...So it's time to talk about Wikipedia. Where did it come from? Why has it been so successful? Why is it controversial? Is it really all it's cracked up to be? How can you use it? Do Wikipedia workers wear yak-wool sweaters? All will be revealed...except that last thing.
Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It was born out of Nupedia, a project of the same two guys. Wikis had been around for a little while before then (as we saw earlier) and Nupedia and Wikipedia were run by the same guys, but they operated independently of each other. Nupedia's servers went down permanently in 2003 as Jimmy and Larry saw Wikipedia growing quickly, more quickly than Nupedia, see here for a graph of how many articles are added a day. It resolutely refused to go commercial and remains so to this day. It continued to grow and the rest, as they say, is history.
I have talked lots about wikis before, so not much to say there. However, Wikipedia is a bit more than just a collection of wikis. It is probably the most important encyclopedia ever written because it was not written by a team of experts, but by us. The largest encyclopedia on earth, with over 2 million articles in English alone, was written by computer anoraks and catfood enthusiasts and me and you. I, for example, have written a short article on a sports book. Not much, but almost everything is worth something where Wikipedia is concerned (unless you write an autobiographical entry and are subjected to the humiliation of being deleted because of insufficient interest in the page). Create an account, read up on some stuff, fiddle about in the tutorials and sandboxes and you're there: a bona fide Wikipedia contributor. It was created by us and is an example, according to Time magazine, of a "Web 2.0 service success" like Myspace and YouTube and consequently Time made "You" the Person of the Year 2006 for going from the person who watched the people who broadcasted to an army of broadcasters who release extraordinary amounts of information every single day.
Of course, this sort of mass broadcasting hijack is going to lead to some errors in accuracy in terms of information broadcasted. You can't use Wikipedia as an educational resource because some of the things put on Wikipeda are utter rubbish. It's pretty easy for Wikipedia's administrators to spot glaring errors, but smaller errors are harder to find. Wikipedia has three basic rules: articles must be objective, verifiability and no original research - everything must be able to be referenced to a published article. If you're looking at an article, essentially ask yourself these things: has this person proved himself reputable? Has the article been reliably referenced? Can I back this information up? Asking these things usually helps to show whether something is legit. Here are a couple of Wikipedia controversies that have emerged, but nowadays the media (i.e. US) can find fault with anything if we look hard enough. However, it does go to show that Wikipedia isn't squeaky-clean.
Wikipedia is different from anything before it: it will always be a work in progress, and it was built by a community of Wikipedians. It means that the news (because Wikipedia is, among other things, a current affairs site) comes to us - mass amateurisation at its finest. I repeat: we are the journalists. Edits happen at about one per second. It's like a hive of information with bees making cyber-honey. It's unbelievable.
It has transformed the way we think about information, but it was us who made the transformation. Wikipedia is the new way. Is it the right way? We'll have to wait and see.
Excellent as usual. Would have liked a bit more of your experience of using the sandboxes/editing.
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