THE WIZARDS BEHIND THE WIKIPEDIA CURTAIN

In a fascinating piece for the Boston Review, Evgeny Morozov writes that "Wikipedia’s economics of knowledge creation are fundamentally unsound". It seems the people's encyclopedia is ripe for reform, or at least more scrutiny.

Reviewing Andrew Lih's "The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia" (which comes across as an unnecessary read), Morozov highlights the limits of this dotcom miracle. Sure, it's amazing that a bunch of strangers have "leveraged the power of the Internet to create a highly functioning, über-productive community that voluntarily creates usable (and frequently used) knowledge for others". Yet at a time when Wikipedia has become a first stop for information gathering online, with more than 3m articles, how reliable is it?

As reliable as its contributors, of course. So it is a shame the system alienates actual experts, "who are forced to engage in pointless intellectual debates with Wikipedia’s bureaucratic guardians, many of whom are persuaded only by hyperlinks, not cogent arguments." Another quirk is the fact that Wikipedians are obsessed with popular culture ("The 711-word entry on nouvelle vague filmmaker Claude Chabrol, for example, is much less impressive than the 1867-word article on Transformers-director Michael Bay"). As Morozov writes:

There is something unappealing about the value system of a project that prizes, say, movie reviews quoted from college newspapers over elaborate entries in the authoritative Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, simply because the latter does not have an easy-to-link Web site.

It is also disconcerting to consult a resource that places articles about soap-opera villains on a par with, say, real people who have done actual important things in the world (something The Economist has opined about). But the most incriminating detail may be this one, about the demographics of Wikipedia contributors:

Wikipedia’s potential lies in harnessing the “wisdom of crowds”; however, those crowds are only as wise as they are diverse. The individuals who compose the crowd need to bring different sets of expertise to the project. But in Wales’s own words, Wikipedians are “80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30.” This homogeneity, too, may explain the persistence of certain knowledge gaps.

It seems churlish to complain about a free gift. That so many people are willing to come together to create a fairly reliable source of information on a variety of subjects is incredible--as Morozov says, it is a feat that works in practice, not in theory. Thankfully, Wikipedia is not going away any time soon. But as the Kool-Aid so many of us are drinking, it's amazing how few of us consider its ingredients (or add enough salt).

~ EMILY BOBROW

Picture credit: Extra Ketchup (via Flickr)