Wikipedia gets the bridal suited at The New Yorker. Full feature article sometime smarmy, sometime fliratious-congratulatory about Wikipedia’s so-so reliability and great potential.” The article touches the ideas, so close to my heart, that although Wikipedia in essence is an exercise in creating expressive and ambiguous knowledge (as most knowledge is in these days), it never quite dares to say it plainly. Let us proclaim it here and now: Wikipedia is a product of our time–of our values and of our understanding of what “trust” and knowledge are. It is the product of a society of doubt born out of over-reliance on personal opinion and self-expression as terminal value. It is the product of many voices, because every voice wants to be heard.
However, the article is quite insightful, including the following quotable passages:
Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features
of the site…As an undergraduate, [Wales–Wikipedia’s founder] 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 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.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.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.Wattenberg and Viegas, 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 Viegas 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.Wikipedia offers endless opportunities for self-
expression.