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The Global Encyclopedia

November 2, 2005 on 2:18 pm | In Build, IdBlog | Add a Comment

After months of quick references and peripatetic perusals, I’ve finally added my first post to Wikipedia. What’s Wikipedia? “A multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia,” according to their own description. But it’s more than that.

Wikipedia is one of the first working models of a global knowledge repository. Google being the other. Anyone can write an article and anyone can edit Wikipedia. That open-access model partly accounts for its tremendous growth. In a little less that five years the encyclopedia has grown to 800,000 entries in the English version (compared with approximately 50,000 articles in the German, French and Spanish editions). Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

That’s really remarkable when you consider that it took Diderot and his coeditors d’Alembert and Jaucourt 30 years to complete their 28-volume Encyclopedie. Or that Britannica Online, the expanded internet version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, has just 66,000 articles. Microsoft’s Encarta cobbles together some 40,000 articles.

Given the level of discourse in your average chatroom, one would not expect high erudition from Wikipedia. Yet, taken as a whole, the level of scholarship is pretty good. For the most part the information in Wikipedia is accurate — and mistakes are quickly corrected. It has been criticized for being consensual rather than credentialed — wide rather than deep. It’s true that many of the articles in Wikipedia are just “stubs” (brief descriptions of topics without much content) but those outlines are gradually being filled in.

Macfarquhar and Bell sought definitive authorities for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Diderot relied upon genius and chutzpa. The Columbia Encyclopedia built its reputation on the massed knowledge of a great university. Wikipedia, on the other hand, was authored by Joe Blow and it basically works.

It’s hard to account for this. My best guess is that while most people don’t know much, everybody knows something. For example, in most quarters my neighbor, Lou, is known as a loud ignoramus. But on the topic of auto body repair he is a recognized authority. In fact, he wrote a book on it. I have a copy. I didn’t ask for it; he gave me one. Between its covers is more than I ever wanted to know about pulling dents and paint jobs. And the world is full of guys like Lou, who can’t wait to tell you all about the thing they know best.

On the continuum of knowledge Wikipedia is certainly a work in progress. But what great encyclopedia is ever finished? If the database of What Is Known were ever sealed it would quickly lose its usefulness. That is Wikipedia’s great strength: the dialectic push and pull of ideas, more than facts alone, that defines what we know.

My Wikipedia entry? Just look up the Nor’easter of 1978.