of the Wiki.
this is my brief thought on wikipedia. as someone who reads an almost ungodly amount of it, I think that I am distinctly more qualified to comment on it than any random sampling. such as that one study which I can’t be bothered to find a link to now.
Jaron Lanier says that “reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure.” It’s true, in its way. Wikipedia is tremendously wrong. It’s got tons of factual mistakes. One time, I opened a page, and was greeted with an enormous close-up of a penis. Other times, huge chunks of articles have been cut off. But I’ve just fixed those problems and gone along my way. In other cases, articles are something that’s not quite ‘wrong.’ Just, odd. And serendipitous, and un-encyclopedic. Like this one.
It reads like something you would hear in a bad police movie, not the encyclopedia Britannica. Maybe it was copied directly out of something ordered from the back of Soldier of Fortune. Who knows. Is it wrong? I’m not sure. Will I ever be fighting a ‘close quarters battle?’ Doubtful. But does it give me a very intriguing perspective on a whole little subset of society and its discourse? Of course it does. Pages like that one make wiki fantastic. You can read into a little slice of a culture very different from yours, and learn a whole bunch of stuff about entire disciplines you once knew nothing of. With one or two clicks. From a firefox panel, even. So Jaron misses the point, and so do the Britannica-study guys.
Cory Doctorow says it much better than I could here. In an extended blog-style quote:
“Wikipedia isn’t great because it’s like the Britannica. The Britannica is great at being authoritative, edited, expensive, and monolithic. Wikipedia is great at being free, brawling, universal, and instantaneous.
Wikipedia entries are nothing but the emergent effect of all the angry thrashing going on below the surface…if you want to really navigate the truth via Wikipedia, you have to dig into those “history” and “discuss” pages hanging off of every entry. That’s where the real action is, the tidily organized palimpsest of the flamewar that lurks beneath any definition of “truth.”
The Britannica tells you what dead white men agreed upon, Wikipedia tells you what live Internet users are fighting over.
So, Wikipedia gets it wrong. Britannica gets it wrong, too. The important thing about systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail. Fixing a Wikipedia article is simple. Participating in the brawl takes more effort, but then, that’s the price you pay for truth, and it’s still cheaper than starting up your own Britannica.”
Fantastic.
Es muss sein.
even quicker, in firefox just hit “tab” to get to the address bar (usually that works, or else its just a quick click) and whatever you type in does a “im feeling lucky” google search, which is often the wikipedia entry. to be sure just throw “wiki” in after your search term. though i do love those search panel plugins… the last.fm plugin gives you access to most popular songs in a few clicks