BOOK OF THE DAY: TOM MORIARTYreviews The Wikipedia Revolutionby Andrew Lih Aurum Press 252 pp, £14.99
WIKIPEDIA HAS become as indispensable as Google. We all use it. It’s simple, it’s free and it’s packed full of useful and useless information to feed our incessant need to know things.
Andrew Lih tells the story of Wikipedia, from its origins in a small application called WikiWikiWeb ( wikiis Hawaiian for quick, which the inventor of the wiki, Ward Cunningham, saw on a bus in Hawaii on his honeymoon), to the present online encyclopaedia of more than 10 million articles in more than 250 languages.
Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales stresses in the foreword that Wikipedia isn’t a technological but a social innovation. What makes Wikipedia special is its army of unpaid volunteers co-operating like busy ants without a command structure. Lih also likens the volunteers to a shoal of piranha fish indulging in a feeding frenzy when a tasty new article comes to their attention.
Such unexpected behaviour, which seeks no reward other than the satisfaction of being part of a significant project, has its origins in the web’s open source movements.
The core value of the Wikipedia project is neutrality or objectivity, the so-called neutral point of view.
Wikipedia has relied on the essential neutrality of its contributors despite some painful episodes – such as the Gdansk/ Danzig “edit wars”, when the rival Polish and German versions of history were anything but neutral.
Collaborative work, freely licensed, is also the spirit at the heart of the Wikipedia project. It has allowed largely anonymous volunteers to build an encyclopaedia with millions of entries to a standard which a controversial report in the journal Nature ranked as only marginally less accurate then Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Critics of Wikipedia point to its occasional unreliability. It is true that errors, accidental and deliberate, do occur, but they are usually corrected very quickly.
Perhaps the most famous controversy in Wikipedia’s eight years was the Seigenthaler incident: in his Wikipedia biography, John Seigenthaler, a veteran journalist, was libellously accused of complicity in the Kennedy assassinations. This was such an embarrassment that access restrictions had to be imposed on the hitherto freewheeling Wikipedians.
Along with the constant battle to achieve accuracy and consistency, Wikipedia faces new challenges now. It must try to retain its special, dynamic culture while continuing to grow.
It must raise revenue to pay for new servers and more full-time paid staff. Lih isn’t sure it can survive long-term but Wikipedia, as Jimmy Wales puts it, has never worked in theory, only in practice.
Tom Moriarty is IT systems manager at The Irish Times