He’s a member of the Massachusetts WikiProject, and the Arizona WikiProject, and he also founded WikiProject Geology — even though, at the time, he didn’t particularly care about rocks. “I found that geology didn’t have a project, but it deserved to,” he says. “Organizing this project, I became a fan of geology.”
He’s got the right idea, says Klein. “One usually makes a better editor of topics that one finds fascinating and new, rather than a topic on which one is a long-time expert.” Otherwise, he says, one runs the risk of bringing long-held biases to the editing process. And anyway, it’s much more fun to contribute to articles on subjects you’d like to learn about than ones you already know.
Vigilance vs. Vandalism
Wikipedia’s controversies are well-advertised. And many of them stem from the fact that large swaths of the site lie dormant and un-patrolled indefinitely, leaving them vulnerable to misinformation. One of the reasons Sawczynec joined up was that he had great affection for the Wiki ideal, and wanted to protect it. But, he says, “to put it plainly, Wikipedia doesn’t have nearly enough people as it needs to combat vandalism. We’re constantly undermanned.”
As an administrator, Sawczynec is forever scanning new edits — he has a watch list of about 4000 articles of his own choosing, which is sprawling even by Wiki standards — ever ready to swoop in and undo misinformation.
“I keep an eye on a lot of pages that get vandalized a ton,” he says. “Rappers, for example. You would not believe how often they get messed with. The page for Lil’ Wayne? That gets vandalized. All. The. Time. I keep an eye on wrestling pages, which also get vandalized a lot. Movie pages get vandalized often.”
And then there’s the ne plus ultra of fucked-with entries: George W. Bush. “It does get locked occasionally, but as a general rule we try not to lock it unless there’s constant vandalism from a lot of different people,” says Sawczynec. “If there’s a lot of vandalism from only one person, we wouldn’t lock the page — we’d block the person. Basically, we try to take the measure that will still allow people the most access to the page.”
But for all the quarrels that are inherent in Wikipedia’s free-for-all setup, the site is just as remarkable for the sense of community it fosters. “It’s so funny,” says Blackburn. “The interface of it is very cut-and-dry, black-and-white. But a lot of times it feels like a coffeehouse atmosphere. You have the actual articles, but you also have the discussion pages where people are arguing about knowledge, arguing about the littlest things.”
On page after page in this vast virtual salon, smart people talk and talk about every subject under the sun. “You really get a sense of camaraderie or friendship with people from all walks of life,” says Blackburn. “You also form a lot of relationships through people that have similar interests as you.”
For the compulsively curious, Klein insists, Wikipedia is “10 times better than being in a library with a talented reference librarian. If you start editing an arbitrary page of historical interest — a page about a particular Roman emperor, or a Japanese historical story — you come back a couple weeks later and you have messages from people who care about that. And you can talk to them.”
