Passion over Reason
That's the triumph of Wikipedia. As the Internet democratizes everything, it has a massive impact on information. Not simply in who gets to read what, but who gets to write it. And as blogging revolutionized our ability to get our own opinions into public consciousness, so has Wikipedia had a great impact on where information comes from.
Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, for those of you that don't know, which differs from other encyclopedias in that the content is all user-generated and user-corrected. It's quite amazing - wiki is now the third-most popular news and information source on the web, beating sites like cnn.com and yahoo news.
There have been problems with Wikipedia - notably, the idea that it was so open (which is also its greatest strength). Its mission of "free information for everyone" is actually a two-way street: anyone can publish or edit a Wikipedia article (well, most articles, anyway - some are now protected or semi-protected, and the entirety of the site has always been open to corrections and revisions). So this has led to inaccuracies, and sometimes outright lies, throughout Wikipedia. The organization behind it uses a small army of volunteers to correct this information, and some articles get "closed," often because rabid fans or detractors try to add too much unobjective information.
But most "official" sources actually had a problem with the very notion of non-experts creating encyclopedia entries. I don't. I like the way we're starting to look at knowledge, as something that shouldn't necessarily be disseminated from on high. I'm really not certain why the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, say, is more qualified to put together an article on a particular musician than a bunch of ardent, amateur music fans writing on Wikipedia. That sort of spirit has already created ardent, amateur non-wiki sites devoted to all areas of popular culture, to no one's surprise. The same people who are responsible for those sites are now just getting together and creating something more official under the Wikipedia banner.
But it's no longer just "light" knowledge. Now, people who feel just as passionately about "higher" knowledge (hate to use the term, even with air quotes) can come together as well, and share what they know with the rest of the world. Fans - fans of music, or movies, as well as fans of science and medicine and architecture and even youth marketing - are sharing what they love. And, famously, the accuracy that one would expect to disappear in more complicated matters of knowledge same seems to be holding true in all areas of Wikipedia: Nature magazine published a comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica that found that Britannia was only slightly more accurate when it came to matters of science.
But as the dust settles on all of this, what is most significant about a volunteer-based system is that people are writing because they really, really care. That's what I think makes Wikipedia so interesting - people are sharing information that they feel passionate about sharing. And that's as it should be - why should passionate "amateurs" have any less right to publish something official than an expert? As Wikipedia grows - there are 1.2 Million English-language articles alone right now, with millions of others in dozens and dozens of other languages - I'm hoping that it will continue to be motivated by that spirit of passion and collectivism. I'm hoping that it keeps knowledge in the hands of the many, rather than the few.
Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, for those of you that don't know, which differs from other encyclopedias in that the content is all user-generated and user-corrected. It's quite amazing - wiki is now the third-most popular news and information source on the web, beating sites like cnn.com and yahoo news.
There have been problems with Wikipedia - notably, the idea that it was so open (which is also its greatest strength). Its mission of "free information for everyone" is actually a two-way street: anyone can publish or edit a Wikipedia article (well, most articles, anyway - some are now protected or semi-protected, and the entirety of the site has always been open to corrections and revisions). So this has led to inaccuracies, and sometimes outright lies, throughout Wikipedia. The organization behind it uses a small army of volunteers to correct this information, and some articles get "closed," often because rabid fans or detractors try to add too much unobjective information.
But most "official" sources actually had a problem with the very notion of non-experts creating encyclopedia entries. I don't. I like the way we're starting to look at knowledge, as something that shouldn't necessarily be disseminated from on high. I'm really not certain why the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, say, is more qualified to put together an article on a particular musician than a bunch of ardent, amateur music fans writing on Wikipedia. That sort of spirit has already created ardent, amateur non-wiki sites devoted to all areas of popular culture, to no one's surprise. The same people who are responsible for those sites are now just getting together and creating something more official under the Wikipedia banner.
But it's no longer just "light" knowledge. Now, people who feel just as passionately about "higher" knowledge (hate to use the term, even with air quotes) can come together as well, and share what they know with the rest of the world. Fans - fans of music, or movies, as well as fans of science and medicine and architecture and even youth marketing - are sharing what they love. And, famously, the accuracy that one would expect to disappear in more complicated matters of knowledge same seems to be holding true in all areas of Wikipedia: Nature magazine published a comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica that found that Britannia was only slightly more accurate when it came to matters of science.
But as the dust settles on all of this, what is most significant about a volunteer-based system is that people are writing because they really, really care. That's what I think makes Wikipedia so interesting - people are sharing information that they feel passionate about sharing. And that's as it should be - why should passionate "amateurs" have any less right to publish something official than an expert? As Wikipedia grows - there are 1.2 Million English-language articles alone right now, with millions of others in dozens and dozens of other languages - I'm hoping that it will continue to be motivated by that spirit of passion and collectivism. I'm hoping that it keeps knowledge in the hands of the many, rather than the few.
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