
In 2006, Marshall Poe’s article on Wikipedia in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “The Hive”, recounts that Wikipedia’s founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, had originally intended to employ scholars to build an online encyclopedia, called Nupedia, but it proved very slow going. When they decided to let anyone in the community contribute, they “looked on Wikipedia as anything more than a lark”. This is evident in Sanger’s flip announcement of Wikipedia to the Nupedia discussion list. “Humor me,” he wrote. “Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.” And, to Sanger’s surprise, go they did. At the end of January, Wikipedia had seventeen “real” articles (entries with more than 200 characters). By the end of February, it had 150; March, 572; April, 835; May, 1,300; June, 1,700; July, 2,400; August, 3,700. At the end of the year, the site boasted approximately 15,000 articles and about 350 “Wikipedians.” Last year, in March 2008, Wikipedia hit ten million articles. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/10M_articles
What propels the Wikipedia editors seems to be their personal interest in certain topics. The stronger their feelings, the more they seem to edit. This is evidenced in the most commonly edited wiki pages:
The result of strong feelings about subjects in Wikipedia is that emotionally charged subjects like George Bush or Michael Jackson have been subject to “edit wars” where people push their own personal biases. According to Poe, in June 2001, only six months after Wikipedia was founded, a Polish Wikipedian named Krzysztof Jasiutowicz made an arresting and remarkably forward-looking observation. The Internet, he mused, was nothing but a “global Wikipedia without the end-user editing facility.” What is interesting is that on the web, most blogs or website are private property, and the only one who can edit them are the owners of the sites.
However, the communal editing function pushes out the bias, and the result is a neutral recounting of the facts that allows most readers to draw their own conclusions. Thus, the Wikipedia aphorism, “Given enough eyeballs, all errors become shallow.”, does not just apply to correcting dates and punctuation, but to the elimination of opinion and bias. Because the communal edit function improves the quality of information, the emotional fuel (basically a self interested need to express oneself) that propels the contributors adds information while their personal biases are filtered out. The net result is that the contributors self interest benefits the community as a whole.
You say:
ReplyDelete"Do people contribute to Wikipedia out of the goodness of their hearts? I don’t think so. If they did, they would contribute and edit any old article."
My question is why would you want people creating and editing a topic that they either know nothing about or have no interest in? What would happen if I were to write an article on Russian Literature? It would probably be shallow and error-prone. Of course, other editors could fix any errors, but what would be the sense in setting up an article for disaster, especially if others are using as a resource. If I instead chose to write about Hemet High School, the article would certainly be more accurate and elaborate. This is not because I lack the benevolence to contribute to the former article; I simply lack the background.
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Wikipedia's mission: "Wikipedia is a nonprofit project that exists for one reason: the free and open sharing of knowledge."
Wikipedia's contributors: "Wikipedia is written collaboratively by an international group of volunteers"
Wikipedia's success hinges on contributions from unpaid volunteers. If this doesn't stem from the goodness of people's hearts, I don't know what would.
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Furthermore, the reasons you give for why they contribute to wikipedia are the only reasons why someone should want to contribute:
"…they edit the pages relevant to the subjects that they are interested in. People seem to have a need to express themselves on their topics of interest, especially when they have strong emotions about it."
In my experience, the best research and insight comes from those genuinely passionate for a topic. Those who are inspired by something often delve into and investigate it. These are precisely the people we should look to for information on a specific topic.