clipped from www.guardian.co.ukWikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope", or "turnip", or "Crazy Eddie", or "quadratic formula", and you will have knowledge you did not have before. It is like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.
More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay - in fact, it is up there in the top-10 rankings with MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2m articles, and because it is very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there - even, or especially, when the article you find is a little clumsily written. Any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia is not a commercial product.
It was constructed, in less than eight years, by strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose. They were drawn because, for a work of reference, Wikipedia seemed unusually humble. It asked for help, and when it did, it used a particularly affecting word: "stub". At the bottom of a short article about something, it would say, "This article about X is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it." And you would think: "That poor sad stub: I will help. Not right now, because I'm writing a book, but some day, yes, I will try to help."
And when people did help they were given a flattering name. They were "editors". It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundsman. Some brought very fancy professional metal rakes, or even back-mounted leaf-blowing systems, and some were just kids thrashing away with the sides of their feet or stuffing handfuls in the pockets of their sweatshirts, but all the leaves they brought to the pile were appreciated.
And the pile grew and everyone jumped up and down in it, having a wonderful time. And it grew some more, and it became the biggest leaf pile anyone had ever seen, a world wonder.
And then self-promoted leaf-pile guards appeared, doubters and deprecators who would look askance at your proffered handful and shake their heads, saying that your leaves were too crumpled or too slimy or too common, throwing them to the side. And that was too bad. The people who guarded the leaf pile this way were called "deletionists".
But that came later. First it was just fun.
Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism. It also had a head start: from the beginning the project absorbed articles from the celebrated 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is in the public domain. And not only the 1911 Britannica. Also absorbed were Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Nuttall's 1906 Encyclopedia, Chambers' Cyclopedia, Aiken's General Biography, Rose's Biographical Dictionary, Easton's Bible Dictionary and many others.
But the sources and the altruism do not fully explain why Wikipedia became such a boom town. The real reason it grew so fast was noticed by co-founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales in its first year of life. "The main thing about Wikipedia is that it is fun and addictive," Wales wrote.
Brion Vibber, who was for a while Wikipedia's only full-time employee, explained the attraction of the encyclopedia at a talk he gave to Google employees in 2006. For researchers it's a place to look stuff up, Vibber said, but for editors "it's almost more like an online game, in that it's a community where you hang out a bit, and do something that's a little bit of fun: you whack some trolls, you build some material, etc". Whacking trolls is, for some Wikipedia editors, a big part of why they keep coming back.
Say you are working away on the Wikipedia article on ageing. You have got some nice scientific language in there and it is really starting to shape up: "After a period of near-perfect renewal (in humans, between 20 and 50 years of age), organismal senescence is characterised by the declining ability to respond to stress, increasing homeostatic imbalance and increased risk of disease. This irreversible series of changes inevitably ends in death." Not bad! And then somebody - a user with an address of 206.82.17.190, a "vandal" - replaces the entire article with a single sentence: "Ageing is what you get when you get freakin old old old." That happened on December 20 2007. A minute later, you "revert" that anonymous editor's edit, with a few clicks; you go back in history to the article as it stood before. You have just kept the ageing article safe, for the moment. But you have to stay vigilant, because somebody might swoop in again at any time, and you will have to undo their harm with your power reverter ray. Now you are addicted. You have become a force for good just by standing guard and looking out for juvenile delinquents.
Some articles are vandalised a lot. On January 11 this year, the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark was replaced with "one ugly animal"; in February the aardvark was briefly described as a "medium-sized inflatable banana".
This sounds chaotic, but most of the time the "unhelpful" or "inappropriate" changes are quickly fixed by human stompers and algorithmicised helper bots. Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead, it is a fast-paced game of paintball.
When, last year, some computer scientists at the University of Minnesota studied millions of Wikipedia edits, they found that most of the good ones - those whose words persisted intact through many later viewings - were made by a tiny percentage of contributors. Enormous numbers of users have added the occasional enriching morsel to Wikipedia, but relatively few know how to frame their contribution in a form that lasts.
So how do you become one of Wikipedia's upper crust, one of the several thousand whose words will live on for a little while, before later verbal fumarolings erode what you wrote? It is not easy. You have to have a cool head, so that you do not get drawn into soul-destroying disputes, and you need some practical writing ability, and a quick eye, and a knack for synthesis. And you need lots of free time - time to master the odd conventions and the unfamiliar vocabulary (words such as "smerge", "hatnote", "meat puppet" and "fancruft"), and time to read through guidelines and policy pages and essays and the endless records of old skirmishes - and time to have been gently but firmly, or perhaps rather sharply, reminded by other editors how you should behave. There is a long apprenticeship of trial and error.
The first thing I did on Wikipedia (in January 2008, under the username Wageless) was to make some not-very-good edits to the page on bovine somatotropin. I clicked the "edit this page" tab, and immediately had an odd, almost lightheaded feeling, as if I had passed through the looking glass and was being allowed to fiddle with some huge engine or delicate piece of biomedical equipment. It seemed much too easy to do damage; you ask, "Why don't the words resist me more?" Soon, though, you get used to it. You recall the central Wikipedian directive: "Be bold." You start to like life on the inside.
