Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
In the wacky wiki world, a Web browser is all you need to start contributing. But when the goal is to create an encyclopedia, such democracy has some pitfalls.
Apr 27, 2004 | Like most frontier sheriffs, Wikipedia Arbitration Committee member Martin Harper wears his badge with a mixture of pride and caution.
A 24-year-old software engineer from Worcester, England, Harper knows what it's like to be new. It was only two years ago, after all, that Harper, an immigrant fresh in from the Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" online encyclopedia project, H2G2, encountered the scary freedom of wiki publishing -- where pretty much anyone can add his or her own thoughts to a Web site, even if that means overwriting or "correcting" what someone has already written.
"I think, like most people, I came across the idea and thought, 'This is madness,'" says Harper, looking back. "On [H2G2] you could have maybe five people editing an article. On Wikipedia you could have 50 people editing at once with no one person in control."
Today, Harper is one of a select few working to impose a civilized order on what has become one of the Internet's fastest growing boomtowns. Launched in January 2001 with barely a dozen articles, Wikipedia crossed the 500,000 articles mark in February, with posters contributing content in more than 30 languages and, by last measure, at a rate of 300,000 articles per year.
Needless to say, so much activity generates plenty of controversy and plenty of work for Harper and the nine other members of the Arbitration Committee. Whether that means throwing cold water on recurring editorial battles over Israel and Iraq or deciding whether a ban on offensive user names such as "Mr. Throbbing Monster Cock," the disputes can vary from the mundane to the humorous to the truly informative all within the space of a single day.
"The hardest problems are always at the lowest level," he says. "People being rude, people refusing to compromise. We have a guy whose skill is copy editing. However, unlike most copy editors, he's quite stubborn and adamant about what's proper for articles. He won't budge and people have been complaining. After far too much discussion amongst the community, it was referred to us the second time. We're trying to ease it. We can't get rid of it."
Such problems, Harper notes, are common to any site that embraces the wiki model. First coined in the mid-1990s by Portland, Ore., programmer Ward Cunningham, "wiki" is the technical name for a site that lets readers edit the published content in real time. Borrowed from a Hawaiian term for "very fast" (wiki wiki), the term dates back to Cunningham's Wiki Wiki Web, an experimental offshoot of the Portland Pattern Repository that first offered readers an "edit this page" link in 1995.
"It was something that needed to exist," says Cunningham, recalling his decision to invite a few dozen fellow programmers to test out the wiki feedback model. "I thought if [WikiWikiWeb] lasted six months, it would still be worth it.
Nine years later, the wiki model is flourishing, mostly in venues where publishers put a value on feedback and informational utility. The Apache Ant Project, for example, uses wikis to make sure readers can correct or improve user guides related to the open-source Apache Web server. Even Microsoft, a company for which Cunningham now works, has gotten in on the act, embedding a wiki page within its recently unveiled Channel 9 external weblog.
Of all the variants out there, however, few have attracted as much attention as Wikipedia. Originally a free-range alternative to Nupedia, a commercial online encyclopedia project of the late 1990s, the project has since become the world's largest wiki with more than 1,200 regular contributors posting and revising content in more than 30 languages.
Get Salon in your mailbox!