Paradigm Shift: The Wikipedia Revolution

Posted by Greg Allen on 05.29.2007

The first attempt at collecting all human knowledge was the ancient library of Alexandria. The attempt was admirable, but it pales in comparison to the exponential growth and limitless potential of Wikipedia. What might we expect from a world where people can find out the answers to virtually all of their questions? Greg Allen weighs in with another edition of Paradigm Shift.

People will talk and talk and talk about the information revolution that is the Internet—how our lives have been deeply shaped and altered by our interaction with this new access to information. By and large, that's a bunch of crap. The Internet may be full of tons of information, but it's also full of tons of garbage. That's why sites that effectively sort through the mess have the potential to revolutionize human affairs. Obviously Google falls into this category, but even the master of search engines often involves trudging through nonsense to find simple and concise answers. (And no, I'm not just bitter because I'm not the first search result).

If you ask me the site that has the potential to be as if not more important than search engines is Wikipedia – which styles itself as the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Though Wikipedia is not entirely without flaws, it also holds within it a number of history-making trends.

A little history

Wikipedia began on 15 January 2001 as a weak offshoot of a parent operation called Nupedia (in which articles were written by experts). In fact that Wikipedia began as almost an afterthought – a chance to generate article topics for the more important Nupedia texts; however, within a few short months the operation took off, quickly reaching more that 20,000 articles. By 2002, Wikipedia had expanded into 26 different languages. 2002 was also the year Wikipedia began growing exponentially, doubling every year since. Currently, the multilingual (over 250 languages) Wikipedia is an absolutely gargantuan portal of information. The English site, which is still by far the largest, comprises over 1.6 million separate articles. The Encyclopedia Britannica, by contrast, has never had more than one hundred and twenty thousand articles in even it's most comprehensive editions.

Bigger is better

Size is one reason why it's not inaccurate to describe wikipedia as a revolution. 1.6 million articles means that lots and lots and lots of things are covered. Things Britannica never could have dreamed were important. For example, you would never be able to find out what this sudoku thing everybody keeps talking about by going to a formal encyclopedia. Wikipedia, on the other hand, has 3,500 words to say on the subject, covering everything from history to strategy to mathematical solutions to. If there's anything more to say on the subject that Wikipedia doesn't, I sure can't come up with it.

It isn't just Sudoku that is included in the enormous net cast by Wikipedia: all the expected biographies and scientific formulas and literary analyses are present, but so many more of the things people care about are on the website. Every one of the almost 400 episodes of The Simpsons, for example, has it's own article that goes into impressive detail recounting the events. Likewise, every character, even the seemingly insignificant ones, has their own page with extensive character analysis. Where else might one go to learn that Ralph Wiggum is not actually profoundly stupid, but likely suffers from a psychosocial disorder, that usually prevents him from displaying his hidden artistic genius?

That the encyclopedia tries to cover everything is another reason it's indispensable. Many times a person will hear something in lecture or conversation and want to know more, but feel too embarrassed to ask. Wikipedia offers them a starting point to figure these things out for themselves. It not only provides useful summaries of virtually every issue, it also uses extensive citation that allow readers to investigate beyond the Wikipedia page directly into the sources used to create that page.

It may be difficult to see the impact of this, but believe me when I say it's going to be enormous. Essentially, Wikipedia has lowered the cost of human curiosity. No longer must someone with only a passing interest in any topic drive out to the library or scour the web. Wikipedia affords everyone the ability to satiate their intrigue to whatever degree they desire. If they only want to read a sentence to understand what something is, they may do so at no cost. If that same somebody is about to start investigating for a research topic at the academic level, Wikipedia will provide the necessary background as well as facilitate further investigation. Who knows what a world where everybody finds out what they want to find out looks like in the long run. I'm betting it'll be pretty fantastic.

