Stacy Schiff “Know it All; Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise?” The New Yorker Issue of 2006-07-31 Posted 2006-07-24
|
|
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?