[WikiEN-l] The London Review of Books on Wikipedia

[Cormac Lawler]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 7:03 PM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Andrew Gray wrote:
> > "Like Boiling a Frog", David Runciman.
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n10/runc01_.html
> >
> > >From the last issue of the London Review of Books, a long and chewy
> > article about Wikipedia; generally positive, though it draws attention
> > to the problems of writing quality and "recentism". There's a review
> > of Andrew Lih's book buried somewhere in it, too...
> >
> >
> "... encyclopedias have been made better by the advent of the internet,
> but newspapers have been made worse: the cumulative impact of the
> readers’ comments that can now be appended online to almost any article
> tends to diminish most forms of human understanding."
>
> Worth reading for that insight alone.


I think what's interesting here is asking: how does Wikipedia harness the
energy of the public (for want of a better word) in a way that can be more
productive, useful (or at least less brain-sporkingly nonsensical) than a
newspaper open comment section does? What is it about this way of working -
this mode of production - that works well? And what is afforded by 'open
commenting' that the wiki model doesn't? (I don't we should overly idealise
the wiki model - I'm sure we've all sporked our brains out over on-wiki
affairs at some stage or another.)

But I was struck by how in the LRB review of Andrew's book, the reviewer
singled out the collaboratively-written afterword as better written than
Andrew's book, which he found "full of interest but rather indulgent,
containing too much incidental detail about people Lih wants to please." I
can't imagine Andrew is fully happy about that (!) - but it's an interesting
take.

Cormac