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The End of Wikipedia

Written on 4th December 2008 14 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need…of some…strangers hand
In a…desperate land
Jim Morrison, 1967

Wikipedia received $890,000 from the Stanton Foundation in order to make the encyclopedia easier to use. A wiki edit page currently has too much knobs and twiddly bits for an average user. Three newly-hired developers will take these complex details away.

“Wikipedia attracts writers who have a moderate-to-high level of technical understanding, but it excludes lots of smart, knowledgeable people who are less tech-centric,” Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner said in a press release. “One of our key priorities is to attract those people and persuade them to help write and edit the encyclopedia.”

Will a lower barrier to edit mean the end of Wikipedia?

Making the crowd-sourced encyclopedia easier to edit will make it easier to abuse. The fact that there is a hurdle to overcome is what prevents Wikipedia from becoming a mess. Some even argue – Andrew Keen anyone? – that Wikipedia already is a mess. Just imagine what will happen if even Joe Sixpack starts editing pages about brain surgery.

Or will it make Wikipedia even more interesting?

“Ideally”, CNet writer Caroline McCarthy notes, “[Wikipedia's] millions of articles will have a broader depth of coverage”.

I don’t know anyone who regularly edits Wikipedia pages. A few thousand attic room geeks decide what kind of information we get to see. So yes, it’s good to welcome some ordinary citizens to share their specific knowledge on hobby’s or their field of expertise.

It all comes down to…

Whether you believe in people are not. Are you an elitist, like Andrew Keen, who sees Web 2.0 users as an infinite amount of monkeys and therefore as a threat to our culture? Or are you the Jimmy Wales-kinda guy? When I asked him some tough Wikipedia questions during an interview in January, he replied: “It’s very difficult to fool a community”. Wales repeats the same mantra as eBay: “People are good”

[poll id="18"]

14 Comments »

About the author: Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .

14 comments/trackbacks to “The End of Wikipedia”

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By StrAbZ on Dec 4, 2008

It wont change anything… because it’s like thinking that peoples able to at this time edit wikipedia, are smart, because they now technologies? I don’t think so.

And it’s now possible for a Joe Sixpack (that now a little in tech) to edit a page about brain surgery.

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Dec 4, 2008

Well, I tried editing stuff a few times but when confronted with the editing screen I bailed out. No doubt making it easier will attract more editors and that will attract more errors.

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By David Weller on Dec 4, 2008

I was once an Open Directory editor- I had complete freedom in the sense that I had the ‘key’ to the editing page. However, there were monitors higher up the organization that had the right to fire me. Expertise in your subject, and collaboration with peers under rules, was expected of editors.

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By Hoof on Dec 4, 2008

I thing knowledge and techsavvyness are a bit connected, but not a lot. I never got around the hurdles to, and consider myself reasonably smart.

It’s is impossible to do predictions I guess. When it’s is easier to edit, you could also argue more mistakes are corrected (I know I would correct stuff).

A system where edits from contributors that get corrected a lot are put into quarantine or something might be a good idea. Just leave it to the crowd to monitor new information before it is put in the ‘official’ page.

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By Sjef Kerkhofs on Dec 4, 2008

I strongly believe in the power of crowdsourcing. I think the community corrects errors most of the time.

I agree with Jimmy Wales: “It’s very difficult to fool a community”

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By UCBearcats on Dec 4, 2008

This blog post has been dugg on digg.com. If you liked it please take the time to give it a digg.

http://digg.com/tech_news/An_e.....its_Demise

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By Samuel on Dec 4, 2008

Thanks for this post. My first reaction was: great, this is a good thing. But I was thinking from a corporate perspectief. We are using the mediawiki platform for our enterprise wiki’s. Although they are much-used in R&D, we see that less-tech-savvy employees would rather have a more user-friendly (mostly relating to a WYSIWYG editor) than the current interface. So, from a company perspective I’m really happy with this and hope this will encourage our employees to use wiki’s more often.

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By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on Dec 5, 2008

Thanks for the comments. I sense that you’re not really worried. Though the poll says that 29 percent does worry about the new step. Let’s see what happens. I’ve scheduled a look back post for December 2009 in my Google Calendar.

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By erwin blom on Dec 6, 2008

So what do you think, are people bad?

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By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on December 6th, 2008:
I don’t think I can answer that question, though I’d love to deny it. After spending three weeks in a country where everybody tries to rip you off, it’s easy to say yes. When turning on the news, it’s easy to say yes. But it’s not easy to live with the very thought that people are bad. So to come to an optimistic conclusion, I like to believe people are good. That’s makes life more interesting and worthwhile. Especially since approaching people with that attitude often stimulates a positive reply (giving the self-fulfilling prophecy a good spin here).

What do you think?

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By erwin blom on Dec 6, 2008

I’m somewhere in the middle as well ;-) I focus on the people with a vision, a goal, inspiration, fun. Something like that.

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