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

Fri May 6 04:02:25 UTC 2005

On 5/5/05, Viajero <viajero at quilombo.nl> wrote:
> Wikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide: huge, nerdy, and imprecise.
> 
> By Paul Boutin

Nice article overall.  Kudos to Boutin.  A few comments, just because
this article was a lot of fun:

> It's too bad Douglas Adams wasn't able to see his vision brought to life. 

It is, isn't it?  It's probably time to write an Adamsian description
of the actual Wikipedia.  I had forgotten how closely the description
matched ;-)

> 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.

We have great coverage of beer, too.

> Wikipedia, with more than 1 million entries in at least 10 languages, is

Did he get his zeroes right in the original?  

> Don't expect Wikipedia to change your life, though, unless you've
> secretly longed to be an encyclopedia editor. Just because you give

We need a good "Encyclopedia Tycoon" game for the tens of thousands of
people who would love to be just that.

> But, like blogging, editing the Net's encyclopedia appeals to a
> small, enthusiastic demographic.

Showing a little POV here.  And a year or so behind the times... I
expect this will be proven untrue for [encyclopedia]-editing, and it
is already untrue for blogging.

> 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.

I always ask critics to pick their disparaging comparisons carefully. 
(We have lots of gaps; better to pick a really good one.   for
instance, we know almost nothing about the districts of most Russian
oblasts.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblasts_of_Russia ).   It's a
little disingenuous to call the seven-section [[Tron]] article a
'seven-part entry'.  And, while there was no "Glass Darkly" entry
until this article was published,  there /were/ entries on 28 of
Bergman's other 42 films.

and I actually think our readers [a dfiferent demographic from Slate
readers :) ] prefer slashdot to the New Yorker, and Cory to E.L...

> But excessive nerdiness isn't what's keeping Wikipedia from becoming the
> Net's killer resource. Accuracy is. 

Heh heh heh.

> Just because the Wikipedia elves will probably fix those errors by the

To cross this thread with a discussion of swams and coordination, the
kinds of "elves" that fix these kinds of errors are
a) rarely long-time users
b) rarely users with accounts
c) much, much faster than a core group of editors could be.

> 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.

Well, at least 100,000 people have edited so far.  So I guess two
orders of magnitude suggests 10 million readers... could be true.  But
everyone has something they feel passionate about correcting.  Even my
luddite mother was impelled to edit the article on her favorite
composer.

> 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.

Exciting!  Tell  us more...

> Wikis are a great way to collect group knowledge, but not every
> reference book in the galaxy will turn into one. 

True dat.  In fact, Wikimedia produces a number of non-wiki reference
works... ;-)

-- 
+sj+