As Web humorist Lore Sjöberg writes on wired.com, “Wikipedia exists in a state of quantum significance flux. It’s simultaneously a shining, flawless collection of incontrovertible information, and a debased pile of meaningless words thrown together by uneducated lemurs with political agendas. It simply cannot exist in any state between these two extremes.”
Ignore it, make use of it, or become addicted to it as you see fit. Wikipedia is a fact of life with or without your approval. And if its recent past is any indication, it’s going to only get bigger — especially as related projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, WikiBooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, and Wikiversity continue to come into their own.
One thing that’s impossible to deny is Wikipedia’s sheer scope. There are 5,986,389 registered users on the English site alone. It’s a given that the vast majority of those (your humble correspondent included) have never done much more than add a link or fix a fact or correct a misspelling. But that’s just the point: small contributions such as those, taken together with more substantial writing from thousands of others, have helped to make something great.
David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, says that Wikipedia is “epically important. It’s not just that it’s generally a good encyclopedia. We’ve really proved something to ourselves: we now know without a doubt that some immense and immensely complex works of humans can be created by removing most of the elements of control.”
Online janitors
Serious, regular contributors, or Wikipedians, usually register with the site and set up a “user page.” That makes their entries more credible because they’re accountable, by name (or at least pseudonym), for what they write. You can learn a lot about the sources of your information by looking up contributor’s profiles (in the search window, type “user:[screen name]”).
Wikipedians are a diverse group. Poke around their user pages and you’ll see arrays of multi-colored “user boxes” proudly announcing that the contributor is nearsighted, or an atheist, or Catholic, or gay, or Swedish, or a teenager, or a backgammon player, or a golden retriever lover, or a pilot, or a Zen Buddhist, or a Jedi, or a Red Sox fan, or an advanced C++ programmer, or an Islay malt drinker, or a Tolkien reader, or a Lovecraft fan, or a guitarist, or a snowboarder, or a pagan, or someone who “advocates the use of more cowbell.”
For his part, Alex Sawczynec (username: GlassCobra), 20, a Northeastern third-year, is a Gryffindor, likes to watch Adult Swim, and prefers New York–style pizza. He’s also a tireless reverter of vandalism and corrector of misinformation on thousands of Wikipedia’s pages.
Although he’d been using the site since high school, Sawczynec confesses that the “stigma of being a nerd” prevented him from getting too involved, at first. Finally, this April, he registered an account and started editing. In just eight months, he’s already logged more than 7000 edits across a wide spectrum of articles, from Cam’ron to César Chávez to Insane Clown Posse.
