Am 02.03.2004 um 19:01 schrieb Schneelocke:

...

Unfortunately, there's no online version of the article available; I'll can try to do a rough translation for meta in the next week if anyone's interested, though.

As a follow-up - as a couple of people were kind enough to point out, providing a translation of the article would likely be a violation of German copyright law. I'm not sure myself (IANAL), but I don't want to take any chances, so please consider my offer to be void.

Darn, I really hate copyright (most of the time, at least).

... therefore, a "review" might be an alternative ;-)

I'll try it here - please excuse my bad English (I wrote that last night/early morning... :-)

The leading German news journal, "Der Spiegel" (The Mirror) this week, in its "technique" section, published an article by Manfred Dworschak on Wikipedia (Der Spiegel, No. 10, 2004-03-01, pp. 174-175).

The title, "Rapunzel to Rain Season" seems to be somehow misleading, though the short abstract is closer to the subject: It states that there is an giant encyclopedia growing on the web, created by volunteers - thousands of them working successfully together: without payment and without supervision.

The author starts his article with the question: "Isn't that a guideline to a guaranteed desaster? Put an empty lexicon on the web and ask the visitors to add content. Everybody is allowed to write what he wants. Even more, everybody is allowed to change the articles by other authors with whatever he wants. And what is the target? An encyclopedia that could compete with the Great Brockhaus one day. Mission impossible. One expects the information value of the wall in a public WC." - Well, one might call this the typical "wiki"-surprise-effect :-)

After setting the stage dramatically in this way, the writer takes "Wikipedia" out of the hat to show that the forementioned assumptions are not correct (though he could have cited a lot of other Wikis on the web too - but we will see, that he is not very well informed in other aspects as well ...): "A visit to the web address www.wikipedia.org shows how the project is going on. The "Wikipedia" is rapidly growing. The english edition has more than 200.000 entries; the German more than 50.000 (de.wikipedia.org). About 200 new entries are added every day. And for sure, in the biggest part it is solid world knowledge ("Weltwissen" - a very oldfashioned German word). Thousands of volunteers bring it together; writing and reviewing/rewriting all the time."

Then, the writer mentions some examples of articles that can be found on (the German) Wikipedia, for instance on HipHop, the theory of relativity or Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus. (HipHop and Tschirnhaus are also represented in screen-shots.) Here also the reference to his rather strange title appears, saying that one could find any information from Ingwer (= ginger) to Iowa and Rapunzel (= lamb's lettuce, but also a figur of a well-known German fairy-tale) to Rainy season -- showing thereby, that he is more interested in alliteration than information :-)

The next paragraph raises the question, where among allt the people working silently on their "Reich" (empire) of "self-made enlightenment" the vandals are: By shortly describing the act of re-writing in Wikis, he ends with the statement that "the public encyclopedia is a self-healing organism."

The next paragraph goes deeper into the versioning system - which, astonishingly, seems to be enough to prevent chaos.

Now we come to more technical / administrative information: "The online encyclopedia causes almost no costs at all;" While one could expect that this is meant to describe the costs for the contributors, he goes on with: "it is free for the public." The next information about the hosting does not seem to be completely correct, but this may be due to the expected less interest of the author (and his presumed audience?) in technical stuff - though the article appeared in the techniques-section ...: "The US entrepeneur Jimbo Wales supplies the necessary servers." About the software, he says: "The software comes from the programmer Ward Cunningham; he called it "wiki" after the hawaiian word for "quick"." - hm, this is correct and wrong at the same time; but surely without the intention of the author: He seems to think (and every reader gets the impression) that Ward wrote the wiki-implementation for Wikipedia ...

Then the author switches to the contribution process: "Beginners can start immediately; no experience is required." (one might doubt that a little bit - but as always in this article: a more precise information would have taken more space ... or more preparation by the author :-) "Who wants to change an existing article opens a text-window on the screen, writes his changings, and done. A new version is on the web." Aha, here we learn, that a connection to the web is necessarily ... and again, everybody knows that offline writing is not permitted ... " The author cites Elisabeth Bauer from Munich with the words: "Most people stay because they know something better" She herself stumbled ofer an error and corrected it. The author thinks that this remarkable experience for the writers would be "The world has become a little bit better - and this was done very fast." and this would keep people interested in the whole process. So Wikipedians are little revolutionaries ... I doubt that this is really the main intention of many people ...

