Wide Area News
Cuts both ways
by Russell Brown
Wikipedia’s weakness is the same as its strength: anyone can edit it.
Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" seemed like such a good idea. Indeed, it still is a good idea – and a hugely valuable resource for countless kinds of information. I use it nearly every day. But rumblings from both inside and outside the project suggest that the encyclopedia that aimed to capture "the sum of human knowledge" may be past its peak.
This wasn't meant to happen. The idea has always been that Wikipedia would simply become greater and grander by the month, as its army of volunteer editors progressively refined and expanded its base of knowledge. But there are signs that it is the very tirelessness of the Wiki organism that is causing it to degrade.
Wikipedia's weakness is the same as its strength: anyone can edit it. And that means that even when a topic has been comprehensively addressed, and an elegant entry written for it, someone else can come in and have a crack. There are Wikipedia entries that can really only get worse; and many do.
Jason Scott, a longtime web publisher, documentary maker and online historian, recently gave a speech (there is also audio available) titled 'The Great Failure of Wikipedia'.
Scott notes the "excellent vision" with which millionaire founder Jimmy Wales launched the project; a vision strongly influenced by his own Randian Objectivist philosophy. Wikipedia, Wales declared, would have a neutral point of view, would always cite its sources, would not be an "original source of information", and would be run by any and all individuals involved.
Scott advances the view that in opening up editing to any and all, "Wikipedia happened on a form of human addiction. That is to say, it turns out that if you give people a stage, and you give them a stage where they have total control, even if it's for a short amount [of time], they will not rest until they can do it again."
The result, he contends, is the constant alteration of certain entries (the worst thing that can happen to a Wikipedia article, says Scott, is to be featured on the site's hope page – whereupon so many would-be editors meddle with it that it is soon wrecked), leading, inevitably, to vicious factional wars, and, more recently, to Wales ignoring his own credo and making executive decisions – like that over the entry for deformed sex offender Brian Peppers, which was the subject of a furious war of deletion and re-publishing, before Wales arbitrarily suspended the whole business for a year.
Scott also notes another internal war: between the "inclusionists" and "deletionists". The latter believe the place needs a constant clean-out of useless "fan cruft"; the former that, actually, there should be an authoritative list of every Pokemon ever. (Given that Wikipedia's pop-culture entries tend to be its best, this columnist comes down on the inclusionist side.)
Wales, says Scott, envisaged a project without politics:
"What Wikipedia has taught us now, is that in a vacuum of politics, politics will be created. There is no vacuum of politics. People who are encountering this space where they can not lord over others for technicalities and gain power for themselves will then proceed to invoke technicalities, take power from other people. They just do this. This is what human beings do."
The politics have begun to break out into the real world. A group of former Wikpedia editors runs a site called Wikipedia Review, which keeps an angry watch on the encyclopedia More recently, a site called WikiTruth was declared a hoax by Wales (who has his own WikiTruth entry), who rubbished claims that it was run by current editors and administrators (the way the site can retrieve and re-publish deleted suggests it does have someone on the inside). Bizarrely, a freelance journalist who disengaged from the project accused Wales of leading a cabal of right-wing Zionists intent on giving the site's political content a particular slant.
Perhaps, as Scott suggests, Wikipedia is an experiment that had to be had; the 1.0 version of a great and important idea. As the history of the Internet has shown, 1.0 versions don't usually work right. One of the project's most trenchant critics, Andrew Orlowski of the UK-based geek news service The Register, recently interviewed Larry Sanger. Sanger created the original NuPedia project that Wales turned into Wikipedia – and he is now launching a new venture, Digital Universe, which aims to become " the largest reliable public information resource in history," in large part by pushing back what Scott calls Wikipedia's "hatred of experts", by employing "stewards" for each area of expertise.
Wikipedia isn't going away, but Sanger's attempt to balance ego and expertise, the formal and informal looks like another useful experiment. We'll check back in 10 years to see who was right.
