keeps a low profile, fixing typos, poor grammar,
and broken links) and its antithesis, WikiTroll (a user who persistently
violates the site’s guidelines or otherwise engages in disruptive
behavior). There are Aspergian Wikipedians (seventy-two), bipolar
Wikipedians, vegetarian Wikipedians, antivegetarian Wikipedians,
existential Wikipedians, pro-Luxembourg Wikipedians, and Wikipedians who
don’t like to be categorized. According to a page on the site, an avid
interest in Wikipedia has been known to afflict “computer programmers,
academics, graduate students, game-show contestants, news junkies, the
unemployed, the soon-to-be unemployed and, in general, people with
multiple interests and good memories.” You may travel in more exalted
circles, but this covers pretty much everyone I know.
Wikipedia may be the world’s most ambitious vanity press. There are
two hundred thousand registered users on the English-language site, of
whom about thirty-three hundred—fewer than two per cent—are responsible
for seventy per cent of the work. The site allows you to compare
contributors by the number of edits they have made, by the number of
articles that have been judged by community vote to be outstanding
(these “featured” articles often appear on the site’s home page), and by
hourly activity, in graph form. A seventeen-year-old P. G. Wodehouse
fan who specializes in British peerages leads the featured-article pack,
with fifty-eight entries. A twenty-four-year-old University of Toronto
graduate is the site’s premier contributor. Since composing his first
piece, on the Panama Canal, in 2001, he has written or edited more than
seventy-two thousand articles. “Wikipediholism” and “editcountitis” are
well defined on the site; both link to an article on
obsessive-compulsive disorder. (There is a Britannica entry for O.C.D.,
but no version of it has included Felix Unger’s name in the third
sentence, a comprehensive survey of “OCD in literature and film,” or a
list of celebrity O.C.D. sufferers, which unites, surely for the first
time in history, Florence Nightingale with Joey Ramone.)
One regular on the site is a user known as Essjay, who holds a Ph.D.
in theology and a degree in canon law and has written or contributed to
sixteen thousand entries. A tenured professor of religion at a private
university, Essjay made his first edit in February, 2005. Initially, he
contributed to articles in his field—on the penitential rite,
transubstantiation, the papal tiara. Soon he was spending fourteen hours
a day on the site, though he was careful to keep his online life a
secret from his colleagues and friends. (To his knowledge, he has never
met another Wikipedian, and he will not be attending Wikimania, the
second international gathering of the encyclopedia’s contributors, which
will take place in early August in Boston.)
Gradually, Essjay found himself devoting less time to editing and
more to correcting errors and removing obscenities from the site. In
May, he twice removed a sentence from the entry on Justin Timberlake
asserting that the pop star had lost his home in 2002 for failing to pay
federal taxes—a statement that Essjay knew to be false. The incident
ended there. Others involve ideological disagreements and escalate into
intense edit wars. A number of the disputes on the English-language
Wikipedia relate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to religious
issues. Almost as acrimonious are the battles waged over the entries on
Macedonia, Danzig, the Armenian genocide, and Henry Ford. Ethnic feuds
die hard: Was Copernicus Polish, German, or Prussian? (A nonbinding poll
was conducted earlier this year to determine whether the question
merited mention in the article’s lead.) Some debates may never be
resolved: Was the 1812 Battle of Borodino a victory for the Russians or
for the French? What is the date of Ann Coulter’s birth? Is apple pie
all-American? (The answer, at least for now, is no: “Apple trees didn’t
even grow in America until the Europeans brought them over,” one user
railed. He was seconded by another, who added, “Apple pie is very
popular in the Netherlands too. Americans did not invent or introduce it
to the Netherlands. You already plagiarized Santa Claus from our Saint
Nicholas. Stop it!”) Who could have guessed that “cheese” would figure
among the site’s most contested entries? (The controversy entailed
whether in Asia there is a cultural prohibition against eating it.) For
the past nine months, Baltimore’s climate has been a subject of bitter
debate. What
is the average temperature in January?
