[BITList] Fwd: from the 03/18 WSJ

[John Feltham]

Begin forwarded message:

18 March 2009
The Wall Street Journal, page A13

Everybody Knows Everything

By JEREMY PHILIPS

Until just a couple of years ago, the largest reference work ever  
published was something called the Yongle Encyclopedia. A vast project  
consisting of thousands of volumes, it brought together the knowledge  
of some 2,000 scholars and was published, in China, in 1408. Roughly  
600 years later, Wikipedia surpassed its size and scope with fewer  
than 25 employees and no official editor.

In "The Wikipedia Revolution," Andrew Lih, a new-media academic and  
former Wikipedia insider, tells the story of how a free, Web-based  
encyclopedia -- edited by its user base and overseen by a small group  
of dedicated volunteers -- came to be so large and so popular, to the  
point of overshadowing the Encyclopedia Britannica and many other  
classic reference works. As Mr. Lih makes clear, it wasn't Wikipedia  
that finished off print encyclopedias; it was the proliferation of the  
personal computer itself.

As CD-ROM drives became standard on new personal computers in the  
1990s, Microsoft decided to produce an encyclopedia on disc. The idea  
was to take advantage of the special capacities of the computer -- its  
ability to play video and audio, for instance, and to supply text  
without the heavy cost of printing and distributing a voluminous work.  
When Microsoft approached Britannica to collaborate, it was rebuffed  
-- Britannica was wary of mighty Microsoft as a partner and concerned  
about cannibalizing its book business, which sold the multivolume  
Encyclopedia Britannica for $2,000 a set. Microsoft turned to Funk &  
Wagnalls instead, licensing its content, and launched the Encarta  
encyclopedia on CD-ROM in 1993.

Soon enough, Britannica and World Book followed with CD-ROMs of their  
own, and they eventually published online editions as well. The battle  
lines were drawn: On one side were well-trusted reference brands; on  
the other, a software company pitching technology and price.


The Wikipedia Revolution
By Andrew Lih
(Hyperion, 246 pages, $24.99)

Technology won. Convenience and affordability swept away the old- 
fashioned model of meticulously researched articles wrapped in a  
prestigious franchise. Microsoft, however, did not have much time to  
savor its victory. Just as the CD-ROM had rendered the paper-based  
encyclopedia obsolete, so the Web sank the CD-ROM.

By 2000, both Britannica and Microsoft had subscription-based online  
encyclopedias. But by then Jimmy Wales, a former options trader in  
Chicago, was already at work on what he called "Nupedia" -- an "open  
source, collaborative encyclopedia, using volunteers on the Internet."  
Mr. Wales hoped that his project, without subscribers, would generate  
its revenue by selling advertising. Nupedia was not an immediate  
success. What turned it around was its conversion from a  
conventionally edited document into a wiki (Hawaiian for "fast") --  
that is, a site that allowed anyone browsing it to edit its pages or  
contribute to its content. Wikipedia was born.

The site grew quickly. By 2003, according to Mr. Lih, "the English  
edition had more than 100,000 articles, putting it on par with  
commercial online encyclopedias. It was clear Wikipedia had joined the  
big leagues." Plans to sell advertising, though, fell through: The  
user community -- Wikipedia's core constituency -- objected to the  
whole idea of the site being used for commercial purposes. Thus  
Wikipedia came to be run as a not-for-profit foundation, funded  
through donations.

As Mr. Lih tells it, the rise of Wikipedia was the natural result of  
market forces: "Wikipedia became an instant phenomenon because of both  
supply and demand. . . . Balanced and reliable content is a rare  
commodity, in high demand. The Internet has a deep supply of  
volunteers willing to share a deep pool of knowledge, but they are  
widely dispersed geographically and logistically. Provide an online  
agora for these two elements to come together, and you have  
Wikipedia." Mr. Wales put the matter less elegantly though more  
concisely: "We make the Internet not suck."

Though it still does, at times. Mr. Lih acknowledges Wikipedia's  
problems: pranksters who eagerly insert "sophomoric chunks of text"  
into Wikipedia entries; fact claims that prove to be inaccurate and  
stand uncorrected for long periods of time, getting picked up and sent  
around the Internet; and, not least, the propagation of malicious  
falsehood. The Wikipedia entry on one journalist fictitiously accused  
him of involvement in President John F. Kennedy's assassination. Some  
blips, Mr. Lih contends, are the inevitable trade-off of a  
participative system. When Wikipedia works, he says, "it exceeds  
nearly all expectations."

Mr. Lih's book is somewhat like Wikipedia itself -- there is much of  
interest, a certain amount of material that only specialists will love  
and some content that is better covered elsewhere. Jeff Howe, in  
"Crowdsourcing" (2008), gives a much fuller account of the history of  
open-source software and content. Appropriately, the afterword to "The  
Wikipedia Revolution" is written by Wikipedia users offering a  
"prognosis" for the site: The users point to the pitfalls of  
Wikipedia's "uneven development," noting that "the biography of  
Britney Spears takes up nearly twice the space as the one for  
Socrates." Whomever this leaves short-changed is, of course, a matter  
of personal opinion; the Wikipedians, following their site's "neutral  
point of view" rule, make no judgment.

It is clear by the end of "The Wikipedia Revolution" that the site,  
for all its faults, stands as an extraordinary demonstration of the  
power of the open-source content model and of the supremacy of search  
traffic. Mr. Lih observes that when "dominant encyclopedias" were  
still hiding behind "paid fire walls" -- and some still are --  
Wikipedia was freely available and thus easily crawled by search  
engines. Not surprisingly, more than half of Wikipedia's traffic comes  
from Google.

Mr. Philips is executive vice president of News Corp., which owns Dow  
Jones & Co., the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.


ooroo

Bad typists of the word, untie.




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20090319/29a7f4bf/attachment-0001.shtml