Wikipedia: A decade of amateur expertise

Wikipedia was launched just 10 years ago, yet already “it’s hard to imagine what life was like” before it arrived, said Todd Wasserman in Mashable.com. When co-founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger invited thousands of unpaid amateurs to create and edit a free, online encyclopedia, they had no idea what they were unleashing. This “worldwide web’’ of 35,000 volunteers has come a “remarkably long way” since then, said Timothy Garton Ash in the Los Angeles Times. Wikipedia now has 17 million articles in 270 languages; some 400 million users consult it every month, and it usually pops up among the top 10 results in any Google search. As a commercial venture, Wikipedia could be worth billions, yet it remains a nonprofit that “breathes the utopian idealism” of the Internet’s early days.

Just don’t count on it being accurate, said Lance Ulanoff in PCMagazine.com. The fact that so many people have access to its entries makes it ripe for error, deliberate falsehoods, and unstated agendas. The site’s entry on Microsoft, for example, makes the company sound “oddly sinister,” whereas the one on Apple provides no hints of “monopolistic practices.” Are such judgments “the role of an encyclopedia”? My own page was edited to state that I’d served in the French Foreign Legion and dated supermodels—funny, but “100 percent false.” The writing is awful, too, said Jonathan Lethem in TheAtlantic.com. With its institutional-sounding, “grindingly monotonous” prose, Wikipedia has “narrowed the vibrant chaos” of the Internet just as badly as Facebook and Google. Yet we’re all supposed to bow in gratitude to this “noble volunteer army” while it subjects us to “death by pedantry.”

You clearly don’t grasp what you’re seeing, said James Bridle, also in TheAtlantic.com. Click on the “View history” button at the top of the Wikipedia article on the Iraq war, for example, and you’ll see that it’s been edited 12,000 times; printed out, that would be a 12-volume encyclopedia of shifting perspectives. “This is what culture actually looks like”—a gradual and cacophonous process of argument, dissent, and “accreting opinion.” And that points to Wikipedia’s central miracle, said Clay Shirky in the London Guardian. It works by “putting the people who care in charge,” and it gets better every day only “because someone decided to make it better.” In a world run by greed, idiots, and paid liars, Wikipedia remains “one of the largest cumulative acts of generosity in history.”

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