Naysayers and Vandalizers

Wikipedia is not without a great deal of critics. Many deride its accuracy, saying the site is comparable to asking a random individual at the bar. That's an obvious exaggeration, but the true criticism fails for much the same reason. Terrifying as it may be to academics, large groups of dedicated individuals are capable of producing informational text of astonishing quality. The science journal Nature published research that compared the accuracy of forty-two science articles on Wikipedia with their equivalents in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The results? Wikipedia contained roughly four errors for every three of Britannica's. Britannica's publishers predictably criticized the Nature article, but much of their criticism was due to the incomplete publishing of the methodology of the study. Nature has subsequently made that information available as well as refuted, point-by-point, Britannica's complaints. It would seem that the two encyclopedia's really are of comparable accuracy. Subsequent research into the accuracy of historical articles has also been commissioned, with similar results.

However, this accuracy is often said to be jeopardized by malicious vandalism. Again, research has concluded this is largely not the case. While some famous cases of vandalism have persisted far longer than they should (curse thee Stephen Colbert), most vandalism is eliminated promptly by either one of the five data trolling robots who police Wikipedia for blatant violations of article integrity (Penisface Jenkins was not Christopher Columbus' first mate as it turns out) or, in more subtle cases, by one of the many thousands of administrators with responsibility for their own little niche corner of Wikipedia. Other rules have been developed to limit vandalism, such as restricting editing access on articles that are persistent targets (e.g. George W. Bush). The result is that Wikipedia is an impressively reliable source that has the opportunity to change the way humans interact with information.

The final major criticism of Wikipedia is that it favors consensus over credentials so that Harvard Professors can conceivably be overruled by high school students with a great Wikipedia profile. This criticism sidesteps the true priorities of Wikipedia. Whereas an academic article attempts to reach a conclusion on a controversial subject, Wikipedia has no need to do so. Much greater emphasis is put upon making sure that all relevant interpretations of any topic have their views accurately portrayed on the site. Once that's settled, Wikipedia articles will cite the conclusions of various authorities on the topic and rarely if ever, attempt to close the book on an issue.

Much of the discussion about Wikipedia necessarily centers around justifying its reliability and usefulness as a tool. Once that hurdle has been overcome, one can discover just how limitless the potential for Wikipedia is. Wikipedia houses just over 1.6 million articles, but, considering the site is only five years old (Britannica is older by centuries) and doubling every single year, it doesn't seem wrong to look on the project as a genuine attempt to produce a work that can accurately be described as "the sum of human knowledge."

As Wikipedia grows and grows, so too will its relevance to everyday society. As stated above, the effect of Wikipedia's change on how individuals relate to information is unknowable, but there are some very tangible signs that a Wikipedia revolution is already upon us. Already over one-hundred judicial rulings in American courts have relied upon Wikipedia. Not all of these are small irrelevant courts either; Wikipedia has been cited numerous times in circuit courts of appeal (one step below the Supreme Court) and once in the Supreme Court of Iowa. In the latter, the court used Wikipedia to explain that "jungle juice" is "a mix of liquor that is usually served for the sole purpose of becoming intoxicated." One wonders where else judges might get authoritative information on such topics.

Court cases show proactively the power of Wikipedia, but the better demonstrations of the site's influences come from those who would abuse it. Senators and Congressional Representatives have been found to have edited their Wikipedia biographies to remove information about broken campaign promises, voting records they now wish to distance themselves from, and scandals both big and small. The fact that people of such influence are scared of how democratized information might weaken them demonstrates the power of the idea. Similarly, Microsoft has recently gotten into a great deal of mischief for trying to bribe a blogger into editing out the nastier aspects of Microsoft's history from the Wikipedia record. Think of Wikipedia as the first approximation of the world's consensus. Predictably, people of power are frightened by how that consensus might negatively view them.

The first attempt at collecting all human knowledge was the ancient library of Alexandria, which required that any book to pass through the Alexandrian port must be loaned to the library so that it might be copied. Such an attempt was admirable, but seems pitiful in comparison to the exponential growth and limitless potential of Wikipedia. No other source has proven such a magum opus of human thought. Scientists who fret about doomsday often say that mankind should construct some kind of off planet storage site to contain the story of mankind's existence. Should such a monument ever be erected, its creators would be hard pressed to find a better legacy than Wikipedia, which more than anything else, describes all aspects of humanity—even the ones that seem insignificant. As is what we should hope and expect from the sum of human knowledge.