Lately there has been a whole series of controversies, scandals, and
the like which have led to negative publicity for Wikipedia. In the
middle of all that, Google announced a (vaporware so far) project to
produce a community-authored information resource of some sort, which
got some press as an alleged "Wikipedia-killer". From the media
reaction to all this, it is very clear that Wikipedia's honeymoon is
long over. A few years ago, the media, blogosphere, general public,
and the ranks of Wikipedians themselves were full of people in their
initial bloom of enthusiasm over how fantastically Wikipedia had
succeeded in such a short time through a method of collective
authorship that it seemed in theory couldn't possibly work. Then,
the critics were in the minority and were easy to dismiss as people
who "just don't get new media", or who had conflicts of interest or
personal grudges of some sort that impaired their objective judgment.
The pro-Wikipedia crowd had a genuine enthusiasm that was catching,
and the anti-Wikipedia crowd was just an ugly bunch of party-poopers.
Now, everything is different. A victim of its own success, Wikipedia
is now part of the "establishment", a major part of the world's
information infrastructure rather than a neat little geeky project.
Just about everybody in and out of it has moved on from their wave of
enthusiasm to be jaded and cynical. The insiders circle their wagons
against "attackers" and try to blame everything on trolls and
harassers and banned users and attack sites and irresponsible
reporters and pernicious memes and so on. The outsiders find it's
more interesting and newsworthy to find and expose problems with
Wikipedia than to talk about how great it is. Even a few Wikipedia-
related bloggers who have previously stayed away from, denounced, or
downplayed all of the "wikidrama" of previous internal controversies
are now starting to sound alarms about how things are getting so bad
that major change is needed:
http://original-research.blogspot.com/
http://wikip.blogspot.com/
Unfortunately, some of the commentary they're drawing is just more of
the same insider reactions: to kill the messenger by denouncing them
as irresponsible rumor-mongers (even though these are actually people
who have largely sided with the establishment before against the
drama-queens and sensationalists). This sort of reaction may have
worked a while back when the critics were a small minority, but it
won't work now. Even if some amount of the criticism is still
overblown and unfounded, it is necessary to constructively engage the
critics instead of dismissing or attacking them, or else the problems
will keep getting worse in a never-ending spiral.
--
== Dan ==
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