[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia featured in German weekly magazine

Wed Mar 3 09:53:19 UTC 2004

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