coeller

I actually tried to contribute to wikipedia a couple months ago, but got scared when I actually went to change the page, so I just put it in the “discussion” of the page (it’s still there). I had been reading about when Orlando Letelier and Leonard Moffitt were killed in Sheridan Circle and then checked it out wikipedia and saw that they reported the two were killed in Dupont Circle and it actually happened in Sheridan Circle, which is just a couple blocks from Dupont. So I put that into the discussion page and somehow someone saw it, replied to my comment and then changed the article. It would be interesting to know exactly how they track such changes.

So today I thought I would make a change to some history that I felt I’ve read a lot about.  I thought - how about Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz and the CIA’s operation PBSUCCESS which overthrew him in 1954.  Alas, there was much written about both him and operation PBSUCCESS.  So I wandered over to the Conservative Mennonite Conference article at wikipedia.  I had looked at it before and realized that it mentions the Brotherhood Beacon, but not any of the conference’s earlier publications.  So, I added one sentence mentioning the previous publications of the conference and when they were started.  You can find it right near the end, under the heading “Status.”  There is definitely room to add more on both of these previous publications as they were both distinct from the Brotherhood Beacon in various ways, but since I wasn’t actually sure about all the differences I decided to leave it alone for now, but I think someday maybe I’ll go back and add a bit more.

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.