And isn’t that risk a small price to pay for a resource that — rather than a pricey set of bound volumes that are updated only every decade or so — is free, easily accessible, sprawling, and constantly (often instantaneously) updated? To say nothing of one of Wikipedia’s greatest features: the ability to learn as you teach.
Alexander Glazkov (username: Solarapex), 33, came to Boston from Ukraine eight years ago. His raison de wiki is not so much to write what he knows as to teach himself about his adopted home as he writes. He’s written short entries on the Kharkiv River in Ukraine, which he knows well, but also about the Quabbin Aqueduct in West Boylston and the Winsor Dam in Belchertown.
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 GlassCobra 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, GlassCobra 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 GlassCobra. “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.”
But, as with anything, there’s always the risk of too much of a good thing. “Wikipediholism” is defined on-site, only half jokingly, as “an obscure form of OCD” whose sufferers “endlessly track and monitor the edits of users with whom they have become obsessed. This disorder can lead to a serious decrease in productivity in all other areas of the victim’s life, like any other addiction.”
Swastikipedia?
There will always be discontent, both inside and outside Wikipedia’s ranks. Recently the English tech tabloid The Register reported that “controversy has erupted among the encyclopedia’s core contributors, after a rogue editor revealed that the site’s top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown [sic] on perceived threats to their power,” and that mistrust of this “ruling clique” had “rank and file . . . on the verge of revolt.”
