Why encyclopaedic row speaks volumes about the old guardBy John Naughton
Sunday January 9, 2005
The Observer
SourceAccording to the laws of aerodynamics, the bumblebee should not be able to fly. Yet fly it manifestly does, albeit in a stately fashion. So much for the laws of aerodynamics.
Much the same applies to Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written, edited and maintained by its readers. Or, to put it another way, written, edited and maintained by anyone who can be bothered to log in and change it. By all laws of reference-work publishing, Wikipedia ought to be a disaster. Yet it is exactly the opposite - an exceedingly useful online reference work often consulted by this columnist and countless others.
I first wrote about it last September in a column that attracted a variety of responses ranging from incredulity to awe, with a spot of vituperation in between. What was interesting was that some people seemed to be outraged by the notion that anything produced by hoi polloi could have lasting value.
These reactions I took as confirmation of my view that 'we have become so imbued by the conventional wisdom of managerial capitalism that we think the only way to do things is via hierarchical, top-down, tightly controlled organisations'. More cerebral critics took a more elevated stance.
Writing more in sorrow than in anger, they conceded that while Wikipedia might be good in parts, one couldn't rely on it because the quality control that characterises traditional encyclopaedias simply wasn't there.
Since then, things have moved on. There was an almighty (but predictable) tussle over the entry on George W Bush in the run-up to the Presidential election, with the page being incessantly edited, defaced, revised and re-edited until Wikipedia's core group decided to lock it. (Actually, it was a very informative and useful entry.)
Then a well-known crackpot wrote a Wikipedia page about himself, only to have it, er, rendered more objective by other contributors. This drove him wild. Again the page was locked (in what seemed to me to be an admirably detached state) to prevent further vandalism.
Opponents of Wikipedia sought to use the episode as evidence that an open project cannot work. Supporters argued it proved the opposite.
Then employees and pensioners of Encyclopædia Britannica began to get in on the act. 'The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection,' sniffed EB's executive editor, Ted Pappas. 'That premise is completely unproven.'
And Robert McHenry, a former EB editor-in-chief, weighed in with an attack on 'the faith-based encyclopaedia', which he likened to a public toilet. 'The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject,' he sneered, 'is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.'
There is an interesting whiff of hysteria here, is there not? After all, if Wikipedia is such a trivial and negligible thing, why are these eminent boobies getting in such a lather about it? In this context, a small experiment may be illuminating. Try looking up tsunami in the online edition of Britannica (www.britannica.com) and then in Wikipedia. While you're at it, note the extensive entry the latter has for the recent disaster and compare it with the video provided by Britannica of the tsunami that devastated Hawaii - in 1946.
The Wikipedia project is fascinating not just because of what it has produced - though that in itself is remarkable. Last September, it contained 310,000 articles in English. As I write, there are 443,110. What's more interesting is the social process that underpins the project.
Implicit in it are all kinds of tensions and conflicts. Yet up to now they have been successfully managed. Nevertheless, governance of the project remains a huge problem. As one perceptive commentator (web expert Clay Shirky) wrote last week: 'Wikipedia is an experiment in social openness, and it will stand or fall with the ability to manage that experiment ... Wikipedia makes no claim to expertise or authority other than use-value, and if you want to vote against it, don't use it. Everyone else will make the same choice for themselves, and the aggregate decisions of the population will determine the outcome of the project. And five years from now, when the Wikipedia is essential infrastructure, we'll hardly remember what the fuss was about.'
Yep. Just as one day kids will wonder if there was life before Google.
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