The Culture of Wikipedia

Manual Now Codifies Rules

Wikipedia may be the largest project to prove the wisdom of H.G. Wells’s observation: “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

Once upon a time in the land of Wikipedia there were no rules. In fact, that was part of the fun. Here was a completely open forum—creative anarchy if you will—for building what founder Jimmy Wales described as “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” Asked what the goal of Wikipedia is, Wales emphasized the process of participating rather than the product itself in saying it should be “fun to contribute.”

But as Wikipedia grew, so did its rules. The first rule, “Ignore all rules,”  written by the founders toward the end of its first year, continued the fundamentally libertarian spirit of the project. But now, seven years later, comes Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. Its author, John Broughton, himself a Wikipedian with many hours logged onto the site, cautions that his 470-page manual covers only a fraction of the body of policies and guidance rules developed to date. The manual is primarily meant to help the neophyte, but it also provides an intriguing look into the culture and day-to-day activities that such an online mass collaboration supports.

Of course there were bound to be rules. Otherwise it would be impossible to keep this mass collaboration in any way stable and coherent. By 2006, however, researchers estimated that the amount of content dedicated to policies and guidelines on Wikipedia was about one-third of the entire website and growing, a testament to the endless and compulsive fascination regular contributors have with contemplating, articulating, redefining, debating, and refining their own process.

Not surprisingly, this bottom-up approach to establishing editorial policy and style by a large group of people, most of whom have not worked with editorial policy or style previously, results in some redundancy, a confusing snarl of articles, and the general tone of a bunch of junior copyeditors splitting hairs and double-crossing each others’ Ts. As it turns out, it takes an enormous amount of effort and trial and error to build policy from the bottom up. In the end Wikipedia may be the largest project to prove the wisdom of H.G. Wells’s observation: “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

Do We Really Need Common Sense Defined?

Wikipedia’s policy encourages writers to “wikify” articles, that is, inserting links in their articles to other Wikipedia articles. And although other guidelines also warn against inserting too many links, the policy nonetheless creates a huge school of red herrings in many articles. Here, for example, is the standard opening paragraph to the countless Wikipedia policy and guidelines articles: 

"This page documents an English Wikipedia editing guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should follow, though it should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page."

Following these links distracts the reader’s focus and wastes time.  What sane person needs to follow a link to an article about common sense that discusses its philosophical roots in Aristotle and Ibn Sina and finishes up with references to some twenty other articles, to quotations about common sense, and to Wiktionary for a dictionary definition, in case the reader hasn’t already had enough?  Common sense dictates deleting such a link.

Although Wikipedia style maintains that links such as these are merely there for those who don’t understand the concepts, the net effect is to leave the ordinary reader with a nagging doubt that there is something special about these terms as used in Wikipedia. In the above quotation, clicking on “editing guideline” takes you to a 1500+-word article with enough links to consume the rest of a day pursuing.

Tech Savvy

The massive maze of rules and the confusing bureaucracy are serious barriers to entry for new contributors. Another is the jargon, endless acronyms, and mark-up coding required to actually create a page, all of which smacks of a subtenor of programmers’ culture. Who makes up the core of the Wikipedia community? By Wales’s own admission, the project is far stronger in technology than in other, comparable areas of knowledge. And this programmers’ flavor helps explain the compulsive contributors who make tens of thousands of contributions and make the rest of us wonder if they even have day jobs—or indeed ordinary lives to attend to.

Paintball for Vandals and Admins

Management has a major role in Wikipedia these days. Administrators regularly delete about half of the estimated thousand or so new articles created each day. Administrators also undo edits, lock articles against change, and ban contributors. Automated programs continuously search the site looking for signs of vandalism. In fact vandalism consumes a lot of energy for Wikipedians. “There are a lot of people whose entire Wikipedia life is dedicated to fighting vandals,” says the Wikipedia veteran James Forrester. In fact, conduct violations, curbs on vandalism, rules for editing conflicts, and a slew of behaviour guidelines are reminiscent of the high-school vice-principal sternly patrolling the halls in search of delinquent conduct and random graffiti. Nicholas Baker, who wrote about the website in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, describes the process of contributing to Wikipedia as a moderately organized free-for-all—rather like paintball.

