Well, ‘wiki’ does mean ‘quick’
A friend just asked in jabber what I am up to, and I said “I’m reading a history of wikipedia.” The project started in 2001, and already
the nonprofit venture is the largest encyclopedia on the planet. Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica’s 80,000 and Encarta’s 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors. Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million.
(via robotwisdom; seeing Jorn Barger filtering links again after a year and a half away is the best thing that’s happened to me today)
Daniel H. Pink’s essay in wired describes the encyclopedia production model as having moved from One Smart Guy to One Best Way and now to One For All:
Instead of clearly delineated lines of authority, Wikipedia depends on radical decentralization and self-organization - open source in its purest form. Most encyclopedias start to fossilize the moment they’re printed on a page. But add Wiki software and some helping hands and you get something self-repairing and almost alive. A different production model creates a product that’s fluid, fast, fixable, and free.
A system that is wide open to anyone’s edits must lead to chaos, right? Or at least something as mediocre as the content of the web itself? Actually, while we definitely need to bring our brain, the content is pretty darn good. It seems the sheer numbers of people who care, combined with tools like change notification, make all the difference:
When MIT’s Fernanda Viégas and IBM’s Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave studied Wikipedia, they found that cases of mass deletions, a common form of vandalism, were corrected in a median time of 2.8 minutes. When an obscenity accompanied the mass deletion, the median time dropped to 1.7 minutes.
It turns out that Wikipedia has an innate capacity to heal itself. As a result, woefully outnumbered vandals often give up and leave. (To paraphrase Linus Torvalds, given enough eyeballs, all thugs are callow.)
Academic Larry Sanger cites lack of credibility (due to no formal review process) and lack of special treatment for “experts” (due to a strong wikipedian anti-elitism) as serious problems; while project founder Jimmy Wales doesn’t agree, they both acknowledge there is probably a content fork coming.
But both Sanger’s critique and Wales’ reaction miss a larger point: You can’t evaluate Wikipedia by traditional encyclopedia standards. A forked Wikipedia run by academics would be Nupedia 2.0. It would use the One Best Way production model, which inevitably would produce a One Best Way product. That’s not a better or worse Wikipedia any more than Instapundit.com is a better or worse Washington Post. They are different animals.
[…]
There’s another equally important difference between the two offerings. The One Best Way approach creates something finished. The One for All model creates something alive. When the Indian Ocean tsunami erupted late last year, Wikipedians produced several entries on the topic within hours. By contrast, World Book, whose CD-ROM allows owners to download regular updates, hadn’t updated its tsunami or Indian Ocean entries a full month after the devastation occurred. That’s the likely fate of Wikipedia’s proposed stable, or snapshot, version. Fixing its contents in a book or on a CD or DVD is tantamount to embalming a living thing. The body may look great, but it’s no longer breathing.
For me, this vitality is all the difference. When AJAX was getting some buzz recently and I wasn’t even buzzword-compliant yet, I got a good hit on Wikipedia. And since Wikipedia entries include external links and potentially excellent editorial review, it has replaced my google reflex for a number of things. (firefox keyword from location bar: ‘wp ajax’ replacing ‘gs ajax’). AJAX might never make it into the traditional encyclopedias, even the online versions.
Finally, for anyone thinking that Wikipedia is a collection of more-or-less equals, here is the real structure:
The Wikipedia power pyramid looks like this: At the bottom are anonymous contributors, people who make a few edits and are identified only by their IP addresses. On the next level stand Wikipedia’s myriad registered users around the globe, people such as Kvaran in New Mexico, who have chosen a screen name (he’s Carptrash) and make edits under that byline. Some of the most dedicated users try to reach the next level - administrator. Wikipedia’s 400 administrators, Derksen and Wool among them, can delete articles, protect pages, and block IP addresses. Above this group are bureaucrats, who can crown administrators. The most privileged bureaucrats are stewards. And above stewards are developers, 57 superelites who can make direct changes to the Wikipedia software and database. There’s also an arbitration committee that hears disputes and can ban bad users.
At the very top, with powers that range far beyond those of any mere Wikipedian mortal, is Wales, known to everyone in Wiki-world as Jimbo. He can do pretty much anything he wants - from locking pages to banning people to getting rid of developers.