As a list moderator, he had tried hard to keep his discussants out of flame wars. Echoing Sanger, he argued that the primary duty of community members was to contribute—by writing code, adding content, and editing. Wales also made a strong case that anyone deleting pages should record his or her identity, explain his or her reasons, and archive the entire affair. Given the structure of Wikipedia there was little Sanger could do to defend himself.
On e-mail lists, unanswered inflammatory posts quickly vanish under layers of new discussion; on a wiki, they remain visible to all, often near the tops of pages. Sanger was trapped by his own creation.
Wales saw that Sanger was having trouble managing the project. Indeed, he seems to have sensed that Wikipedia really needed no manager. In mid-December , citing financial shortfalls, he told Sanger that Bomis would be cutting its staff and that he should look for a new job. To that point, Wales and his partners had supported both Nupedia and Wikipedia.
But with Bomis suffering in the Internet bust, there was financial pressure. Early on, Wales had said that advertising was a possibility, but the community was now set against any commercialization.
In January , Sanger loaded up his possessions and returned to Ohio. Oh, thank you SO much, Cunctator. Sanger made two great contributions to Wikipedia: he built it, and he left it. After forging a revolutionary mode of knowledge building, he came to realize—albeit dimly at first—that it was not to his liking.
He found that he was not heading a disciplined crew of qualified writers and editors collaborating on authoritative statements the Nupedia ideal , but trying to control an ill-disciplined crowd of volunteers fighting over ever-shifting articles.
Wales, though, was a businessman. He wanted to build a free encyclopedia, and Wikipedia offered a very rapid and economically efficient means to that end. The articles flooded in, many were good, and they cost him almost nothing.
Why interfere? Moreover, Wales was not really the meddling kind. Over the past four years, Wales has repeatedly demonstrated an astounding reluctance to use his power, even when the community has begged him to. In , Wales diminished his own authority by transferring Wikipedia and all of its assets to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation , whose sole purpose is to set general policy for Wikipedia and its allied projects.
The numbers are staggering. The English-language Wikipedia alone has well more than a million articles and expands by about 1, a day. As of mid-February , more than 65, Wikipedians—registered users who have made at least ten edits since joining—had contributed to the English-language Wikipedia. The number of registered contributors is increasing by more than 6, a month; the number of unregistered contributors is presumably much larger. Then there are the odd non-English-language Wikipedias.
Nine of them already have more than , entries each, and nearly all of the major-language versions are growing on pace with the English version.
The Internet did not create the desire to collect human knowledge. For most of history, however, standardizing and gathering knowledge was hard to do very effectively. The main problem was rampant equivocation. Can we all agree on what an apple is exactly, or the shades of the color green? Not easily. The wiki offered a way for people to actually decide in common.
On Wikipedia, an apple is what the contributors say it is right now. You can try to change the definition by throwing in your own two cents, but the community—the voices actually negotiating and renegotiating the definition—decides in the end. Wikipedia grew out of a natural impluse communication facilitated by a new technology the wiki. The fact that two plus two equals four is written in the stars—we merely discovered it. But Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth.
Just think about the way we learn what words mean. Generally speaking, we do so by listening to other people our parents, first. Since we want to communicate with them after all, they feed us , we use the words in the same way they do. Wikipedia says judgments of truth and falsehood work the same way.
The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus.
Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. Early detractors commonly made two criticisms of Wikipedia. First, unless experts were writing and vetting the material, the articles were inevitably going to be inaccurate.
Second, since anyone could edit, vandals would have their way with even the best articles, making them suspect.
No encyclopedia produced in this way could be trusted. Last year, however, a study in the journal Nature compared Britannica and Wikipedia science articles and suggested that the former are usually only marginally more accurate than the latter. Yet it is a widely accepted view that Wikipedia is comparable to Britannica. Vandalism also has proved much less of an issue than originally feared. There are, of course, exceptions, as in the case of the journalist John Seigenthaler , whose Wikipedia biography long contained a libel about his supposed complicity in the assassinations of John F.
But even this example shows that the system is, if not perfect, at least responsive. Two days later, he sent an e-mail to the Nupedia mailing list—about two thousand people. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes. Within a month, Wikipedia had six hundred articles. After a year, there were twenty thousand. Wales is fond of citing a proclamation by Charles Van Doren, who later became an editor at Britannica.
Van Doren believed that the traditional encyclopedia was defunct. It had grown by accretion rather than by design; it had sacrificed artful synthesis to plodding convention; it looked backward. In its seminal Western incarnation, the encyclopedia had been a dangerous book. In the nineteen-thirties, H. Wells lamented that, while the world was becoming smaller and moving at increasing speed, the way information was distributed remained old-fashioned and ineffective.
