Wikipedia - The New York Times
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The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20091124063423/http://www.nytimes.com:80/info/wikipedia/
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
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Wikipedia
Wikipedia
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Noam Cohen
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Overview
"Wikipedia is a free, Web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation." As of Oct. 21, these were the first words of the English Wikipedia's description of itself - as fine a place to start in looking to answer the question, "What is Wikipedia?" Like nearly each of the more than three million articles that constitute the English-language Wikipedia, those words are the collective creation of users of the site, some anonymous, some not, and have been tweaked over and over. There are more than six million other articles in Wikipedias in about 250 other languages.
Table of Contents
Overview
A Place for Amateurs
Founding
Who Runs It?
An Edited Wikipedia?
Trusted Editors vs. Everyone Else
Complete New York Times Coverage
Wikipedia's contributors are nothing if not statistics obsessed: here are a few facts you can glean from the article
"Wikipedia:Size Comparisons."
English Wikipedia has more than one billion words, making it 25 times bigger than the largest English print encyclopedia; it has had more than 150,000 different contributors, about the population of Eugene, Ore., who have made a total 3.8 million changes to articles, or "edits," the term used by Wikipedians, which itself is the term Wikipedians use to describe themselves.
The power of Wikipedia is encapsulated in some basic facts about that self-defining article, "Wikipedia" - a founding document of sorts. The article now runs more than 6,100 words (with links to more detailed subsections), with more than 193 footnotes and 16 graphical elements, including a video clip, photographs, a cartoon, newspaper clippings and charts and graphs. Like every entry in the online encyclopedia, it began with someone using the editing tool on the site to create an article - typically an article begins as a "stub," a first stab at defining a topic. Someone else typically expands it, while another contributor may shrink it again; some edit for style, others for typos.
Multiply that experience by three million (for the number of English language articles) and you begin to understand the magnitude of information that has been collected on Wikipedia. In addition to the articles themselves, and the associated art work, the servers that host Wikipedia store detailed records of each and every change to an article (excluding some vandalism that is purged forever) and complementary pages for discussing editing issues related to each article. (To meticulously examine how an article has been edited click on the History tab at the top of an article - by choosing one of the entries you will find colored texts to show what material was added, what material was changed; to follow the debates, click on the Discussion tab.)
A Place for Amateurs
The staggering growth of Wikipedia has been read on many levels:
* for some, it represents the rise of the amateur at the expense of the professional (after all, no one asks what makes a contributor "qualified" to write something there);
* for others, it is about the power of the Internet to join people in voluntary enterprises for the common good (Wikipedia's success is, on some level, a political development, they would say);
* and on a third hand - don't worry someone on this wikified project of The Times will no doubt fix that error - Wikipedia is credited with being the most powerful engine in promoting free culture (because, everything that appears on the site must have the most permissive license within Creative Commons, allowing its reuse as long as the original source receives credit).
The overarching question for Wikipedia - its central riddle, really - is this: How can a source be reliable when anyone can edit it? One favorite answer from Wikipedia's defenders is, "The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work." More seriously, they put their faith in the "wisdom of crowds," believing that by having many people watching what appears there, errors and vandalism will be weeded out, sooner rather than later.
Founding
Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia was the outgrowth of an online encyclopedia project, Nupedia, that was meant to hew to the traditional model -experts write the articles, and reviewers examine what they produce. Stymied by Nupedia's slow growth under the traditional model, they experimented with the relatively new "wiki" technology that allowed collaborative, real-time editing. (The wiki software, created by a programmer, Ward Cunningham, took its name from the Hawaiian term "wiki-wiki," which means quick.)
Aided by being mentioned on the influential technology news site, Slashdot, Wikipedia quickly grew, and a new mousetrap was discovered. During 2001, its first year, Wikipedia grew to more than 20,000 articles in 18 languages. (Mr. Sanger left Wikipedia, believing that it should give more authority to experts; he has since created another site, Citizendium that does just that.)
Who Runs It?
The various Wikipedias, as well as other "wiki" projects like Wiktionary and the Wikimedia Commons, are controlled and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit foundation created in 2003 and based in San Francisco. The foundation oversees chapters across the world that promote the Wikipedia project; it sponsors the annual Wikimania conventions, now in their fifth year. In the past, Wikimanias have been held in Frankfurt; Boston; Taipei; Alexandria, Egypt; and, in the summer of 2009, in Buenos Aires.
There is a board of directors that meets regularly to plan for the future, as well as an executive director. In the past, Wikipedia was able to operate with a bare-bones staff of fewer than 10, and a budget of only a couple of million dollars, largely going to pay for the bandwidth and servers. Despite these spartan conditions, the site managed to reach the Top 10 of most visited sites on the planet. In 2009, the staff grew to more than 25 and its budget is more than $6 million dollars. The number of unique visitors around the world to all the Wikimedia sites is an estimated 325 million.
While Mr. Sanger has moved on, Mr. Wales is still the public face of the project. He travels the world evangelizing on behalf of Wikipedia. Technically a mere board member and "chairman emeritus," Mr. Wales, as a founder, has broad social capital within the group, making him more than just a board member.
An Edited Wikipedia?
As Wikipedia moves forward, the question of how to maintain quality is one that has remained at the forefront. Since some highly publicized scandals when incorrect and offensive material was published and managed to remain on the site, Wikipedia has both insisted on greater attribution for the facts that it prints. (A note, "citation needed," is a common feature of articles on Wikipedia.) Likewise, Wikipedia has been holding biographical articles to higher standards.
In August 2009, Wikipedia announced that it planned a move that many saw as a step away from its freewheeling ethos of anyone can edit. The plan, called "flagged revisions," would be limited to articles about living people, and would require that material be signed off on by an experienced editor before it would be seen by the general reader. In essence, there would be a layer of review that would prevent some "edits" from appearing immediately. To supporters of the plan, this was not much of an intrusion on the normal course of things, since many articles are "protected" already, meaning casual users cannot edit them at all. Under flagged revisions, the thinking goes, at least anyone can make a change, even if those changes won't appear immediately.
Trusted Editors vs. Everyone Else
Flagged revisions is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia's leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.
Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia's contributors into two classes - experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else - altering Wikipedia's implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries.
Mr. Wales, a supporter of flagged revisions, said by way of explaining his rationale: "We have really become part of the infrastructure of how people get information. There is a serious responsibility we have."
Complete New York Times Coverage
View all news articles, commentary and multimedia about Wikipedia.
Wikipedia Resource List
A list of resources from around the web about Wikipedia as selected by topic curators
Profile of Wikipedia's Founder
Reason.com
The Wikipedia Signpost
Wikipedia's in-house Newsletter
Wikipedia's Main English Language Page
About the Topic Curators
Noam Cohen
Noam Cohen has written the Link by Link column about the Internet and society for The New York Times since 2007, and has chronicled the rise of Wikipedia for The Times since 2006, when he attended his first Wikimania conference. He also attended the three that followed: in Taipei, Alexandria and Buenos Aires. He also has been a staff editor at The Times for the business, metro and foreign desks. His writing has appeared in American Scholar, The New Republic, Dissent and New York magazine. In 2000, Mr. Cohen was the senior news editor for the online startup Inside.com, which covered entertainment and the news media during the Internet boom.
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