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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
Well, "Spring is Sprung"  , as they say, so for no reason other than random chance, here's a Wired article in praise of Wikipedia. Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it's a beacon of so much that's right. Of course, Writing.com is really the Last Best Place on the Internet, but I'll accept Wikipedia as a close second. Remember when Wikipedia was a joke? In its first decade of life, the website appeared in as many punch lines as headlines. I've noted before that WDC came into being prior to Wikipedia. Not by much, mind you. September 2000 and January 2001. I remember when those years seemed so futuristic. We expected interplanetary travel, jetpacks, flying cars, suborbital transport, and asteroid mining. What we got was the internet. The article is long, but here's a few select comments. To confess that you've just repeated a fact you learned on Wikipedia is still to admit something mildly shameful. It's as though all those questions that used to pepper think pieces in the mid-2000s—Will it work? Can it be trusted? Is it better than Encyclopedia Britannica?—are still rhetorical, when they have already been answered, time and again, in the affirmative. I remember back then, someone took a random sampling of articles from both Wiki and EB and fact-checked the hell out of them. They came in about equal. Of course, that was 20 years ago, and a few things have changed. It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling. Like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. It does do a fundraising event every year, kind of like public radio. I'm not the least bit embarrassed to say that I contribute. Money, that is. I don't have the will to contribute content there. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked? I have, at times, noted that it's the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. Like that ancient institution, I fully expect it to be overrun and destroyed by the know-nothings, at some point. Until that happens, I continue to use it. Wikipedia and Britannica do, at least, share a certain lineage. The idea of building a complete compendium of human knowledge has existed for centuries, and there was always talk of finding some better substrate than paper: H. G. Wells thought microfilm might be the key to building what he called the “World Brain”; Thomas Edison bet on wafer-thin slices of nickel. Wells was a science fiction writer, and Edison was a hack. They were both products of their time and prognosticated the best they could with the technology available to them. Wells couldn't foresee some storage medium denser than microfilm, and there was no way Edison or anyone else (not even Tesla) could have predicted semiconductor technology (or, if they did, it was by mere chance). There is, as I said, lots more interesting information in the article. One reason I'm sharing this is that I have a tendency to hyperlink Wikipedia entries here, and I wanted to justify that. Two things can happen with crowdsourcing. Well, more than two, as usual, but at the extremes, you can get the worst of humanity, or the best. As the article notes, Wikipedia isn't perfect. Nothing is. But it represents the best of humanity, while social media usually represents the worst. |
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