On 6/26/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
I agree; your perception of the Project as organic is much closer to reality than my own. Wikipedia is organic: it is living, and it is growing.
"Organic" is a tricky word here, because it tends to imply the structure that is not there. Assuming you believe in evolution :) you see real organisms as developing complexity and organization over time in a way that we don't see here. On one level the project is self-sustaining, in that people do continue to add articles and edit whatever may happen. Whether this produces an encyclopedia is at first entirely beside the point; as long as people are will to participate, and the website is there and functioning, the basic metabolism of the project continues.
The thing is that (to continue the analogy) this isn't classic Darwinian evolution at work; it is a kind of Intelligent Design, intended to manifest a purpose. All of the problems we are discussing relate to the perception that this manifestation isn't as effective as we would like. And to a very great degree, the failures reflect that this Purpose is not entirely real. In the first place, people come to WIkipedia with a lot of varied personal purposes. Some are patently at cross-purposes with anyone's conception of encyclopedia writing, such as the various true trolls and vandals who simply use it as the vehicle for their personal entertainment. But other people, through cultural differences or variation in the quality of their education, don't see the project of writing in the same terms as an overly intellectualized, humanized and Westernized college grad such as myself would. They may not be truly committed to neutrality, or may be incapable of executing it.
At any rate, the thing is that the Purpose manifested in the actual work isn't one single Purpose; it is whatever is manifested in the writing of whoever is editing that particular passage. And since the thing is far too big for anyone to be everywhere, there is definitely fragmentation. On top of the that, I get the sense that what organs we do have seem to have developed particularly to deal with that very first class of people. They have a definite fire-fighting quality. On the other hand, the projects seem more geared towards making a commonality of purpose. But they are by nature localized, so that what they produce is a Purpose specific to the topic at hand. I'm not trying to knock the projects, and I don't mean to imply that they are each and everyone bent on a definite POV. But each one is, by nature, going to tend to be colored by the commonality of interest.
I don't know about the future of Britannica-style encyclopedia projects-- though I can see such an encyclopedia using an in-house wiki as a vehicle for their work. I can see a scenario in which the determining factor is that Wikipedia is free on-line, and Britannica is not. Therefore, as long as money is a more important factor, we are going to tend to drive them out of the market. The only countervailing factor is quality, but markets are notoriously tolerant of poor quality. Wikipedia is already "the encyclopedia everyone consults even though they know it often isn't very good."