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