At first, Wales handled the fistfights himself, but he was reluctant
to ban anyone from the site. As the number of users increased, so did
the editing wars and the incidence of vandalism. In October, 2001, Wales
appointed a small cadre of administrators, called admins, to police the
site for abuse. Admins can delete articles or protect them from further
changes, block users from editing, and revert text more efficiently
than can ordinary users. (There are now nearly a thousand admins on the
site.) In 2004, Wales formalized the 3R rule—initially it had been
merely a guideline—according to which any user who reverts the same text
more than three times in a twenty-four-hour period is blocked from
editing for a day. The policy grew out of a series of particularly
vitriolic battles, including one over the U.S. economy—it was
experiencing either high growth and low unemployment or low growth and
high unemployment.
Wales also appointed an arbitration committee to rule on disputes.
Before a case reaches the arbitration committee, it often passes through
a mediation committee. Essjay is serving a second term as chair of the
mediation committee. He is also an admin, a bureaucrat, and a checkuser,
which means that he is one of fourteen Wikipedians authorized to trace
I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse. He often takes his laptop to
class, so that he can be available to Wikipedians while giving a quiz,
and he keeps an eye on twenty I.R.C. chat channels, where users often
trade gossip about abuses they have witnessed.
Five robots troll the site for obvious vandalism, searching for
obscenities and evidence of mass deletions, reverting text as they go.
More egregious violations require human intervention. Essjay recently
caught a user who, under one screen name, was replacing sentences with
nonsense and deleting whole entries and, under another, correcting the
abuses—all in order to boost his edit count. He was banned permanently
from the site. Some users who have been caught tampering threaten
revenge against the admins who apprehend them. Essjay says that he
routinely receives death threats. “There are people who take Wikipedia
way too seriously,” he told me. (Wikipedians have acknowledged Essjay’s
labors by awarding him numerous barnstars—five-pointed stars, which the
community has adopted as a symbol of praise—including several Random
Acts of Kindness Barnstars and the Tireless Contributor Barnstar.)
Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket, complete with an elaborate
hierarchy of users and policies about policies. Martin Wattenberg and
Fernanda B. Viégas, two researchers at I.B.M. who have studied the site
using computerized visual models called “history flows,” found that the
talk pages and “meta pages”—those dealing with coördination and
administration—have experienced the greatest growth. Whereas articles
once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site’s content, as of
last October they represented seventy per cent. As Wattenberg put it,
“People are talking about governance, not working on content.” Wales is
ambivalent about the rules and procedures but believes that they are
necessary. “Things work well when a group of people know each other, and
things break down when it’s a bunch of random people interacting,” he
told me.
For all its protocol, Wikipedia’s bureaucracy
doesn’t necessarily favor truth. In March, 2005, William Connolley, a
climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey, in Cambridge, was
briefly a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to
which he had contributed. After a particularly nasty confrontation with a
skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the
greenhouse effect, the case went into arbitration. “User William M.
Connolley strongly pushes his POV with systematic removal of any POV
which does not match his own,” his accuser charged in a written
deposition. “His views on climate science are singular and narrow.” A
decision from the arbitration committee was three months in coming,
after which Connolley was placed on a humiliating one-revert-a-day
parole. The punishment was later revoked, and Connolley is now an admin,
with two thousand pages on his watchlist—a feature that enables users
to compile a list of entries and to be notified when changes are made to
them. He says that Wikipedia’s entry on global warming may be the best
page on the subject anywhere on the Web. Nevertheless, Wales admits that
in this case the system failed. It can still seem as though the user
who spends the most time on the site—or who yells the loudest—wins.
Connolley believes that Wikipedia “gives no privilege to those who
know what they’re talking about,” a view that is echoed by many
academics and former contributors, including Larry Sanger, who argues
that too many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and
unjustly confident of their own opinions. He left Wikipedia in March,
2002, after Wales ran out of money to support the site during the
dot-com bust. Sanger concluded that he had become a symbol of authority
in an anti-authoritarian community. “Wikipedia has gone from a nearly
perfect anarchy to an anarchy with gang rule,” he told me. (Sanger is
now the director of collaborative projects at the online foundation
Digital Universe, where he is helping to develop a Web-based
encyclopedia, a hybrid between a wiki and a traditional reference work.
