… I came, I saw, I edited!
That’s right: Today was a geek milestone in my life — I edited my first Wikipedia entry. Sure, it’s probably something I should have done it a long time ago, but there was nothing I really wanted to put myself forward as an expert on.
Today, though, I stumbled across an entry composed of hundreds of bits, contributed by lots and lots of people — and I thought of a few bits that weren’t there, so I added them, just like that.
The specific things I submitted — well, those can wait. What’s important is that a lot of people might not be too familiar with Wikipedia.
Basically, it’s an encyclopedia written by thousands of people just like you and me, instead of by a centralized, closely-supervised staff.
Wired Magazine had an excellent article about Wikipedia a couple of months ago, and began with this sketch:
Dixon, New Mexico, is a rural town with a few hundred residents and no traffic lights. At the end of a dirt road, in the shadow of a small mountain sits a gray trailer. It is the home of Einar Kvaran. To understand the most audacious experiment of the postboom Internet, this is a good place to begin.
Kvaran is a tall and hale 56-year-old with a ruddy face, blue eyes, and blond hair that’s turning white. He calls himself an “art historian without portfolio” but has no formal credentials in his area of proclaimed expertise. He’s never published a scholarly article or taught a college course. Over three decades, he’s been a Peace Corps volunteer, an autoworker, a union steward, a homeschooling mentor, and the drummer in a Michigan band called Kodai Road. Right now, he’s unemployed. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t work. For about six hours each day, Kvaran reads and writes about American sculpture and public art and pubÂlishes his articles for an audience of millions around the world.
Hundreds of books on sculptors, regional architecture, and art history are stacked floor to ceiling inside his trailer – along with 68 thick albums containing 20 years of photos he’s taken on the American road. The outlet for his knowledge is at the other end of his dialup Internet connection: the daring but controversial Web site known as Wikipedia.
So how does a loose network of thousands of dabblers go on to produce anything remotely dependable? Because it’s vigilantly policed by Wikipedia community:
Whenever somebody amends the entry, the watch list records the change. So when that anonymous vandal replaced a Jimmy Carter photo with a nose-picker, all the Wikipedians with Jimmy Carter on their watch list knew about it. One of them merely reverted to the original portrait. At the same time, the user who rescued the former president from Boogerville noticed that the vandal had also posted the nose-pick photo on the “Rapping” entry – and he got rid of that image just four minutes after the photo appeared.
On controversial topics, the response can be especially swift. Wikipedia’s article on Islam has been a persistent target of vandalism, but Wikipedia’s defenders of Islam have always proved nimbler than the vandals. Take one fairly typical instance. At 11:20 one morning not too long ago, an anonymous user replaced the entire Islam entry with a single scatological word. At 11:22, a user named Solitude reverted the entry. At 11:25, the anonymous user struck again, this time replacing the article with the phrase “u stink!” By 11:26, another user, Ahoerstemeir, reverted that change – and the vandal disappeared. When MIT’s Fernanda Viégas and IBM’s Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave studied Wikipedia, they found that cases of mass deletions, a common form of vandalism, were corrected in a median time of 2.8 minutes. When an obscenity accompanied the mass deletion, the median time dropped to 1.7 minutes.
It turns out that Wikipedia has an innate capacity to heal itself. As a result, woefully outnumbered vandals often give up and leave. (To paraphrase Linus Torvalds, given enough eyeballs, all thugs are callow.) What’s more, making changes is so simple that who prevails often comes down to who cares more. And hardcore Wikipedians care. A lot.
The result of this approach is a half-million entries — six times the number in Encyclopedia Britannica.
The result is also a bunch of entries which would never show up in any respectable encyclopedia, like “List of songs with titles that don’t appear in the lyrics” … which happens to be the topic I contributed to.
The list is self-explanatory, and contains like Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” and “The Battle of Evermore” — the one’s where you’ve always had to tell your friends, “No, the name of the song isn’t “Hey Hey Mama, Said the Way You Move” …
Anyway, when I got down to the Monkees section, I noticed that there were only three entries, so I doubled the size of the section.
A couple of hours later I realized that “Papa Gene’s Blues” didn’t qualify under the rules of the entry (anything like “The Ballad of John and Yoko” or “Annie’s Song” refers to the song itself and therefore is a different type of song, or something, whatever), so I deleted it and remembered “For Pete’s Sake”, also known as the ending theme of the Monkees TV show.
Then, still drunk with power, I went to the Waitresses section and added “No Guilt” (the lyrics include the words “I know someone who really met Belushi”, but not the words “No Guilt”).
Ha — just like that, I contributed to a global knowledge project!
I could get used to this …
Plus: I just noticed that there’s a link to a page for Laurie Anderson’s Big Science album, no currently no information has been entered …
Hmm …
Earlier today I was composing a multi-part post, but then I figured I’d upload a few photos of Molly to Flickr while I was thinking about it, then I get caught up in going through my archives, and it was Goodbye Productivity for the rest of the evening. (I only got through February of this year of my photos.)
