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Top Higher-Ed News for Friday, March 4, 2005
The Hyperaddictive Library of the Future Called Wikipedia
Everyone's encyclopedia
Four years ago, a wealthy options trader named Jimmy Wales set out to build a massive online encyclopedia ambitious in purpose and unique in design. This encyclopedia would
be freely available to anyone. And it would be created not by paid experts and editors, but
by whoever wanted to contribute. With software called Wiki-- ( Hawaiian term for "quick" or "super-fast" - "wiki wiki" ) which allows anybody with Web access to go to a site and edit, delete, or add to what's there--Wales and his volunteer crew would construct a repository
of knowledge to rival the ancient library of Alexandria.
In 2001, the idea seemed preposterous. In 2005, the nonprofit venture is the largest encyclopedia on the planet. Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors.
Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the
total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million.
Wikipedia's explosive growth is due to the contributions of Einar Kvaran and others like
him. Self-taught and self-motivated, Kvaran wrote his first article last summer--a short
piece on American sculptor Corrado Parducci. Since then, Kvaran has written or
contributed to two dozen other entries on American art, using his library and photographs
as sources. He's added words and images to 30 other topics, too--the Lincoln Memorial, baseball player Carl Yastrzemski, photographer Tina Modotti, and Iceland's first prime
minister, Hannes Hafstein, who happens to be Kvaran's great-grandfather. "I think of
myself as a teacher," Kvaran says over tea at his kitchen table.
To many guardians of the knowledge cathedral--librarians, lexicographers, academics--
that's precisely the problem. Who died and made this guy professor? No pedigreed
scholars scrutinize his work. No research assistants check his facts. Should we trust
an encyclopedia that allows anyone with a pulse and a mousepad to opine about
Jackson Pollock's place in postmodernism?
But the Wikipedia community of 16,000 contributors self-motivated and self-taught
amateurs is surprisingly efficient in policing the site and checking one another's material, according to Pink. "Instead of clearly delineated lines of authority, Wikipedia depends on radical decentralization and self-organization open source in its purest form."
The software that made Wikipedia so easy to build also makes it easy to manipulate and deface. A former editor at the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica recently likened the site
to a public rest room: You never know who used it last.
Read the full story from Wired "The Book Stops Here" by Daniel H. Pink -
March 2005, pp 124-139.
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