World Wide Wiki

I don't do a lot of exploring on the Web. If there's something I want to know about, I go looking for it, and when I find it, I close the browser and get back to whatever I was doing before. There are a few sites I visit pretty regularly, but that includes places like my credit union and Weather Underground: pretty practical, mundane stuff. Some of that's because I'm jaded about this while internet thang... I've been on it longer than the Web, so it's lost its novelty for me. It's just a tool to me now, not a universe to explore.

But I've recently found a "new" way for me to waste a whole lot of time on the Web: Wikipedia. I've heard about it over the last year or two, and increasingly found it showing up in my search-engine results, and being rather helpful. The other day I decided to give it some real attention. And I think I'm hooked.

A "wiki" is a system which allows multiple people to collaborate on documents. Basically, anybody who wants to edit them... can. If you've got a bunch of people working on documentation for a piece of software, it has obvious advantages: anybody can update anything they see wrong or missing.

But you'd think such openness and freedom would crash and burn if you did an open-ended project and let absolutely anyone in the whole world update it. But that's exactly what Wikipedia is doing. It's an encyclopedia, done wiki-style. Anyone can contribute to it, on any topic.

You'd think that the signal-to-noise ratio would quickly degenerate, but surprisingly, it hasn't. If someone creates an article and fills it with garbage, anyone else can come along and delete it. Or fix it. Wikipedia keeps a record of changes, so it's easy to roll back an article to its previous state if someone removes everything from it, or adds a bunch of crap.

Just as importantly, Wikipedia is licenced under the same terms that govern GPL documentation: it's free for anyone to use. The people behind Wikipedia are aiming to make printed encyclopedias obsolete, and I think they're well on their way.

A big question people have is about bias and accuracy. At least Brittanica or World Book has standards for who writes their articles, so you know you can trust them. Or can you? They've got volumes of pages to fill, so they hire "experts" to write for them, and don't necessarily check thoroughly what's submitted.

By contrast, Wikipedia publishes their entire content for review online. If someone knows better, or thinks the author of an article is overly biased... they can fix it. And if the "fix" just makes it worse, someone can put it back. And on and on, until what's left is a heavily-reviewed article that balances the various biases involved. Their articles on "hot" controversial subjects have evolved this way.

On the other hand, there are oodles of Wikipedia articles that no one has ever really reviewed. They have some built-in mechanisms to look for obvious garbage entries, but if I were to create a new article about an obscure topic that no one else has bothered to check up on, I could get away with making up all sorts of bullshit about it.

The only solution to this is some skepticism on the part of the reader, which I'm afraid we really can't count on. But fortunately it is possible for any reader to look at the history of an article, and if there's only one person contributing all of the info, and no one's correcting him, then you know it's not a very authoritative article. But at least it exists. Which it wouldn't in a print encyclopedia, or even one of them new-fangled digital ones, like Encarta.

In some ways, Wikipedia is like what the World Wide Web is supposed to be: the sum of all human knowledge. But it has a few key differences. One is that Wikipedia pages don't go offline. There may be a web site out there with all sorts of excellent information about ____, but there's no guarantee it'll be there next year. With information entered into Wikipedia, it probably will be. There's also the benefit of some consistent structure to it. And that whole peer-review thing; if someone posts an "informative" web site that's full of shit, no one else can correct it.

Wikipedia is never going to serve as a substitute for searching the Web, but it has some unique benefits as something to be part of the Web.

And as someone who believes that he knows a hell of a lot about a hell of a lot, it's going to keep me pretty busy.