(Full disclosure: I am, with Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and its only full-time paid participant. I feel very uncomfortable calling myself its "editor-in-chief." The participants would rebel at that title, and it would be "anti-wiki"--"anti-wiki" is bad, in case you didn't know.)
Among Wikipedia's active contributors are Axel Boldt, mathematics professor at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota; Michael Tinkler, a professor of art history; a female professor in both ESL and mathematics at Columbia U. and CUNY; and well over a dozen other Ph.D.'s, M.D.'s, and highly-educated people from around the world. In addition, there are many extremely bright, articulate graduate students and undergraduates involved. There are also dozens of computer programmers who are constantly displaying their knowledge both within and outside the bounds of computer science. Everyone is welcome and their work is judged on its own merits.
But--why all this activity and interest? Isn't it puzzling? Surely it is. Wiki software must be the most promiscuous form of publishing there is--Wikipedia will take anything from anybody. So how is it possible that so many otherwise upstanding intellectuals love Wikipedia (some, secretly) and spend so much time on it? Why aren't we writing for academic journals, or something?
It's fun, first of all. But it can be fun for intellectually serious people only if we know that we're creating something of quality. And how do we know that? The basic outlines of the answer ought to be fairly obvious to anyone who has read Eric S. Raymond's famous essay on the open source movement, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Remember, if we can edit any page, then we can edit each other's work. Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow. We catch each other's mistakes and enjoy correcting them.
So, we're are constantly monitoring Wikipedia's Recent Changes page. When--as happens rarely--some eedjit shows up and vandalizes a page, it's fixed nearly instantly. (We save back copies of all pages, and these are very easily accessible.) We (that is, we participants) work on a lot of different pages, and I think most of us feel some collective responsibility for how the whole thing looks. We're constantly cleaning up after each other and new people.
In the process, a camaraderie--a politeness and congeniality not found on many online discussion forums--has developed. We've got to respect each other, because we are each other's editors, and we all have more or less the same goal: to create a huge, high-quality free encyclopedia.
The way I see it, we're having fun creating a thing of beauty.
Perhaps this doesn't explain something, though. Why should highly-qualified people get involved with Wikipedia? It's not peer-reviewed. So, isn't it lightweight? Why should any serious researcher care about it? Why should anyone rely on it?
This is a common first reaction. The attitude appeared--gently expressed--in both the Technology Review article
Walter Bender, executive director of MIT's Media Laboratory, believes that what makes Britannica a valuable resource is the scope and depth of its editing, and free Web-based encyclopedias such as Wikipedia will probably never be able to compete with that.
and the New York Times article:
But even if Wikipedia doesn't become a popular resource it may survive, even thrive, because of what it offers to those working on it.
That is the view of James J. O'Donnell, a professor of classical studies and vice provost for information systems at the University of Pennsylvania...
"The thing and the experience may be much more valuable for those who are creating it than it is for somebody who just walks in saying, `So when is the Second Punic War and which one was that?' " Mr. O'Donnell said. "A community that finds a way to talk in this way is creating education and online discourse at a higher level."
The implication is that Wikipedia has a nice community, but it doesn't have much breadth, depth, or reliability; so if you want serious information, go to Britannica.
If Wikipedians believed that, we'd bag the whole thing. We think we are--gradually, and sometimes from very rough first drafts--developing a reliable resource. So what answer can I offer to the above concerns?
Part of the answer is already given above: Wikipedia's self-correction process (Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales calls it "self-healing") is very robust. There is considerable value created by the public review process that is continually ongoing on Wikipedia--value that is very easy to underestimate, for those who have not experienced it adequately.
Another part of the answer is that, of course, we've been around since just last January, 2001. (Britannica's had a few centuries' head start.) Significantly, Wikipedia's rate of growth has been steadily increasing--in terms of article numbers and quality, traffic to the website, and attracting more highly-qualified contributors. So it seems very reasonable to think that within a few years the project will surpass Britannica in both breadth and depth. At our current rate of growth, we will have over 100,000 articles by 2005; articles begun this year will be, in all likelihood, fleshed out to great detail. Not a few articles already have been.
But what about reliability? That's a third part of the answer. It seems very likely that, in coming months, Wikipedia will set up some sort of approval process, whereby certain versions of articles receive the stamp of approval of some body of Wikipedia reviewers. There have been two main proposals about how to set up a review process. Whatever the shape of the process, it would act entirely independently of article generation. (We certainly do not want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.) But after it's in place, we will be able to present a set of genuine expert-approved articles that can favorably compare with articles from any general encyclopedia--Britannica included.
Admittedly, Wikipedia isn't on the verge of world domination--yet. But it's growing beyond anyone's expectations. The rate of growth continues to increase. Once an approval process is installed, in short order Wikipedia will--I think--be able to boast a breadth, depth, and reliability to compare to any general encyclopedia you please.
Then we'll try to get to the depth and reliability of a whole reference library full of specialized encyclopedia--something no general encyclopedia has ever done.
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