coeller

Yes, that is a George W. Bush quote, only he was talking about Social Security (obviously).

Let me begin by saying that I love wikipedia. I know it’s been subjected to some ridiculous atrocities such as students using it as a source of academic writing and a bout or two with slander issues in the past. But that is the ridiculous side of it. It really is simpy phenomenal. I find it to be extremely useful for getting the information you want on nearly any topic. Obviously, if you’re going to contribute to any real debate on a subject you should move beyond wikipedia to more secure information, but the fact is that it provides excellent introductions to almost any topic. And for that I love it.

Rosenzweig writes an insightful overview of wikipedia which is contains, I think, an excellent balance of sympathy and critique, which will be coming out in the June 2006 issue of the Journal of American History.

Rosenzweig notes that according to Alexa Traffic Rankings, wikipedia was the 41st most popular website in the world. According to the latest data, wikipedia has moved up the rankings to number 17. I don’t know how long it’s been since this article was written, but anyway you look at it, that’s an impressive ranking. By the way, Alexa Traffic Rankings are very cool, and who knew that craigslist was doing so well.

To extend my sheer amazement at wikipedia even further, Rosenzweig notes that as of September 2005 the entire project only had two full-time employees. It almost makes me want to cry, it’s so great. Who would ever imagine you could run such a successful and innovative site that changes the way we think about information and the internet with two employees?

In a funny note, he comments that wikipedians have created an article “Wikipedia: Errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica that have been corrected in wikipedia.” I thought this was a great article and that Rosenzweig appropriately called the spirit of this page “gleeful.”

One final note on wikipedia - I think it’s amazing how fast mistakes are fixed. Rosenzweig mentions that vandals “defaced” the article on Calvin Coolidge only 10 times over a two-year period. And that the average time to repair the damage was three minutes. That’s simply amazing. And it connects to an article that I read recently about an experiment done by Esquire magazine, in which they wrote an article about wikipedia and placed it on wikipedia. As an experiment they included factual errors and wrote it very poorly. They comment that the factual errors were all fixed within minutes and then wikipedians moved on to “refinement, clarification and making the article more readable.” The article was edited 224 times in the first 24 hours it was posted, and another 149 times in the next 24 hours. You can read an article about the experiment here.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 2:31 am and is filed under Weekly Writing. 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.