The Charms and Troubles of Wikipeda

In Edit This Page, Evgeny Morozov recounts the history and evolution of Wikipedia as discussed by Andrew Lih in his book, “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia”. With compliments to Lih’s book, Morozov offers an insightful explanation of Wikipedia’s transition from the unfettered democracy of its early days to its current to a much more bureaucratic form, an inevitable transition, Morozov suggests, as the site grew and attracted a larger more diverse set of editors (not to mention many “vandals”). Yet he goes on to criticize Lih for failing to give a comprehensive philosophical explanation of why Wikipedia works. He then criticizes the site itself for an administrative structure that forces “subject experts . . . to engage in pointless intellectual debates with Wikipedia’s bureaucratic guardians, many of whom are persuaded only by hyperlinks, not cogent arguments.”

Morozov’s admonishment of Lih’s philosophical failings may be only a foil for his own failure to grasp the unique nature of Wikipedia. In his article The Charms of Wikipedia published in the New York Review of Books, Nicholson Baker captures the idiosyncrasies of Wikipedia and describes how it is precisely these idiosyncrasies that make the site such a dynamic and vital resource. Proving that one man’s flaws are another man’s charms, Baker explains that on Wikipedia “any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn’t a commercial product.” This is not to say that Wikipedia’s founders did not aim to create an accurate source, they did. And while the information on Wikipedia is far from perfect, it is not so far from perfect to justify critics’ complaints (in her article on Wikipedia in the New Yorker, Stacy Schiff cites a Nature survey that found that Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Encyclopedia Britannica’s). Yet to focus too heavily on the question of Wikipedia’s accuracy distracts from the real beauty of Wikipedia, its cultural import. While Morozov may bemoan the insufficiency of the entry on nouvelle vague-director Claude Chabrol compared to that ofTransformers-director Michael Bay, he can’t deny the fact that most people in this country would probably rather watch a film starring Megan fox than Jean-Paul Belmondo. Yet with 13 million articles, Wikipedia is also a repository for people’s diverse and obscure interests. The cite could never be as extensive or as relevant as it is if it were bound to the same restrictive methodologies as more traditional encyclopedias. By preferencing online sources rather than library tomes, Wikipedia both reflects and perpetuates the fact the internet has spawned a generative, fundamentally populist form of knowledge-creation, one that is presently our greatest epistemological tool. To lament this fact as Morozov does is to be sorely out of touch with the contemporary society that Wikipedia reflects with both its methodology and its flaws.