The Wikipedia Phenomenon

By Sharil Dewa

In January 2001, a wealthy options trader named Jimmy Wales set out to build a massive online encyclopedia in an entirely new way – by tapping the collective wisdom of millions of amateur experts, semi-experts, and just regular people who thought they knew something.

This encyclopedia would be freely available to anyone, and it would be created not by paid experts and editors, but by whoever wanted to contribute.

Wales started with a few dozen prewritten articles and a software application called a Wiki (named for the Hawaiian word meaning “quick” or “fast”), which allows anybody with Web access to go to a site and edit, delete, or add to what’s there. The ambition: Nothing less than to construct a repository of knowledge to rival the ancient library of Alexandria.

This was, needless to say, controversial.

For one thing, this is not how encyclopedias are supposed to be made. From the beginning, compiling authoritative knowledge has been the job of scholars.

The history of the classic encyclopedia started with a few people who dared to try the impossible. In ancient Greece, Aristotle single-handedly set out to record all the knowledge of his time. Four hundred years later, the Roman nobleman Pliny the Elder cranked out a thirty-seven-volume set of the day’s knowledge. The Chinese scholar Tu Yu wrote an encyclopedia on his own in the ninth century.

And in the 1700s, a few French aristocrats took twenty-nine years to create the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers.

Individual work gradually evolved into larger team efforts, especially after the arrival of the Industrial Revolution. In the late eighteenth century, several members of the Scottish Enlightenment started to apply the industrial principles of scientific management and the lessons of assembly lines to the creation of an encyclopedia such as the world had never before seen.

The third edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, published between 1788 and 1797, amounted to eighteen volumes plus a two-volume supplement, totaling over 16,000 pages.

Groups of experts were recruited to write scholarly articles under the direction of a manager, organized by a detailed work chart.

Now Wales has introduced a third model which has been named “the open collective”.

Instead of one expert or a number of handpicked experts, Wikipedia draws on tens of thousands of people of all sorts—ranging from real experts to interested bystanders—with a lot of volunteer curators adopting entries and keeping an eye on their progression.

How did it happen?

Those who have done significant searches on the web would have seen that Wikipedia comes up quite high in the search results in a good number of times. This would not be so surprising considering that this free online encyclopedia provides fairly accurate data on a wide range of topics in a non-bias manner.

This online encyclopedia with more than two million articles was put together all by volunteers. How did this social phenomenon occur? What is the reason that people would just put in their time and effort into this project?

The various tools of the Wikipedia platform enabled volunteer strangers to work together. The concept that sometimes complex structures can be built not by a commanding authority nor by direct communications by members, but by each member noting the current environment produced by previous members and then triggering their own actions appeal to a lot of people. The tools that enabled this includes watch lists, use of template and article stubs, history and unlimited undos.

This is not to say that this phenomenon is easy to come by. In fact, others have tried to replicate Wikipedia's success but have failed. Some newspapers decided to let people write an editorial (called Wikitorial) in their online newspaper pages, a projects which they had to abandon due to individuals who incite confrontations, people who intentionally wreck the good work of others, and people who create multiple accounts to bias results and to deceive. Wikipedia has its share of these problems. But due to their large legions of dedicated users that quickly revert these vandalism, it was successful.

WikiHow is another collaborative style site following the model of Wikipedia. However, WikiHow used the Google ad model of revenue from the very start. Therefore it did not run into the resistance that Wikipedia encountered when it tried to switch from non-ad format to ad-based format.

A disadvantage of Wikipedia is, of course, that it is not (and does not want to be) an officially approved encyclopedia. Hence, the information that can be found on Wikipedia might in certain cases be inaccurate. Although this occurs quite seldom, and if it does the inaccuracy written down is quickly spotted and corrected by other members of Wikipedia’s community, the fact remains that if one is researching for certain topics, Wikipedia is a very good tool to do so, but it should not remain the only tool to be used.