After bovine hormones, I tinkered a little with the plot summary of the article on Sleepless in Seattle, while watching the movie. A little later I made some adjustments to the intro in the article on hydraulic fluid. After dessert one night, my wife and I looked up recipes for cobbler, and then I worked for a while on the cobbler article, though it still was not right. I did a few things to the entry on periodisation. About this time I began standing with my computer open on the kitchen counter, staring at my growing watchlist, checking, peeking. I was, after about a week, well on my way to a first-stage Wikipedia dependency.
But the work that really drew me in was trying to save articles from deletion. Here's how it happened. I read a short article on a post-Beat poet and small-press editor named Richard Denner, and saw that the article had been proposed for deletion by a user named PirateMink, who claimed that Denner was not a notable figure, whatever that means. Another user, Stormbay, agreed: no third-party sources, ergo not notable.
Denner was in serious trouble. I tried to make the article less deletable by incorporating a quote from an interview in the Berkeley Daily Planet - Denner told the reporter that in the 60s he'd tried to be a street poet, "using magic markers to write on napkins at Cafe Med for espressos, on girls' arms and feet". (If an article bristles with some quotes from external sources these may, like the bushy hairs on a caterpillar, make it harder to kill.) And I voted "keep" on the deletion-discussion page: "What harm does it do to anyone or anything to keep this entry?"
An administrator named Nakon - one of about 1,000 peer-nominated volunteer administrators - took a minute to survey the two "delete" votes and my "keep" vote and then killed the article. Denner was gone. Startled, I began sampling the "AfDs" (the Articles for Deletion debate pages) and the even more urgent "speedy deletes" and "PRODs" (proposed deletes) for other items that seemed unjustifiably at risk; when they were, I tried to save them. Taekwang Industry, a South Korean textile company, was one. A user named Kusunose had "prodded" it - that is, put a red-edged banner at the top of the article proposing it for deletion within five days. I removed the banner, signalling that I disagreed, and I hastily spruced up the text, noting that the company made "Acelan" brand spandex, raincoats, umbrellas, sodium cyanide and black abaya fabric. The article didn't disappear: wow, did that feel good.
So I kept on going. I found press citations and argued for keeping the Jitterbug telephone, a large-keyed mobile phone with a soft earpiece for older callers; and Vladimir Narbut, a minor Russian Acmeist poet whose second book, Halleluia, was confiscated by the police; and Sara Mednick, a neuroscientist and author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life; and Pyro Boy, a minor celebrity who turns himself into a human firecracker on stage. I took up the cause of the Arifs, a Cyprio-Turkish crime family based in London; and Card Football, a poker-like football simulation game; and Paul Karason, a suspender-wearing guy whose face turned blue from drinking colloidal silver; and Michelle Leonard, co-writer of a glam hit called Love Songs (They Kill Me) ...
All these people and things had been deemed non-notable by other editors, sometimes with unthinking harshness. When I managed to help save something, I was quietly thrilled - I walked tall, like Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men.
At the same time as I engaged in these tiny, fascinating (to me) "keep" tussles, hundreds of others were going on, all over Wikipedia. I signed up for the Article Rescue Squadron, a small group that opposes "extremist deletion, having seen it mentioned in John Broughton's invaluable guide, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. And I found out about a project called WPPDP (for "WikiProject Proposed Deletion Patrolling") in which people look over the PROD lists for articles that should not be made to vanish. Since about 1,500 articles are deleted a day, this kind of work can easily become life-consuming. I was swept right out to the Isles of Shoals. I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me - for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an "inclusionist".
That is not to say that I thought that every article should be fought for. Someone created an article called Plamen Ognianov Kamenov. In its entirety, the article read: "Hi my name is Plamen Ognianov Kamenov. I am Bulgarian. I am smart." The article is gone, understandably. Someone else, evidently a child, made up a lovely short tale about a fictional woman named Empress Alamonda, who hated her husband's chambermaids. "She would get so jealous she would faint," said the article. "Alamonda died at 6:00pm in her room. On August 4 1896." Alamonda is gone, too.
Still, a lot of good work - verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange - is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow notion of what sort of curiosity an online encyclopedia should be able to satisfy in the years to come.
Anybody can "pull the trigger" on an article, as Broughton phrases it. It is harder to improve something that is already written, or to write something altogether new. There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking people's work - even to the point of laughing at nonstandard "Engrish" . They poke articles full of warnings and "citation-needed" notes and deletion prods till the topics go away.
In the autumn of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists - some of the most original and articulate people on the net. One openly called it the "web-comic articles purge of 2006". A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: "I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others' sandcastles." Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organised deleters to book burners.
As the deletions and ill-will spread in 2007 - deletions not just of webcomics but of companies, places, websites, lists, people, categories and ideas, all deemed to be trivial, "NN" (non-notable), "stubby", undersourced, or otherwise unencyclopedic, Andrew Lih, one of the most thoughtful observers of Wikipedia's history, told a Canadian reporter: "The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow." In September 2007, Wales - himself an inclusionist who believes that if people want an article about every Pokémon character, then hey, let it happen - posted a one-sentence stub about Mzoli's a restaurant on the outskirts of Cape Town. It was quickly put up for deletion. Others saved it, and after a thunderstorm of vandalism (as when the page was replaced with "I hate Wikipedia, its a far-left propaganda instrument, some far-left gangs control it"), Mzoli's is now a model piece, spiky with press citations. There is even, as of January, an article about "Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia" - it, too, survived an early attempt to purge it.
I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue - a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren't libellous or otherwise illegal. Like other middens, it would have much to tell us over time. We could call it the Deletopedia.
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