WIKIPEDIA - Happy Birthday

  Wikipedia was born on Jan.15, 2001 and is now over 18. I think we can all agree, however, that it has been a mature adult for several years. I recently received an email from the Wikimedia Foundation that was full of beautiful pictures of the earth and the things on it. It was their way (as the host of Wikipedia) of saying "Thanks" to me for the few bucks I have contributed to their operation and organization. I am not generally an especially charitable person, but I gave money to them because I use them all the time and I am satisfied with the products they provide. You do too and you probably are also. If you go searching for information about aardvarks you will find Wikipedia and be happy with what they tell you about aardvarks. Send them a donation and birthday wishes.
 
   I was hesitant to offer this endorsement and promotion because my skepticism, about the benefits to be derived from such online connections and internet/web-related things, has increased as the costs for such connections have been made more apparent. The enthusiasm for social media, Facebook, google, algorithms and other digital doodads has diminished as we learn more about ransomware, clickbait fabrications and fake news. A new book asks the question, "Is social media destroying democracy?" and the Canadian government has set up a team to protect us from the mysterious manipulations that might occur in the upcoming election if we don't start building our own walls. Still, even if one is less than sanguine about the latest technological developments coming out of Silicon Valley, one can still say that Wikipedia seems to be a good thing that works well, even though it is the result of the collective work of very large non-profit committee.
 
   Everyone thought such an electronic encyclopedia was an idiotic idea. The name, "Jimmy Wales," which is the name of the co-creator, is a name that seems like it should be in the credits for an Austin City Limits episode, rather the on the page of a reference work. How reliable could an entry be since it could be created by an idealogue or an imbecile? Who was the authority? How could it be produced without the motivation provided by profit and who would work for free?
 
   Initially they seemed like good questions since many imbecilic entries were created and there were hoaxes and pranks and deliberate attempts to sabotage and manipulate the information that was posted. Professors indicated that citations to Wikipedia were not to be used in the creation of essays and reference librarians everywhere relaxed.
 
   Fairly quickly things changed. Jimmy Wales responded that he hoped professors would not countenance the use of Wikipedia, just as he hoped they would disapprove of the use of a regular encyclopedia to produce a research essay. Soon, some professors were asking students to create Wikipedia entries and by the 10th anniversary Wikipedia was asking members of the academic community to create content on public policy issues. The librarians at the New York Public Library held an 'editathon" over six hours, during which they allowed the content creators to come to the library and use the rich research collection to improve the articles relating to  the musical-theatre categories. A major science journal compared the information for some topics in Wikipedia to those in the Encyclopedia Britannica and found out it was not doing too badly. Those thousands of people who were continuously scrutinizing and instantly massaging and improving the contents were apparently doing a very good job.



   Who are these people? That is a good question. One of them was a Canadian named Simon Pulsifer who, while working on the mayoral campaign for an Ottawa candidate, provided 78,000 edits and created between 2,000 and 3,000 articles. Perhaps he was odd and surely he was obsessive, but was he any odder than some of the very odd and obsessive creators of the very authoritative Oxford English Dictionary? They were also mostly volunteers and a few were certifiable. One was a hermit who rarely came out of his cottage and another was an American army surgeon and murderer who cut off his own penis. Most of his useful citations were sent from the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. He is pictured above. In terms of obsessiveness, one of the OED volunteers contributed over 165,000 'slips' which were written by hand and sent by post.



Being a book-loving reader of this blog and now convinced of the usefulness of Wikipedia, perhaps you would like to have a printed set of this reference work in your own library and are wondering how many shelves it would occupy. I am not sure, but if you google "Wikipedia" you will find an entry for it and learn that contains around 6,000,000 articles on almost 50,000,000 pages.

Before you hit the print button, you should know that back in 2015 there was an art project in a New York gallery where an attempt was made to download the then "11 gigabytes of very compressed data" and it took about two weeks. The end result was 76,000 volumes which included a table of contents consisting of 91 volumes. The price: $500,000. It was not printed.

Sources:
See: "Celebrating 10 Years of Wikipedia," Verne G. Kopytoff, The New York Times, Jan. 17, 2011.
For an example of when Wikipedia began to be received more positively by the academic community see: "Editing Wikipedia Entries for Medical School Credit," Noam Cohen, The New York Times, Sept. 30, 2013
  Information about the Canadian contributor is here and, who knows, he may still be contributing: "Prolific Canadian is King of Wikipedia," Alexandra Shimo, The Globe and Mail, Aug.4, 2006.
  The NYPL "editathon" is written about here: "Wikipedia's Deep Dive Into a Library Collection," Amanda Petrusich, The New York Times, Oct. 21, 2011.
  For the article about the attempt to print Wikipedia see "Wikipedia Moves to the Bookshelves," Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, June 17, 2015.
  The information about the odd OED contributors can be found in these books which you should certainly have a look at anyway: The Professor and the Madman and/or The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. 
  Among the many new books in which social media and the accompanying shiny things are being assessed more critically see: Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Apparently the Age of Surveillance Capital reminds us of the cost of free things and that "if you are not paying for it, you're the product." Although Wikipedia is  free, it is not gathering and tracking our "every move, emotion, utterance and desire" to sell to advertisers or using the "data exhaust" we are leaving behind to determine the direction in which we are heading.