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Wikipedia's Awkward Adolescence

Like a startup maturing into a real business, Wikipedia's corporate culture seems conflicted between its role as a harmless nouveau-digital experiment and its broader ambitions.

By K.G. Schneider

PAGE 5

It's true that a Wikimorgue composed of deleted articles would be largely a wasteland of spam and junk. But like the publishing of the federal budget, knowing that everyone could see the deleted articles if they wanted to, and that it was Wikipedia's policy to make these deletions transparent, could stay the hands of overenthusiastic editors.

As for the jargon, Wikipedia maintains an admirable site called the Simple English Wikipedia, a "user-contributed online encyclopedia intended for people whose first language is not English." Wikipedia should take a page from its own book (or wiki) and commit to writing editorial decisions that can be readily understood by people whose first language is not Wikipedian.

Adopting practices to improve the accountability of Wikipedia's editors could improve the quality of Wikipedia, article by article. But one other perhaps unsolvable issue remains: whether we as a global community are well-served by any information resource that claims to serve as "the" source of information.

Stephen Laster, CIO at Harvard Business School, is also an avid sailor. About Wikipedia as a sole source, he comments, "When sailing, you should never rely on just your compass, just your GPS or just your depth scale to identify your location. You need to use all of your instruments to get an accurate picture of where you are. The same is true for knowledge and education—you can't get the truth from a single source."

It may well be that no matter how well-cited and well-written Wikipedia's articles are, its editorial commotions are grounded in the fundamentally subjective nature of most knowledge, and that as Wikipedia emerges from its charmed childhood to struggle with its awkward adolescence, we as a global community may decide that the "hive mind" is served best by more than one colony.

K.G. Schneider is a librarian who works in research and development for a library automation network. She lives in Tallahassee, Fla.

 

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