Community and controversy as the online reference giant turns five.
illustration: Insu Lee
Last fall, students at the University of South Florida contributed to
Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, by writing entries for numpty, mohoger, japsoc, and gavilan. The definitions they gave were foggy (numpty, "tea from the land of nump"; gavilan,
"a species of left-wing American focused solely on doom and gloom").
Their English professor, Alex Duensing, encouraged them to dream up
more entries. When members of Wikipedia protested, he argued that his
class had a "fundamental right to shape reality."
Currently the 19th-most-visited web-site in the world, Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) invites anyone, regardless of academic credentials, to write and edit articles. Much has been made of this cavalier attitude toward scholarship—some choose to replace complete entries with phrases like "toilet bowl" or "hi, mom!"—but it's hard to complain: This is free information. Self-described Wikipediholics spend several hours a day researching, summarizing, and reinventing the meaning of various concepts. "Everyone wants to learn," says Daniel Mayer, one of the site's top contributors, with more than 40,000 edits. "It's not like the Victorian model of education: one person dictating at the head of the classroom. There's no hierarchy. There's no teacher."
Some of the most faithful Wikipedians compare the enterprise to building the ancient pyramids: A vast collection of anonymous people make tiny, negligible contributions (a single clause, a comma deletion), and the result is a cultural monument. People have created their own Wikipedias in Slovene, Finnish, Arabic, Afrikaans, Tatar, and 200 other languages. Two and a half years ago, Wales started a new project, Wikibooks, with the hope of providing a cheaper alternative to textbooks (U.S. college students currently spend $5 billion a year on them). Writers have begun to collaborate on texts in many subjects, including microeconomics, linguistics, Shakespeare, Japanese history, wooing men, and raising chickens. There's no copyright charge for taking material off the site, but as of now, most of the books are slipshod and incomplete—not ready for classrooms.
Wikipedia will never be finished, so long as its participants are active. Seventeen thousand people contribute regularly. As Shirky puts it, most encyclopedias ask the questions "Who knows? Who has the facts?" Wikipedia asks something different: "Who cares?" With entries that are both impossibly minute ("Musashi Junior & Senior High School") and transcendent ("Life"), one has to wonder whether Wikipedia will eventually just bloat out of bounds. It's hard to predict whether it represents a paradigm shift or just an anomaly. The site is constantly changing, propelled by its obsessed community. "We forgive those who vandalize against us," writes one club, the Really Reformed Church of Wikipedia, on its user page. "Blessed art thou among Wikipedians/and blessed is the fruit of thy keyboard."
Read more HERE.
