I. Wired article March 2005: The book stops here

A. Introduction

1. wealthy options trader named Jimmy Wales

2. With software called Wiki - which allows anybody with Web access to go to a site and edit, delete, or add to what's there

3. In 2001, the idea seemed preposterous. In 2005, the nonprofit venture is the largest encyclopedia on the planet.

a) Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors. Tack on the editions in 75 other languages

4. Britannica recently likened the site to a public rest room: You never know who used it last

5. Topic=Issue: Is Wikipedia a heartening effort in digital humanitarianism - or a not-so-smart mob unleashing misinformation on the masses? Are well-intentioned amateurs any replacement for professionals? And is charging nothing for knowledge too high a price?

B. History of Encyclopedias: a new way to do an old thing.

1. In the beginning, encyclopedias relied on the One Smart Guy model. In ancient Greece, Aristotle put pen to papyrus and single-handedly tried to record all the knowledge of his time.

2. With the Industrial Revolution, the One Smart Guy approach gradually gave way to the One Best Way model, which borrowed the principles of scientific management and the lessons of assembly lines.

a) Late in the 20th century, computers changed encyclopedias - and the Internet changed them more. Yet …, the production model - and therefore the product itself - has remained the same.

3. Now Wales has brought forth a third model - call it One for All

a) Instead of clearly delineated lines of authority, Wikipedia depends on radical decentralization and self-organization - open source in its purest form.

b) A different production model creates a product that's fluid, fast, fixable, and free.

c) the collective knowledge and effort of a far-flung labor force,

C. Look up any topic you know something about …the Wikipedia entry is, if not perfect, not bad.What makes the model work is … the willingness to abide by two core principles.

1. The first: neutrality.

a) All articles should be written without bias. Wikipedians are directed not to take a stand on controversial subjects like abortion or global warming but to fairly represent all sides.

2. The second principle is good faith.

a) All work should be approached with the assumption that the author is trying to help the project, not harm it.

3. Wikipedia represents a belief in the supremacy of reason and the goodness of others. In the Wikipedia ideal, people of goodwill sometimes disagree. But from the respectful clash of opposing viewpoints and the combined wisdom of the many, something resembling the truth will emerge. Most of the time.

D. Threats: contributors less noble in purpose, whose numbers are multiplying.

1. trolls, minor troublemakers who breach the principle of good faith with inane edits designed to rile serious users. More insidious are vandals, who try to wreck the site - inserting profanity and ethnic slurs,

2. defenses against them are built into the structure.

a) a "watch list."

b) On controversial topics, the response can be especially swift.

c) cases of mass deletions, a common form of vandalism, were corrected in a median time of 2.8 minutes.

d) Wikipedia has an innate capacity to heal itself; And hardcore Wikipedians care. A lot.

e) more centralized, policelike measures - to guard against "edit warriors," "point-of-view warriors," "revert warriors," and all those who have difficulty playing well with others.

E. An emerging hierarchy

1. At the bottom are anonymous contributors,

2. On the next level stand Wikipedia's myriad registered users

3. he next level - administrator. Wikipedia's 400 administrators, Derksen and Wool among them, can delete articles, protect pages, and block IP addresses.

4. Above this group are bureaucrats, who can crown administrators. The most privileged bureaucrats are stewards. And above stewards are developers, 57 superelites who can make direct changes to the Wikipedia software and database. There's also an arbitration committee that hears disputes and can ban bad users.

5. At the very top, with powers that range far beyond those of any mere Wikipedian mortal, is Wales, known to everyone in Wiki-world as Jimbo…The God-King

a) he recruited Larry Sanger; Sanger quit in 2002.

F. Sanger’s critique: he argues that the site's production model suffers from two big problems.

1. The first is that "regardless of whether Wikipedia actually is more or less reliable than the average encyclopedia," librarians, teachers, and academics don't perceive it as credible, because it has no formal review process.

2. The second problem, according to Sanger, is that the site in general and Wales in particular are too "anti-elitist." Established scholars might be willing to contribute to Wikipedia - but not if they have to deal with trolls and especially not if they're considered no different from any schmo with an iMac.

G. Author’s conclusion

1. The better criterion on which to measure Wikipedia is whether this very young, pretty good, ever improving, totally free site serves a need - just as the way to measure Britannica is whether the additional surety that comes from its production model is worth the cost.

2. The One Best Way approach creates something finished. The One for All model creates something alive.

3. "If you don't know about something, you can start an article, and other people can come and feed it, nurture it."

a) Wool posted a stub - a few sentences on a topic - in the hopes that someone would add to it. That someone turned out to be Kvaran, who owned several books on Lawrie and who'd photographed his work not only at Rockefeller Center but also at the Capitol Building in Lincoln, Nebraska. Today, the Lawrie entry has grown from two sentences to several thorough paragraphs, a dozen photos, and a list of references. Brown himself posted a stub when he was wondering how many people were considered the father or mother of something.