He promises that it will have “the lowest error rate in history.”) Even
Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues
that “ ‘disaster’ is not too strong a word” for Wikipedia. In his view,
the site is “infested with moonbats.” (Think hobgoblins of little minds,
varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science
fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing
on their terrain. “The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia
contributors have done, the better Britannica looks,” Raymond said. He
believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an
encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard: either it
works or it doesn’t. There is no such test for truth.
Nor has increasing surveillance of the site by admins deterred
vandals, a majority of whom seem to be inserting obscenities and
absurdities into Wikipedia when they should be doing their homework.
Many are committing their pranks in the classroom: the abuse tends to
ebb on a Friday afternoon and resume early on a Monday. Entire schools
and universities have found their I.P. addresses blocked as a result.
The entry on George W. Bush has been vandalized so frequently—sometimes
more than twice a minute—that it is often closed to editing for days. At
any given time, a couple of hundred entries are semi-protected, which
means that a user must register his I.P. address and wait several days
before making changes. This group recently included not only the entries
on God, Galileo, and Al Gore but also those on poodles, oranges, and
Frédéric Chopin. Even Wales has been caught airbrushing his Wikipedia
entry—eighteen times in the past year. He is particularly sensitive
about references to the porn traffic on his Web portal. “Adult content”
or “glamour photography” are the terms that he prefers, though, as one
user pointed out on the site, they are perhaps not the most precise way
to describe lesbian strip-poker threesomes. (In January, Wales agreed to
a compromise: “erotic photography.”) He is repentant about his
meddling. “People shouldn’t do it, including me,” he said. “It’s in poor
taste.”
Wales recently established an “oversight” function, by which some
admins (Essjay among them) can purge text from the system, so that even
the history page bears no record of its ever having been there. Wales
says that this measure is rarely used, and only in order to remove
slanderous or private information, such as a telephone number. “It’s a
perfectly reasonable power in any other situation, but completely
antithetical to this project,” said Jason Scott, a longtime contributor
to Wikipedia who has published several essays critical of the site.
Is Wikipedia accurate? Last year, Nature
published a survey comparing forty-two entries on scientific topics on
Wikipedia with their counterparts in Encyclopædia Britannica. According
to the survey, Wikipedia had four errors for every three of
Britannica’s, a result that, oddly, was hailed as a triumph for the
upstart. Such exercises in nitpicking are relatively meaningless, as no
reference work is infallible. Britannica issued a public statement
refuting the survey’s findings, and took out a half-page advertisement
in the Times, which said, in part, “Britannica has never claimed
to be error-free. We have a reputation not for unattainable perfection
but for strong scholarship, sound judgment, and disciplined editorial
review.” Later, Jorge Cauz, Britannica’s president, told me in an e-mail
that if Wikipedia continued without some kind of editorial oversight it
would “decline into a hulking mediocre mass of uneven, unreliable, and,
many times, unreadable articles.” Wales has said that he would consider
Britannica a competitor, “except that I think they will be crushed out
of existence within five years.”
Larry Sanger proposes a fine distinction between knowledge that is
useful and knowledge that is reliable, and there is no question that
Wikipedia beats every other source when it comes to breadth, efficiency,
and accessibility. Yet the site’s virtues are also liabilities. Cauz
scoffed at the notion of “good enough knowledge.” “I hate that,” he
said, pointing out that there is no way to know which facts in an entry
to trust. Or, as Robert McHenry, a veteran editor at Britannica, put it,
“We can get the wrong answer to a question quicker than our fathers and
mothers could find a pencil.”
Part of the problem is provenance. The bulk of Wikipedia’s content
originates not in the stacks but on the Web, which offers up everything
from breaking news, spin, and gossip to proof that the moon landings
never took place. Glaring errors jostle quiet omissions. Wales, in his
public speeches, cites the Google test: “If it isn’t on Google, it
doesn’t exist.” This position poses another difficulty: on Wikipedia,
the present takes precedent over the past. The (generally good) entry on
St. Augustine is shorter than the one on Britney Spears. The article on
Nietzsche has been modified incessantly, yielding five archived talk
pages. But the debate is largely over Nietzsche’s politics; taken as a
whole, the entry is inferior to the essay in the current Britannica, a
model of its form. (From Wikipedia: “Nietzsche also owned a copy of
Philipp Mainländer’s ‘Die Philosophie der Erlösung,’ a work which, like
Schopenhauer’s philosophy, expressed pessimism.”)
