Wikipedia is not losing its momentum. First some vital statistics:

Wikipedia, which was launched in 2001, is now the seventeenth-most-popular site on the Internet, generating more traffic daily than MSNBC.com and the online versions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal combined. The number of visitors has been doubling every four months; the site receives as many as fourteen thousand hits per second.

Given how I feel about metrics, I consider something else a sign of Wikipedia’s continuing journey to the mainstream. The comedy show, Colbert report, uses the online collaborative encyclopedia to coin the word Wikiality. And at the same time it highlights how fallacious TV programmes and shows can be with their own interpretation of reality.

On Monday night’s Colbert Report, the defender of truth himself praised Wikipedia for "wikiality", "the reality that exists if you make something up and enough people agree with you". He urged viewers to "find the Wikipedia entry on elephants and create an entry that stated their population had tripled in the last six months, a fact he freely stated to not know if it was "actually true," with his sidebar stating "it isn’t."

But Wikipedia is not a democracy of content at all. Millions of people being able input their version of ‘reality’ may be democratic in the sense of open access. A handful (in internet terms) of editors determining what sticks, with Jimmy Wales as the ultimate arbiter is monarchy. There are two hundred thousand registered users on the English-language site, of whom about thirty-three hundred—fewer than two per cent—are responsible for seventy per cent of the work. So half the story about Wikiality is missing, Mr Colbert, and you could have found this out without your show stunt.

Scores of internet users took Colbert’s bait, repeatedly vandalizing approximately 20 articles on elephants before all being placed under a lock. The move also subsequently caused Wikipedia administrator Tawker to block Stephen Colbert from the website, reportedly to verify his identity.

This is the kind of smarmy entertainment that we came to expect from TV – make it sound and look good, but don’t scratch the surface and, God forbid, make an informed argument. This is MSM for heaven’s sake! If you want unfiltered facts, credibility and a more complex picture, that’s what the web is for!

Alright, I’ll calm down, it’s a comedy show.

New York Post has a thorough article on Wikipedia asking if it can conquer expertise. An odd question as it pre-supposes that expertise doesn’t reside in the wild where Wikipedia can harness it better than let’s say the Britannica. (I refer the honorable reader to the post on self-determination I blogged earlier). I found the social dimension surrounding Wikipedia astounding.

There are Aspergian Wikipedians (seventy-two), bipolar Wikipedians, vegetarian Wikipedians, antivegetarian Wikipedians, existential Wikipedians, pro-Luxembourg Wikipedians, and Wikipedians who don’t like to be categorized. According to a page on the site, an avid interest in Wikipedia has been known to afflict “computer programmers, academics, graduate students, game-show contestants, news junkies, the unemployed, the soon-to-be unemployed and, in general, people with multiple interests and good memories.”

It is openess that gives rise to a greater variety, which encourages emergence of new alternative ways of…. doing things. In the off-line environment, we are governed by various sets of rules, often locked into place and conflicting, with little choice but a radical breaking down before we see a real change. The online underworld has given us an opportunity to watch real alternatives evolve emergently. Because of its unexpectedness and vastness, the internet has been accepted as chaotic and without structures. This is not strictly speaking true – just because you cannot see a structure, it does not mean there isn’t one. It may be one you are not used to and for many that seems hard to imagine.

Curiously, though, mob rule has not led to chaos. Wikipedia, which began as an experiment in unfettered democracy, has sprouted policies and procedures.

…

Five robots troll the site for obvious vandalism, searching for obscenities and evidence of mass deletions, reverting text as they go. More egregious violations require human intervention. Essjay recently caught a user who, under one screen name, was replacing sentences with nonsense and deleting whole entries and, under another, correcting the abuses—all in order to boost his edit count. He was banned permanently from the site. Some users who have been caught tampering threaten revenge against the admins who apprehend them. Essjay says that he routinely receives death threats.

So some people take Wikipedia too seriously it seems. Jimmy Wales is ambivalent about the rules and procedures but believes that they are necessary.

Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it’s a bunch of random people interacting.

There are varied opinions about Wikipedia mentioned in the article and even Eric Raymond, the author of the Cathedral and the Bazaar (that opened my eyes to open-source back in 1990s and apparently inspired Jimmy Wales) says that Wikipedia is full of moonbats. This completes the circle – the Wikipedia’s entry for moonbat records my contribution to its definition. Gotta love the Web.

via Gothamist

Update: CBSNews.com’s Melissa P. McNamara writes about Colbert report show and Wikiality in her column on August 9th.

TAGS: None