He describes that Elisabeth contributed (like many others) especially on her field of studies, arabian studies, mentioning two of her articles, and that she is helping to build up the new arabian wikipedia.

The next paragraph states, that the encyclopedia is available in more than 50 languages. Hm, this suggests that all the articles are available in 50 languages - again, some-one does not seem to really have understood the project. Even though he says, that "people from Poland, China, Catalonia work on their own editions" this suggestion is not corrected, I think. Further on, he writes that the articles from Wikipedia seem tobe well estimated among the (entire) internet community, because many of them appear among the first results in Google searches. And this draws new people to the project ...

Then, he mentions the (main) weak point of Wikipedia: That the information on/from different fields as varying heavily. Many articles are very short or missing, while others are "meters long" (i.e. J.R.R. Tolkien) or offer a lot of precise information (i.e., articles on computer history or biology) - He cites 3 names from the German literature that he missed at all: Peter Weiss, Walter Kempowski, Botho Strauss. So, germanists, go on and help your colleague :-)

The author mentions that the German Wikipedia alone has about 2.000 contributors, "among them, many specialists that no (commercial) lexicon redaction could engage (or hire)". As an example he cites a group of trans-sexual persons contributing information on their way of living from a scientific point of view. Also, there are many articles on the (mathematical) theory of graphs (i.e., "forests and trees in the theory of graphs") are only possible, where there is a "special love for this silent branch of mathematics."

As an important advantage of Wikipedia the author mentions its actuality: most of all "Wikipedia" is very up-to-date: The computers of the project record hundreds of changings every hour." (even though many changings might not refer to news items ...) He mentions two article about matters that caused discussions in Germany during the last months: RFID chips and the chaos around "Toll-Collect" which have been changed a few hundred times.

The author states that "such excesses of re-writing are almost normal. Even the small article on "Gerichtskostenfreistempler" (court costs' freeing stamp?) went through six versions until the community was pleased." For Wikipedians who contribute small corrections to articles he uses the word "text gardener", because they would care for every detail "before going to bed".

What about real vandalism? The author describes in short that there are some administrators who could erase an entire article and its history, but that even against this act people could protest. . But this would not be an option in the case of controverse subjects at all. "Many articles, from child abuse to to wind energy machines, call up different parties to fight. These texts are rewritten again and again. Opinion and contra-opinion byte each other - in the end remain the most solid facts that survive all battles." An interesting point (interesting, because projects like Wikipedia or Open source are still a large, open field for researchers from the social sciences, I think) comes up in the penultimate paragraph: "Researchers of conflict handling could find a lot of material here", because everybody knows that normally discussions on the internet tend to become war flames. To the author, one reason seems to be, that every combattant has to accept the others opinion as unchangeable in those flame war forums. Therefore, the only kind of reaction remaining to him is to fight back even stronger. But "Wikipedia" shows, that there is another way: The article ends with the (not complete sentance) that "fighters" are much more careful when they have to rewrite (and not only to comment) an article of their opponent, because everybody else can read and correct again what they wrote.

All in all: Though the article is something "essayistic" in its examples and not very precise in some points (typical for the Spiegel in the last years), it is at least a rather positive description of Wikipedia. But, unfortunately, I think the author will not convince "scientist" who think of themselves as "serious" to contribute which could be useful especially in the social and historical sciences. (Ok, the main reason may be, that these people want to be cited in "eternity" ... and, therefore, would hesitate at all to work on an article that someone could rewrite.) I think it is a pity that (my view of) Wikipedia is not (clearly enough, at least) shown as a collaborative tool bringing together people from all over the world and establishing wisdom as what it is (or should be): a process among people, not a product that can be put between hardcovers every 20 years or so and sold to a rich, passive audience.

Ok, I'm sorry for my bad English - but I hope the important points of the article come across.

I may remember, that there was another article by the Spiegel on Wikipedia in its online version a few days ago: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzkultur/0,1518,287730,00.html which caused a "/.-effect" (I heard) on Wikipedia :-) This, too, is one of the most cited / visited web sites in the German speaking world. Its tenor also is positive. So, good press for Wikipedia - go on!

Greets around

Bernd