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.”
(The hierarchy at Wikipedia, whose head office, the Wikimedia Foundation Inc., will be moving from St. Petersburg, Florida, to San Francisco this winter, is complicated. Learn about its “mix of anarchic, despotic, democratic, republican, meritocratic, plutocratic, and technocratic elements” at meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Power_structure.)
Indeed, some disillusioned former Wikipedians gripe about such bureaucratic heavy-handedness and/or the rabidity of some of the site’s devotees, grumbling about “Swastikipedia.” Meanwhile, Web sites such as wikipediareview.com and wikipedia-watch.org charge themselves with debunking what they see as the self-satisfied smugness of so-called Wikipediots. (“They have a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information,” the latter proclaims.)
Hell, Wikipedia’s own co-founder, Larry Sanger, left the site in 2002 — not just because he was uneasy with the potential for abuse and inaccuracy, but because he believed Wikipedia’s populism went too far, to the point of disdain for experts and scholars. He’s since created another reference site, Citizendium, which, striving for “credibility and quality, not just quantity,” enforces stricter rules, and requires editors to post under their own names. (Having launched in March of this year, it currently has 4200 entries.)
Of course, it’s never heartening to learn of the CIA and the Vatican perpetrating propagandistic edits all over the site, or to hear American Library Association President Michael Gorman castigating Wikipedia for creating “a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet.” But, by and large, Wikipedia is doing good work.
When Klein first discovered the site, in 2001, “It was really unattractive. There was no design, just text. I remember I wasn’t particularly impressed.” Now, having spent thousands of hours helping build and refine it — and not just the English site; he also posts in German and in the Uto-Aztecan language of Nahuatl — Klein is convinced that it’s one of the great projects of world history: “a completely free, public collection of modern knowledge about society.” That’s one reason language-specific Wikipedia content will be bundled into each One Laptop per Child computer shipped to the developing world.
It shouldn’t be too staggering to see how big this has become. “We’re now a people who dedicate most of our time to our online personas,” says Diana Boston (username: OneWomanArmy923), 38, a non-governmental-organization worker who’s originally from Whitman, and who’s written on feminism, Émile Zola, abortion, responsible drug use, and ducks. “I’m not surprised that an online encyclopedia of knowledge, where anyone can give their two cents, is a big hit.”
