[WikiEN-l] Response to Nick Carr on Wikipedia and Web 2.0

[David Gerard]

There's a long rant on Wikipedia (and the so-called Web 2.0) by Nick Carr at:

  http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php

I've posted a comment, which is currently waiting in his comment
moderation queue. Read the above, and below is my reply. I left this
on another blog commenting on the Nick Carr post, at:

    http://asay.blogspot.com/2005/10/commentary-nick-carr-on-amorality-of.html

I'll probably put it on my LiveJournal
(http://reddragdiva.livejournal.com/ - combining utter tedium with bad
taste!) tomorrow or something as well.


- d.



David Gerard said...

    Everything Nick wrote is a valid opinion, and commercial
encyclopedias are doomed anyway because (as Microsoft is finding out
with Linux) it's hard to compete with free. (I eagerly await EB
putting out TCO studies on Wikipedia.)

    Speaking as someone who's highly involved in it (I write stuff,
I'm an administrator, I'm on the Arbitration Committee, I'm a mailing
list moderator, I do media interviews), Wikipedia is of mediocre
quality with some really good bits. If you hit the "Random page" link
twenty times, you'll end up mostly with sketchy three-paragraph stub
articles.

    That said, the good bits are fantastic. Although articles good
enough to make "Featured Article" status (which are indeed excellent)
tend to be hideously esoteric; somehow getting more general articles
up to that sort of quality is not facilitated at present.

    Encyclopedia Britannica is an amazing work. It's of consistent
high quality, it's one of the great books in the English language and
it's doomed. Brilliant but pricey has difficulty competing
economically with free and apparently adequate (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better - this story plays out
over and over again in the computing field and is the essence of
"disruptive technology"). They could release the entire EB under an
open content license, but they have shareholders who might want a word
about that.

    So if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have
to be a good Wikipedia. So those who care about getting a good
encyclopedia are going to have to work out how to make Wikipedia
better, or there won't be anything.

    I've made some efforts in this direction - pushing toward a
page-rating feature, a "Rate this page" tab at the top, which, unlike
an editorial committee, will actually scale with the contributor base
and will highlight areas in need of attention. (See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_feature and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/En_validation_topics - the feature is
currently waiting on an implementation the lead developer thinks won't
kill the database.) Recent discussion on the WikiEN-L mailing list has
also included proposals for a scaleable article rating system.

    Wikipedia is likely to be it by first-mover advantage and network
effect. Think about what you can do to ensure there is a good
encyclopedia in ten years.