Wikipedia, just after it was first created in 1782.

I use Wikipedia all the time. I’ve just been combing through the various Freud-derived terms that underly the notion of a sociopath to check some generalisations I am making in a documentary treatment. Now I know I had better check my ideas with a real psychologist before I go much further. (And now I am worrying that my text is evidence for my grandiosity. My sick grandiosity…)

Procrastinating yet again, I turn to my trusty emails for distraction, which pop up with the estimable Library Link of the Day offering. And discover it is about Wikipedia.

I’ve always pictured the editing process on Wikipedia as a cat fight on a city dump, in which obsessives and sensible people out-click each other into exhaustion. The one occasion when I tried to contribute was like that, as a close relation of an accused killer tried to slime the witnesses even before the trial. The whole item was soon taken down.

But it turns out that Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has a solid handle on who does what – and it may be wrong. He reckons that

“The idea that a lot of people have of Wikipedia,” he noted, “is that it’s some emergent phenomenon — the wisdom of mobs, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing — thousands and thousands of individual users each adding a little bit of content and out of this emerges a coherent body of work.”† But, he insisted, the truth was rather different: Wikipedia was actually written by “a community … a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” where “I know all of them and they all know each other”. Really, “it’s much like any traditional organization.”

But Henry Blodget, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Silicon Valley Insider, from which I am summarising this, did enough algorithmic figuring to discover something different.

“When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.”

In other words, the few hundred true believes that Wales knows and relies on are doing the internal heavy lifting. Although Blodget dismisses this as surface-over-substance, I think it involves all those issues of consistency, proof and opinion, and picking over the dump after the cat fights.

But the huge mass of Wikipedia’s entries, all those millions of keystrokes and nuggets of arcane knowledge, are actually provided by an army of experts, sharing what they genuinely know. And care enough to fight about in those tacky, obsessive brawls behind the page.

To find a simple example – wiki any disease or drug you care about, and read the text.

“In complex vertebrates, including humans, the amygdalae perform primary roles in the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events. Research indicates that, during fear conditioning, sensory stimuli reach the basolateral complexes of the amygdalae, particularly the lateral nuclei, where they form associations with memories of the stimuli. The association between stimuli and the aversive events they predict may be mediated by long-term potentiation, a lingering potential for affected synapses to react more readily.[3″

And so on.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.