The Wonder Of Wikipedia

Wikipedia, in case you didn’t know, is an on-line encylopedia. What makes it different from, say, the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica, is that anyone – anyone – can edit the entries. It does not have a closed community of paid experts who are responsible for the accuracy of the contents. Wikipedia itself makes no guarantee of the validity of its content. At the bottom of the disclaimer page it even points to alternative sources of online encyclopedias whose content is produced by professional, peer-reviewed authors. Now, this might seem like a pretty scary thing, and indeed some folks scoffed that Wikipedia should not be trusted. Famously, Robert McHenry (former Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica) published a snide article in 2004, in which he likened using Wikipedia to visiting a public toilet:

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.

There was a rather robust reaction to this pomposity, but clearly McHenry sailed on, full of the same pomp and circumstance, when he commented on the reaction in another article some months later. These references, together with references to other articles, both pro- and anti-, are collected on the Wikipedia page devoted to Wikipedia itself.

I’m reminded about all this, because today I saw that Dave Winer is pissed-off because someone has removed his name from the Wikipedia entry on podcasting (Winer is generally reckoned to be one of the fathers of podcasting). But as Jon Udell points out, Wikipedia does have a framework in place to mediate in the social construction of its content knowledge. And despite Mr. McHenry claiming that a visitor "does not know who has used the facilities before him", Wikipedia does have a very clear audit trail that is visible to anyone. In fact, Jon Udell also provides a fascinating example of this in action here, where he shows how a page has evolved over time.

As for me, I use Wikipedia extensively. Nothing is perfect, but Wikipedia often comes close, and certainly it is more responsive than the lumbering dinosaur that Britannica has become.