Village Voice, NY
Feb 4 2005
Choose Your Own Encyclopedia
Wikipedia
by Julian Dibbell
In olden times, when music was “sold” on shiny discs called “CDs” and
people took photographs with cameras instead of telephones, there was
this thing called an encyclopedia, which cost as much as a round-trip
to Hong Kong, took up more shelf space than a home entertainment
center, and contained basic information on every topic worth knowing
about. Four years ago, a couple of dotcom dreamers were inspired to
reinvent the encyclopedia in the freewheeling, massively
collaborative image of the Internet itself. The result was
wikipedia.org, today the biggest encyclopedia ever compiled, with
over 1 million copyright-free online articles and growing – every word
of it composed and edited by, literally, anybody who feels like it.
No, really. Go to any Wikipedia entry you choose – “Hindu philosophy,”
“drunk driving,” “pataphysics” – and click on the Edit This Page tab.
Bingo: Whatever you write immediately becomes the last word on the
subject. And if this sounds like a recipe for mob rule, that’s
because it is. But mob rule turns out to be a surprisingly good way
to write an encyclopedia. Typos abound, and especially in articles on
controversial topics like the Armenian genocide or George W. Bush,
the constant wars between opposing camps of revisers can reduce texts
to a state of almost Heisenbergian indeterminacy. But outright
factual errors generally get corrected fast (within minutes, on
average), and in the range and depth of its articles, Wikipedia
handily holds its own against encyclopedias produced the
old-fashioned way. Funny: It’s almost as if the great intellectual
unwashed could be trusted to manage its own culture.
