[WikiEN-l] Slate: "Wikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide: huge, nerdy, and imprecise."

Thu May 5 20:27:32 UTC 2005

Wikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide: huge, nerdy, and imprecise.

By Paul Boutin
Posted Tuesday, May 3, 2005, at 2:37 PM PT

It's too bad Douglas Adams wasn't able to see his vision brought to 
life. I don't mean the so-so movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to 
the Galaxy. I'm talking about Wikipedia, the Web's own don't-panic guide 
to everything.

The parallels between The Hitchhiker's Guide (as found in Adams' 
original BBC radio series and novels) and Wikipedia are so striking, 
it's a wonder that the author's rabid fans don't think he invented time 
travel. Since its editor was perennially out to lunch, the Guide was 
amended "by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty 
offices on an afternoon and saw something worth doing." This anonymous 
group effort ends up outselling Encyclopedia Galactica even though "it 
has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least 
wildly inaccurate."

Adams actually launched his own onlin guide before he died in 2001, but 
it was, he wrote, "still a little like the fossil record in that it 
consists almost entirely of gaps." Wikipedia is a colossal 
improvement—it's just like the fictional Hitchhiker's Guide, only 
nerdier. Wikipedia is the Web fetishist's ideal data structure: It's 
free, it's open-source, and it features a 4,000-word exegesis of Dune.

For decades, software-makers competed to build complex collaboration
systems. These high-end tools, like Lotus Notes, let companies specify 
who can edit which documents and establish complex approval procedures 
for changes. In 1995, software researcher Ward Cunningham destroyed the
hierarchies by designing a site, the WikiWikiWeb, that anyone could dit.
(Wiki-wiki means "quick quick" in Hawaiian. Cunningham saw it on a 
Honolulu Airport bus.)

Wikipedia, with more than 1 million entries in at least 10 languages, is
the mother of all wikis, but there are also wikis devoted to quotations,
the city of Seattle, and Irish politics. (Check out this wiki of wikis,
which lists more than 1,000 sites.) Instead of enforcing rules, wikis 
trust that groups can behave. Anyone can edit or reorganize their 
contents. If you realize something's missing, incomplete, or incorrect, 
you can fix it yourself without asking permission. "People told me that 
the experience changed their lives," Cunningham said via e-mail.

Don't expect Wikipedia to change your life, though, unless you've 
secretly longed to be an encyclopedia editor. Just because you give 
everyone read and write permissions doesn't mean everyone will use them. 
Wiki lovers argue that they are collaborative, self-correcting, living 
documents that evolve to hold the sum of all the knowledge of their 
users. But, like blogging, editing the Net's encyclopedia appeals to a 
small, enthusiastic demographic.

Like the Guide's lengthy entries on drinking, Wikipedia mirrors the
interests of its writers rather than its readers. You'll find more on
Slashdot than The New Yorker. The entry for Cory Doctorow is three times 
as long as the one for E.L. Doctorow. Film buffs have yet to post a page 
on Through a Glass Darkly; they're too busy tweaking the seven-part 
entry onTron.

But excessive nerdiness isn't what's keeping Wikipedia from becoming the
Net's killer resource. Accuracy is. In a Wired feature story, Daniel 
Pink (kind of) praised the hulking encyclopedia by saying you can 
"[l]ook up any topic you know something about and you'll probably find 
that the Wikipedia entry is, if not perfect, not bad." But don't people 
use encyclopedias to look up stuff they don't know anything about? Even 
if a reference tool is 98 percent right, it's not useful if you don't 
know which 2 percent is wrong. The entry for Slate, for instance, claims 
that several freelance writers are "columnists on staff" and still lists 
Cyrus Krohn as publisher months after the Washington Post Co.'s Cliff 
Sloan took over.

Just because the Wikipedia elves will probably fix those errors by the 
time you read this article doesn't mean that the system is inherently
self-healing. Not everyone who uses a wiki wants to hit from both sides 
of the plate. The subset of enthusiastic writers and editors is orders 
of magnitude smaller than the group of passive readers who'll never get 
around to contributing anything.

Bashing Wikipedia is nearly as risky as bashing Scientology. I know that
I'm going to get barraged by the Wikivangelists—"If an entry's wrong,"
they'll say, "stop complaining about it and fix it." But if I were truly
conscientious, I'd have to stop and edit something almost every time I 
use Wikipedia. Most people are like Douglas Adams' characters—we 
resolvefirmly to stay and fix it after work then forget the whole 
episode by lunchtime. Wikipedia is a good first stop to get the basics 
in a hurry, especially for tech and pop culture topics that probably 
won't ever make it into Britannica. I'm just careful not to use it to 
settle bar bets or as source material for an article. I made that 
mistake exactly once.

Wikis are a great way to collect group knowledge, but not every 
reference book in the galaxy will turn into one. A couple of weeks ago, 
online reports claimed that Microsoft's Encarta decided to wikify its 
paltry 42,000 entries. Encarta's Editorial Director Gary Alt told me 
that the truth is prosaic. Readers will be able to submit suggested 
corrections or improvements to existing entries, but Encarta is not 
looking for new entries, and the editors will still decide what's worth 
including.

An elitist encyclopedia like Encarta will never be able to match the
breadth or speed of a user-edited reference library, but it's smart to 
coax readers into helping stretch its inherent advantage—reliability. 
Alt told me he's hiring all of six people to review and research reader 
submissions. Unlike the editor of The Hitchhiker's Guide, they'll 
probably be eating lunch at their desks.

Related in SlateLast year, Clive Thompson asked if an online crowd could
write a novel. In January, Jack Shafer said that blogs need a little 
time to catch up to the hype.

Paul Boutin is a Silicon Valley writer who spent 15 years as a software
engineer and manager.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2117942/