On 7/24/06, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
FYI,
The latest piece about Wikipedia from The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact
Generally great expository that aptly captures Wikipedia's most interesting corners. But this deserves a big whaaa?
"Wales—who resembles a young Billy Crystal with the neuroses neatly tucked in—recalls the enchantment of pasting in update stickers that cross-referenced older entries to the annual supplements."
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
You're right in that it's pretty good- the level of quality and quiet humor one expects from the New Yorker.
But there are a few oddities; like for instance, "He [Sanger] left Wikipedia in March, 2002, after Wales ran out of money to support the site during the dot-com bust. " I think this part may be wrong - I thought Wales had money for the site, but not for Sanger's salary? I mean, Wikipedia didn't go off the internet at this point.
Or: ""It's a perfectly reasonable power in any other situation, but completely antithetical to this project," said Jason Scott, a longtime contributor to Wikipedia who has published several essays critical of the site." Jason Scott == longtime contributor? Sure, he has ~200 edits, but most seem to center around himself and his article, and 200 edits isn't the sort of magnitude or long-term participation I'd characterize as "a longtime contributor".
Or: "According to the survey, Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Britannica's, a result that, oddly, was hailed as a triumph for the upstart." <-- Why is it so odd? I mean, almost everybody said that this was good news for Wikipedia because it showed that we weren't *that* bad. Critics were expecting it to be much much worse than it was.
But despite the occasional cluelessness or error, there are some genuinely interesting bits in there, even for a hardened editor like meself: "Wattenberg and Viégas, of I.B.M., note that the vast majority of Wikipedia edits consist of deletions and additions rather than of attempts to reorder paragraphs or to shape an entry as a whole, and they believe that Wikipedia's twenty-five-line editing window deserves some of the blame."
~maru