Andrew Lih's Thoughts on Wikipedia
Andrew Lih is director of technology at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong.
Over the last decade, the Web has become such an essential tool for journalists, we can hardly imagine working without it. While information can be found quickly and easily using tools such as Google, the problem is often not a lack of content, but rather the volumes of stale and questionable content. Determining the accuracy and sourcing of search results is a challenge for any journalist, oftentimes negating the time saved by using the Internet. However, the advent of participatory journalism has provided a unique solution to this problem — it engages the news audience to participate in the process of rationalizing Web content, crafting the news, and contributing knowledge into the "media ecology." Weblogs by journalists such as Dan Gillmor, Joshua Marshall, and Andrew Sullivan are examples of this, by calling on audience feedback and contributions to help put stories in context. However, also emerging are wiki websites, where any user can immediately directly edit any page with one click of the mouse. It is wiki technology that has produced the largest form of participatory journalism to date — Wikipedia.
Open content
Wikipedia is an Internet-based, volunteer-contributed encyclopedia that in just three years has become a popular and highly regarded reference. It has thousands of international contributors and is the largest example of an open content wiki. (The Hawaiian word for "quick," WikiWiki, is the basis for the wiki name.) The goal of Wikipedia was to create an encyclopedia that could be shared and copied freely while encouraging people to change and improve the content. Each and every article has an "Edit this page" button, allowing anyone, even anonymous passersby, to add or delete any content on the page. What would surely seem to create chaos has actually produced surprisingly credible content which has been evaluated and revised by the thousands of visitors to the site.
The project was started by Jimmy Wales, head of Internet startup Bomis.com, after his original concept of a strictly controlled, Ph.D-edited free encyclopedia ran out of money and resources after two years and only a few hundred articles. Not wanting the content to stagnate, he put them on a wiki website in January 2001, and invited visitors to edit or add to the collection. It became a runaway success. In the first year it gained a loyal following, generating over 20,000 articles and spawning over a dozen language translations. After two years, it had 100,000 articles. Just this February, at the three year mark, it exceeded 200,000 articles in English and 500,000 articles in 50 languages. Every day, there are nearly 2,000 articles added across all the various languages.
Keeping it social and neutral
What could possibly allow this completely open editing system to work? Because they provide the ability to track the status of articles, review individual changes, and discuss issues, wikis function as social software, acting to facilitate communication and collaboration with other users. A wiki also tracks and stores every version ever edited, so no operation is ever permanently destructive. With regard to malicious contributors, in a wiki it takes much more effort to vandalize a page than to revert an article back to an acceptable version. While it may take five or 10 seconds to deface one article, it can be quickly undone by others with just one click of a button. This crucial asymmetry tips the balance in favor of productive and cooperative members of the wiki community, allowing quality content to emerge.
However, technology is not enough on its own. Wales created an editorial policy of maintaining a neutral point of view (NPOV) as the guiding principle. "NPOV is an absolute non-negotiable requirement of everything that we do," he says. According to Wikipedia's guidelines, "The neutral point of view attempts to present ideas and facts in such a fashion that both supporters and opponents can agree." Inspired by this policy, the grassroots project has confronted the same great issues facing modern newsrooms — sticking to the facts, attributing sources, maintaining balance, and applying rules uniformly, such as when to use the word "terrorist," or evaluating what constitutes a cult or a religion.
So far, the effort has created numerous reference-quality articles as wide ranging as the Hutton Inquiry, algorithms, social history of the piano, origins of the American Civil War, and severe acute respiratory syndrome. As its quality has improved, news publications have increasingly cited Wikipedia on subjects such as Wahhabism, crony capitalism, folk metal, British "honours" system, Abdul Qadeer Khan and extinct animals. It has even been used in litigation, when in July 2003, a Wikipedia article on profanity was cited in a motion to dismiss a case in a Colorado court.
Teaching
Wikipedia has also served a valuable teaching tool at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre. We have used it in undergraduate and graduate journalism classes to teach the skill of writing dispassionately for an international audience. By collaborating online with others, students not only interact with each other when writing, but get advice and corrections from complete strangers around the world within minutes of making contributions to the Wikipedia.
Future
Wikis are just starting to receive recognition for generating credible collaborative content. Perhaps the toughest part of Wikipedia's future is how to manage its own success. While Wikipedia has recorded impressive accomplishments in three years, its articles have a mixed degree of quality because they are, by design, always in flux, and always editable. That reason alone makes people wary of its content. But first time visitors are typically impressed with what the community has developed, considering the decentralized nature of the effort and the usefulness of its content.
Wales envisions someday a "1.0" version of Wikipedia — a tangible product in printed form or CD-ROM, serving as a reference work for those not connected to the Internet. But this vision is still far from reality, as there is still contentious debate on how to do something that is unnatural for a wiki — freeze its content. Until then, thousands of contributors will keep plugging away, like a massive cyber ant colony, working on the largest encyclopedia in the world.
