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Inside nobody’s world
The Wikipedia Revolution: how a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia
By Andrew Lih
Aurum £14.99.
THERE must be better things to do on a night in than meticulously updating the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. Surely nobody really wants to spend their hours stubbornly stamping out errors within seconds of their appearance?
But for the obsessives who keep the people’s encyclopedia Wikipedia alive and kicking – for nothing more than kudos among a “community” of fellow internet pedants – it’s a different story.
As Andrew Lih, a self-confessed Wiki insider, finds in his smart biography of the website, there are more than enough people happy to devote hours, days, months of their spare time to making sure this global reference library stays up and running.
It’s easy to dismiss this invisible army of bedroom editors – “nobodies” in Lih’s words – as techy nerds who spent too much time in the school library when they should have been taking girls to the drive-in. But think how many times you have dipped into the Wiki fountain of knowledge.
This all-knowing, if occasionally distorted service has become a first-stop resource in work places, universities and, yes, even newsrooms around the world.
There will always be those who chant “yeah, just because Wikipedia says it, doesn’t mean it’s right” and that’s a fair point. People have been accused of murder and corruption over its pages with vandals taking advantage of the open- to-all editing function.
Sometimes allegations go unnoticed for months, which Lih points out is often most apparent when a figure is famous enough to have a Wiki entry but not famous enough to have an entry which is regularly checked for accuracy. What a sad pitfall of being a C-lister that is. But despite Wikipedia’s flaws, a basic trust seems to have been established that it is right more times that it is wrong.
Lih courses Wiki’s creation to its current dilemma at a developmental crossroads: there was a recent appeal for users to offer donations to help it expand its reach. There was an astronomical response.
And it is the people who keep it ticking that are most fascinating. In Lih’s book, you get the impression these Trivial Pursuit champions lie awake at night worrying that Britney’s birthday might have been wrongly amended, and the author admits several users are watched for potential burnout. Then there is the story of RickK, a “Wikipedian” – their word – from California. The poor sod eventually gave up on two years of voluntary work during which he make 36,000 edits. Mortified at a suggestion that he had made a mistake, he quit the “community” in a fit of anger.
It was an example of how serious Wiki is taken. Maybe the characters Lih introduces us to have a reason for such earnest diligence. After all, the basic idea of the world sharing all of its knowledge for free, educating where possible and without the intrusion of political bias or marketing, is hard to fault.
The challenge now, touched on by Lih, is surely to take that premise and provide a more global balance, possibly reaching a stage where entries on the history and life of non-English speaking countries are as long or longer than the reams of information listed for forgettable American celebrities.
RICHARD OSLEY
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