I’m a big fan of Wikipedia.\u00a0 I’ve never been particularly troubled by existential or agency questions about it because it seems to me so self-evidently useful.<\/p>\n
Why <\/em>do people love Manchester United?\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 I don’t get it.<\/p>\n Why <\/em>do people go on pilgrimage?\u00a0 Dunno.\u00a0 Adventure, maybe?\u00a0 Not that interesting of a question to me, really.<\/p>\n Why <\/em>do people write and edit Wikipedia?\u00a0 Seems odd.\u00a0 Wouldn’t have predicted it.\u00a0 Shrug.\u00a0 (I do think, however, a rite of passage for Internet literacy is your first Wikipedia edit.\u00a0 If you haven’t ever done it, please do so now.\u00a0 I’ll wait.)<\/p>\n In each case, though, you have to acknowledge the importance of sport, of the power of pilgrimage, and the value of Wikipedia.\u00a0 In case you doubt the last, you can go to to look up pilgrimage<\/a> or “Compostela<\/a>” or the phenomenon of Old Trafford<\/a> on Wikipedia.\u00a0 That is something that you could not even imagine doing just a few years ago.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Agency is a little more complicated; I still don’t care why<\/em> people write and edit Wikipedia but I end up in plenty of conversations about Wikipedia’s supposed lack of authority and various biases.\u00a0 I think there’s bias everywhere and I don’t know exactly what the best authority for an encyclopedia ought to be.\u00a0 (For instance, I know a lot of academics — I’m married to one — and I can assure you that they are not necessarily a storehouse of factual authority.)\u00a0 I’m quite content to read an article like, say, Burma in World War II<\/a>, without knowing the details of the authors.<\/p>\n But this credibility is undermined by one sort of authorial bias; the articles unsurprisingly reflect the writers and the writers, apparently, really like things like science fiction and programming languages.\u00a0 You can profitably compare, for instance, the entries on Earth-One<\/a> (some DC comics paranoid reader term) and Value Proposition<\/a> (a very widely used if silly business term.)\u00a0 The latter is perfunctory, listless, while the sci fi entry is brimming with authority and telling detail.\u00a0 (It’s still not going to get him laid, though.)<\/p>\n More on the issue of agency; via Silicon Alley Insider<\/a>, an interesting article by Aaron Swartz asking “Who Writes Wikipedia<\/a>?”<\/p>\n Potential answers:<\/p>\n (1)\u00a0 Everyone writes Wikipedia.\u00a0 It’s crowdsourced social knowledge or whatever the latest thing is.\u00a0 A hundred million monkeys write it.\u00a0 We all do.\u00a0 It’s the wisdom of the audience.\u00a0 This is the common view, and the source of much doubt about its reliability.<\/p>\n (2)\u00a0 The Five Hundred write Wikipedia.\u00a0 A small self-selected elite write Wikipedia and everyone else just reads it.\u00a0 Sometimes the number is a thousand, sometimes 1,600.\u00a0 But it resembles a normal, large, organization although the elite is unpaid.\u00a0 This is Jimmy Wales’s view<\/a>.<\/p>\n (3)\u00a0 Swartz, though, has done some basic analysis of edit data and has a theory:<\/p>\n When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site \u2014 the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it\u2019s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m a big fan of Wikipedia.\u00a0 I’ve never been particularly troubled by existential or agency questions about it because it seems to me so self-evidently useful. Why do people love Manchester United?\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 I don’t get it. Why … Continue reading