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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 don’t 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 site’s 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 shouldn’t it work for hobbyists and armchair enthusiasts stringing together an encyclopedia?

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/09/magazine/09POPULIST.html?ex=1011957729&...

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