Participatory Media: Wikipedia
Wikipedia.org is a free online encyclopedia that anybody — anybody at all — can edit, simply by clicking on a button that says “edit this page.”
Wikipedia’s promise is nothing less than the liberation of human knowledge — both by incorporating all of it through the collaborative process, and by freely sharing it with everybody who has access to the internet. Wikipedia’s English-language version doubled in size last year and now has over 1m articles. By this measure, it is almost 12 times larger than the print version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Taking in the other 200-odd languages in which it is published, Wikipedia has more than 3m articles. Over 100,000 people all over the world have contributed, with a total of almost 4m “edits” between them. Wikipedia already has more “visitors” than the online New York Times, CNN and other mainstream sites. It has become a vital research tool for huge numbers of people. And Wikipedia is only five years old.
This success has made Wikipedia the most famous example of a wider wiki phenomenon. Wikis are web pages that allow anybody who is allowed to log into them to change them. The word “wiki” comes from the Hawaiian word for “quick,” but also stands for “what I know is.”
Whereas blogs contain the unedited, opinionated voice of one person, wikis explicitly and literally allow groups of people to get on the proverbial “same page.”
Jimmy Wales started the (not-for-profit) Wikimedia Foundation that operates Wikipedia, as well as lesser-known sites such as Wiktionary, Wikinews and Wikibooks. He says Wikipedia’s editing process “is much more traditional than people realise.” Fewer than 1% of all users do half the total edits. They add up to a few hundred committed volunteers who know each other and value their reputations. Besides “democracy” on the site, Mr. Wales says, there is occasional “aristocracy” (when editors with superior reputations get more say than others) and even occasional “monarchy” (”that’s my role”) when quick intervention is needed.
The journal Nature recently commissioned a study to compare the accuracy of a sample of articles drawn from Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica respectively. Nature’s experts found 162 errors in Wikipedia’s articles and 123 errors in Britannica’s.
“The Wiki Principle,” The Economist