Had the Internet existed in his lifetime, Wells might have beaten Wales to the punch. Insofar as Wikipedia has a physical existence, it is in St. Wales, who is married and has a five-year-old daughter, says that St. When I visited the offices in March, the walls were bare, the furniture battered. With the addition of a dead plant, the suite could pass for a graduate-student lounge.
The real work at Wikipedia takes place not in Florida but on thousands of computer screens across the world. Wikipedians are officially anonymous, contributing to unsigned entries under screen names. They are also predominantly male—about eighty per cent, Wales says—and compulsively social, conversing with each other not only on the talk pages attached to each entry but on Wikipedia-dedicated I. There are two hundred thousand registered users on the English-language site, of whom about thirty-three hundred—fewer than two per cent—are responsible for seventy per cent of the work.
A seventeen-year-old P. Wodehouse fan who specializes in British peerages leads the featured-article pack, with fifty-eight entries. Since composing his first piece, on the Panama Canal, in , he has written or edited more than seventy-two thousand articles. There is a Britannica entry for O. One regular on the site is a user known as Essjay, who holds a Ph.
A tenured professor of religion at a private university, Essjay made his first edit in February, Initially, he contributed to articles in his field—on the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara. Soon he was spending fourteen hours a day on the site, though he was careful to keep his online life a secret from his colleagues and friends. Gradually, Essjay found himself devoting less time to editing and more to correcting errors and removing obscenities from the site.
In May, he twice removed a sentence from the entry on Justin Timberlake asserting that the pop star had lost his home in for failing to pay federal taxes—a statement that Essjay knew to be false. The incident ended there. Others involve ideological disagreements and escalate into intense edit wars. A number of the disputes on the English-language Wikipedia relate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to religious issues.
Almost as acrimonious are the battles waged over the entries on Macedonia, Danzig, the Armenian genocide, and Henry Ford. Some debates may never be resolved: Was the Battle of Borodino a victory for the Russians or for the French? Is apple pie all-American? Americans did not invent or introduce it to the Netherlands.
You already plagiarized Santa Claus from our Saint Nicholas. Stop it! The controversy entailed whether in Asia there is a cultural prohibition against eating it. What is the average temperature in January? At first, Wales handled the fistfights himself, but he was reluctant to ban anyone from the site. They can work closely with library staff, the Wikipedia community, and other volunteers to identify common objectives and implement mutually beneficial programs.
It also allows library administration to recognize the work and its place within the organization. Integrating Wikipedia volunteers into your library and formalizing their roles places faith in them as individuals and can motivate them to stay engaged longer. Staff champions. Employees can allocate a certain amount of their work hours to Wikipedia projects, typically with a broader public access or outreach mission in mind. The tactic used by NARA, a more informal one, gives permission for staff; the tactic used by SLNSW is a longer, more formal process, but it has been effective at not only giving approval but also providing a rationale for integrating Wikipedia work into organizational priorities with an inclusive strategic buy-in.
Either method allows staffers to justify Wikipedia programming within their jobs. Expecting staffers to do this work in addition to their existing jobs can lead to uneven focus and can contribute to the underrecognition of something that is fundamental to organizational missions: a strategy for broader public access to collections and specialized knowledge.
Many organizations are not ready to invest staff time to develop a case for Wikipedia contributions as part of a broader public-access strategy. Instead, some will build another role into their staff, using either volunteers or term-based employees. Wikipedians in residence. Employing a Wikipedian in residence WIR is a common way to incorporate a Wikipedia presence in a library.
Their role is not to edit Wikipedia on behalf of the institution but to focus on projects that grow the understanding, skills, and capacity of the organization to successfully engage with Wikipedia projects and to improve its broader strategy for open, public engagement with institutional content. This role usually includes a number of subactivities, such as creating a free-licensing or open access policy for digital heritage assets; training staff members in Wikipedia editing or open-licensing; organizing events, edit-a-thons, or other contribution activities that use institutional expertise; and facilitating the donation of media to Wikimedia Commons.
The bots perform a wide range of editorial and administrative tasks that are tedious, repetitive and time-consuming but vital. They delete vandalism and foul language, organise and catalogue entries, and handle the reams of behind-the-scenes work that keep the encyclopaedia running smoothly and efficiently and keep its appearance neat and uniform in style.
In brick-and-mortar library terms, bots are akin to the students who shelve books, move stacks from one range to another, affix bar codes to book spines and perform other grunt tasks that allow the trained librarians to concentrate on acquisitions and policy. Bots have been around almost as long as Wikipedia itself. The site was founded in , and the next year, one called rambot created about 30, articles - at a rate of thousands per day - on individual towns in the US.
The bot pulled data directly out of US Census tables. The articles read as if they had been written by a robot. They were short and formulaic and contained little more than strings of demographic statistics. But once they had been created, human editors took over and filled out the entries with historical details, local governance information, and tourist attractions.
In , another bot created thousands of tiny articles about asteroids, pulling a few items of data for each one from an online Nasa database.
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