MIT Technology Review
The Decline of Wikipedia
By _Tom Simonite_
(http://www.technologyreview.com/contributor/tom-simonite/) on October 22, 2013
The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like
the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation
but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under
pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things
in
the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade.
And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of
Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston
Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and
evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like
it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or
ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of
information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.
Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human
knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s
flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against
vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007
and
is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the
flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any
standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren
’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its _entries on
Pokemon_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pokémon) and _female porn
stars_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pornographic_actresses_by_decade) are
comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan
Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000
articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of
a
good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own
middle-­ranking quality scores.
The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective
running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing
bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who
might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.
In response, the _Wikimedia Foundation,_ (http://wikimediafoundation.org/)
the 187-person nonprofit that pays for the legal and technical
infrastructure supporting Wikipedia, is staging a kind of rescue mission. The
foundation can’t order the volunteer community to change the way it operates.
But
by tweaking Wikipedia’s website and software, it hopes to steer the
encyclopedia onto a more sustainable path.
The foundation’s campaign will bring the first major changes in years to a
site that is a time capsule from the Web’s earlier, clunkier days, far
removed from the easy-to-use social and commercial sites that dominate today.
“
Everything that Wikipedia is was utterly appropriate in 2001 and it’s
become increasingly out of date since,” says Sue Gardner, executive director
of
the foundation, which is housed on two drab floors of a downtown San
Francisco building with a faulty elevator. “This is very much our attempt to
get
caught up.” She and Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, say the project
needs to attract a new crowd to make progress. “The biggest issue is editor
diversity,” says Wales. He hopes to “grow the number of editors in topics
that need work.”
Whether that can happen depends on whether enough people still believe in
the notion of online collaboration for the greater good—the ideal that
propelled Wikipedia in the beginning. But the attempt is crucial; Wikipedia
matters to many more people than its editors and students who didn’t make time
to read their assigned books. More of us than ever use the information
found there, both directly and via other services. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has
either killed off the alternatives or pushed them down the Google search
results. In 2009 Microsoft closed Encarta, which was based on content from
several storied encyclopedias. Encyclopaedia Britannica, which charges $70 a
year for online access to its 120,000 articles, offers just a handful of free
entries plastered with banner and pop-up ads.
Newcomers Unwelcome
When Wikipedia launched in 2001, it wasn’t intended to be an information
source in its own right. Wales, a financial trader turned Internet
entrepreneur, and _Larry Sanger_
(http://www.technologyreview.com/article/403538/larry-sangers-knowledge-free-for-all/)
, a freshly minted philosophy PhD,
started the site to boost Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia started by Wales
that relied on contributions from experts. After a year, Nupedia offered a
strange collection of _only 13 articles_
(http://web.archive.org/web/20010331191028/http:/www.nupedia.com/newest.phtml)
on such topics as Virgil and
the Donegal fiddle tradition. Sanger and Wales hoped Wikipedia, where anyone
could start or modify an entry, would rapidly generate new articles that
experts could then finish up.
When they saw how enthusiastically people embraced the notion of an
encyclopedia that anyone could edit, Wales and Sanger quickly made Wikipedia
their main project. By the end of its first year it had more than 20,000
articles in 18 languages, and its growth was accelerating fast. In 2003, Wales
formed the Wikimedia Foundation to operate the servers and software that run
Wikipedia and raise money to support them. But control of the site’s content
remained with the community dubbed Wikipedians, who over the next few
years compiled an encyclopedia larger than any before. Without any traditional
power structure, they developed sophisticated workflows and guidelines for
producing and maintaining entries. Their only real nod to hierarchy was
electing a small group of “administrators” who could wield special powers
such as deleting articles or temporarily banning other editors. (There are now
635 active admins on the English Wikipedia.)
The project seemed laughable or shocking to many. Wikipedia inherited and
embraced the cultural expectations that an encyclopedia ought to be
authoritative, comprehensive, and underpinned by the rational spirit of _the
Enlightenment_ (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/456709/philosophe) .
But
it threw out centuries of accepted methods for attaining that. In the
established model, advisory boards, editors, and contributors selected from
society’s highest intellectual echelons drew up a list of everything worth
knowing, then created the necessary entries. Wikipedia eschewed central
planning and didn’t solicit conventional expertise. In fact, its rules
effectively discouraged experts from contributing, given that their work, like
anyone
else’s, could be overwritten within minutes. Wikipedia was propelled
instead by the notion that articles should pile up quickly, in the hope that
one
_Borgesian day_
(http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/babel.htm) the
collection would have covered everything in the world.
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