Wikipedia remains a lumpy work in progress. The entries can read as
though they had been written by a seventh grader: clarity and concision
are lacking; the facts may be sturdy, but the connective tissue is
either anemic or absent; and citation is hit or miss. Wattenberg and
Viégas, of I.B.M., note that the vast majority of Wikipedia edits
consist of deletions and additions rather than of attempts to reorder
paragraphs or to shape an entry as a whole, and they believe that
Wikipedia’s twenty-five-line editing window deserves some of the blame.
It is difficult to craft an article in its entirety when reading it
piecemeal, and, given Wikipedians’ obsession with racking up edits,
simple fixes often take priority over more complex edits. Wattenberg and
Viégas have also identified a “first-mover advantage”: the initial
contributor to an article often sets the tone, and that person is rarely
a Macaulay or a Johnson. The over-all effect is jittery, the textual
equivalent of a film shot with a handheld camera.
What can be said for an encyclopedia that is sometimes right,
sometimes wrong, and sometimes illiterate? When I showed the Harvard
philosopher Hilary Putnam his entry, he was surprised to find it as good
as the one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He was
flabbergasted when he learned how Wikipedia worked. “Obviously, this was
the work of experts,” he said. In the nineteen-sixties, William F.
Buckley, Jr., said that he would sooner “live in a society governed by
the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a
society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard
University.” On Wikipedia, he might finally have his wish. How was his
page? Essentially on target, he said. All the same, Buckley added, he
would prefer that those anonymous two thousand souls govern, and leave
the encyclopedia writing to the experts.
Over breakfast in early May, I asked Cauz for an analogy with which
to compare Britannica and Wikipedia. “Wikipedia is to Britannica as
‘American Idol’ is to the Juilliard School,” he e-mailed me the next
day. A few days later, Wales also chose a musical metaphor. “Wikipedia
is to Britannica as rock and roll is to easy listening,” he suggested.
“It may not be as smooth, but it scares the parents and is a lot smarter
in the end.” He is right to emphasize the fright factor over accuracy.
As was the Encyclopédie, Wikipedia is a combination of manifesto and
reference work. Peer review, the mainstream media, and government
agencies have landed us in a ditch. Not only are we impatient with the
authorities but we are in a mood to talk back. Wikipedia offers endless
opportunities for self-expression. It is the love child of reading
groups and chat rooms, a second home for anyone who has written an
Amazon review. This is not the first time that encyclopedia-makers have
snatched control from an élite, or cast a harsh light on certitude.
Jimmy Wales may or may not be the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us
tooling down the interstate, with but a squint back at the railroad.
We’re on the open road now, without conductors and timetables. We’re
free to chart our own course, also free to get gloriously, recklessly
lost. Your truth or mine?
♦
EDITORS’ NOTE:
The July 31, 2006, piece on Wikipedia, “Know It All,” by Stacy
Schiff, contained an interview with a Wikipedia site administrator and
contributor called
Essjay, whose responsibilities included handling
disagreements about the accuracy of the site’s articles and taking
action against users who violate site policy. He was described in the
piece as “a tenured professor of religion at a private university” with
“a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law.”
Essjay was recommended to Ms. Schiff as a source by a member of
Wikipedia’s management team because of his respected position within the
Wikipedia community. He was willing to describe his work as a Wikipedia
administrator but would not identify himself other than by confirming
the biographical details that appeared on his user page. At the time of
publication, neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name. Essjay’s
entire Wikipedia life was conducted with only a user name; anonymity is
common for Wikipedia administrators and contributors, and he says that
he feared personal retribution from those he had ruled against online.
Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is
twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught.
He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with
Wikipedia—as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia
positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the
co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona,
“I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”
