{"id":606,"date":"2006-12-03T16:31:52","date_gmt":"2006-12-03T23:31:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=606"},"modified":"2006-12-03T16:31:52","modified_gmt":"2006-12-03T23:31:52","slug":"knowledge_and_u","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=606","title":{"rendered":"Knowledge and unknowledge"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking recently that I’m overdue for a Wikipedia post – I mean, it’s been at least a week – so I was relieved to see a long article<\/a> in today’s Washington Post, by David Segal, about a theme I touch on from time<\/a> to time<\/a>: The expansion of the Wikipedian bureaucracy and the ever stricter controls which that bureaucracy is imposing on the free encyclopedia’s content. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s cofounder and top executive, recently said<\/a>, “The radical idea behind Wikipedia is for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge and that’s what we are doing.” But is that really what Wikipedia is doing?<\/p>\n

As the Post article describes, the “sum of all human knowledge” ain’t what it used to be. A good portion of the mental energy of Wikipedia’s elite members is today going toward removing stuff from the site rather than adding to it. And the stuff that’s being removed isn’t just graffiti and trash talk; it’s real content. Recently, for instance, an entry on the Shining Diamonds, a Canadian thrash-folk band, was slated for deletion from Wikipedia.The powers-that-be decided that the band was “non-notable.” As Segal writes:<\/p>\n

\n

This was not some hasty, capricious opinion, either. No, this was the official verdict of a squad of stern-sounding editors at Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, which recently began the process of booting an entry about the Shiny Diamonds off the site. One Wiki editor counted a mere 97 Google hits about the group and noted on a Wiki page that all those citations “seem to be myspace or other self-promotion.” Three other Wiki editors soon weighed in, each recommending “delete,” which in Wiki-speak translates roughly as “Beat it, losers.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The band’s front man, who goes by the name Tim the Mute, was a bit miffed, Segal reports:<\/p>\n

\n

“I urge whatever Internet-snob wiki-geeks who deem our band ‘non-notable’ to look at their own lives,” he fumed. “The Internet is about sharing and the point of Wikipedia is that there’s room for everything.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At least Tim the Mute has a lot of company. About a hundred entries a day are being erased from “the sum of all human knowledge.” (My all-time favorite entry<\/a> – the one for Montahue Jetson, George Jetson’s grandfather – has thus far avoided the Wikipedian scythe, I note with considerable relief.)<\/p>\n

Now, philosophically, I have no problem with this newfound desire to separate the wheat from the chaff. Encyclopedias have always had to decide what’s worthy of being included and what isn’t. Wikipedia is just following the fine old tradition of selectivity. But what puzzles me is this: I thought Wikipedia was about not<\/em> following tradition. I thought it was about being freed from the old physical world’s scarcity-imposing constraints, the constraints that forced us for millennia to live without easy access to “the sum of all human knowledge.” I thought the fact that Wikipedia didn’t have to worry about ink and paper and printing meant that it could be radically inclusive – that it could put everything in and let readers decide what was worthy of their time and what wasn’t. I thought Wikipedia was about the long tail of knowledge. I thought it was about abundance<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would at some point like to learn more about the Shining Diamonds. Hell, I’d<\/em> like to learn more about the Shining Diamonds. So why is that knowledge suddenly deemed to be outside the scope of “the sum of all human knowledge”? Why is that knowledge suddenly unknowledge?<\/p>\n

What bugs me is not what Wikipedia is doing but the discrepancy between what it’s doing and the myth that continues to be promulgated about what it’s doing. If you’re not trying to collect “the sum of all human knowledge” – if your goal is in fact to collect some subset of human knowledge, as encyclopedias have always done – then for crying out loud stop talking about assembling “the sum of all human knowledge.”<\/p>\n

In a recent interview<\/a>, Mitch Kapor, one of Wikipedia’s most tireless promoters, was asked, concerning the online encyclopedia, “Where is the systematic arbitration of truth? Where is the gatekeeping?” He replied, “Who said the arbitration of truth is ever systematic? Or that it could be or should be? Who said that quality emerges out of gatekeeping?”<\/p>\n

Who said that quality emerges out of gatekeeping? That’s precisely what Wikipedia is saying, about a hundred times a day.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Blogger Tony Pierce writes<\/a> about his impending banishment from the sum of all human knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking recently that I’m overdue for a Wikipedia post – I mean, it’s been at least a week – so I was relieved to see a long article in today’s Washington Post, by David Segal, about a theme I touch on from time to time: The expansion of the Wikipedian bureaucracy and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}