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Populist Editing
December 9, 2001
By STEVEN JOHNSON
Despite the popular conception of the Internet as our most
interactive medium, on the great majority of Web pages the
interaction all goes in one direction. But an intriguing
new subgenre of sites, called WikiWikiWebs, really are
interactive: users can both read and write. If you dont
like the perspective of the article you are perusing, you
can go in and rephrase the concluding paragraph. If you
stumble across a spelling mistake, you can fix it with a
few quick keystrokes. Wikis are like communal gardens of
data: some participants do a lot of heavy planting, while
others prefer to pull a weed here and there.
The most ambitious Wiki project to date applies this
governing principle to the encyclopedia, that
Enlightenment-era icon of human intelligence. The result is
the Wikipedia, created in early 2001 by a philosophy Ph.D.
named Larry Sanger and billed as a collaborative project
to produce a complete encyclopedia from scratch.
Wikipedia has attracted more than 1,000 new entries a month
on everything from astronomy to the visual arts. With a
total of 16,000 articles in the database, the Wikipedia is
already large enough to be a source of generally reliable
information, though stronger in some areas (Star Trek
spinoffs) than others (the novels of Charles Dickens).
Wikipedia differs from conventional encyclopedias in that
each article is a work in progress: a visitor will draft a
new entry, sometimes merely jotting down a few random data
points, with a handful of links to other related entries; a
few weeks later, another visitor might add a paragraph or
two or a few more hyperlinks. Each entry has a revision
history, like those featured in modern word processors,
that lets you see at a glance any changes that have been
made to the document.
What prevents a crank or a saboteur from deliberately
undermining the quality of entries? Only the steady force
of constant revisions, doled out by thousands of
contributors. A few jokers in the mix will invariably get
washed out by the overwhelming number of contributors who
are genuinely interested in the sites meeting its
objectives. There is a saying in the open-source software
community (from which the Wiki movement borrows more than a
few moves): given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
The slogan works for programmers collectively writing an
operating system like Linux, so why shouldnt it work for
hobbyists and armchair enthusiasts stringing together an
encyclopedia?
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/09/magazine/09POPULIST.html?ex=1011957729&am…
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