On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 7:03 PM, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
"Like Boiling a Frog", David Runciman.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n10/runc01_.html
From the last issue of the London Review of Books, a long and chewy
article about Wikipedia; generally positive, though it draws attention to the problems of writing quality and "recentism". There's a review of Andrew Lih's book buried somewhere in it, too...
"... encyclopedias have been made better by the advent of the internet, but newspapers have been made worse: the cumulative impact of the readers’ comments that can now be appended online to almost any article tends to diminish most forms of human understanding."
Worth reading for that insight alone.
I think what's interesting here is asking: how does Wikipedia harness the energy of the public (for want of a better word) in a way that can be more productive, useful (or at least less brain-sporkingly nonsensical) than a newspaper open comment section does? What is it about this way of working - this mode of production - that works well? And what is afforded by 'open commenting' that the wiki model doesn't? (I don't we should overly idealise the wiki model - I'm sure we've all sporked our brains out over on-wiki affairs at some stage or another.)
But I was struck by how in the LRB review of Andrew's book, the reviewer singled out the collaboratively-written afterword as better written than Andrew's book, which he found "full of interest but rather indulgent, containing too much incidental detail about people Lih wants to please." I can't imagine Andrew is fully happy about that (!) - but it's an interesting take.
Cormac