Inclusively Exclusive

Although still ostensibly open to all, the democratic spirit Wikipedia originally espoused has morphed into an odd form of exclusivity, a secret, quasi-anonymous society. There are approximately 1500 “admins” and 30 “bureaucrats,” who have the power to name administrators and other bureaucrats, approve or revoke user accounts, and rename user accounts. There are also committees for bot approval, three groups that oversee countervandalism, and a usability group, among others. People get promoted to these jobs based on the quality and the quantity of their contributions to Wikipedia as well as how they have behaved on the site. Thus this is a meritocracy based largely on enthusiasm and time spent contributing. In effect, like some twenty-first century guild, it requires a long apprenticeship to get to the top.

The scope of the encyclopedia has also deteriorated over time. Originally the founders were only going to include articles on topics that were traditionally understood to  be encyclopedic, using the Britannica as a model. However as the project grew, popular culture and trivia have come to predominate. The article on Paris Hilton is the same length as the article on Aristotle and longer than the one on Virginia Woolf. The article on Shakespeare is only slightly longer—by 600 words—than the one on Britney Spears. There are also at least stubs for every train station in England.

Getting It Kinda Right

While the major rules of Wikipedia are no doubt necessary for supporting a mass collaboration of this sort, they also encourage particular writing habits. Wikipedia encourages everyone to contribute: Just start something. Write as much as you can, it seems to say, and don’t worry if it’s not complete. In fact, don’t even worry if the text isn’t exactly right on all points. No doubt, someone else will come along and add more information and/or correct your errors, whether they be factual or grammatical. And somebody else will add more facts and organize it better. Would that things could be this way in the real world!

To eliminate partisanship and matters of opinion the founder Jimmy Wales wisely insisted from the start on a neutral point of view. To guarantee this, he required a cited source for every fact. Unfortunately this policy has led to favoring good sources over writing quality. Wikipedia’s manual author Broughton advises contributors to start with finding sources, not with writing, because if you want your article to be accepted, “good sources are more important than good writing.”

Be Bold But Not Too Bold

“Be bold,” has always been the motto for Wikipedia. Recently however Wikipedia administrators have “encouraged” editors who make major changes to articles to explain themselves on the discussion page. Brougham also cautions that contributors should not write about things they feel deeply about because they risk the neutrality of their point of view. So, in an odd way, contributing to Wikipedia promotes not the expert but the amateur point of view. The combination of not having to be exactly right, or complete, or in any way expert on the subject you write about truly does create a culture of amateurs, making any actual achievements—and there are some—all that much more surprising.

Reliability Issues Remain

Just how reliable is Wikipedia? Enthusiasts say that it’s remarkably reliable, considering how the articles are cobbled together as the work of many hands. More thoughtful proponents argue that it’s a good place to start researching something but that’s it. Harsher critics contend that Wikipedia may be a fascinating experiment but it’s a bad encyclopedia. The problems are the variation in reliability and the possibility that at any moment someone can change an article, for better or worse. Users face a bizarre conundrum: If you are an expert on a subject, you can verify that an article is correct, but if you actually want to find something out—the usual reason for consulting an encyclopedia—then you won’t know whether the entry is true or not. Jimmy Wales has countered that visitors must always judge the information at Wikipedia just as they do information they get on TV, radio, the Web, or indeed in books. Still, the situation does beg the question of what an encyclopedia is supposed to be.

The Anti-Encyclopedia

Of course, printed encyclopedias are bound by their medium. They try very hard to get things right the first time because correction and addition are arduous and expensive. New editions are rare, and annual addenda are at best awkward and clumsy stopgaps. Originally encyclopedias strove to encompass all knowledge. As knowledge expanded encyclopedias by necessity became more selective. The most interesting contributions to a written encyclopedia are often those general introductions to large topics, geography, for example, or the history of science. Traditional encyclopedia pay an expert to undertake an overview of  a large topics, often a challenging, difficult task. In the end, Wikipedia is the anti-encyclopedia—too much information and far too little verified knowledge.

Digital software technology has always been good at supporting—indeed fostering—large complex bureaucracies. It seems infinitely malleable and limited only by storage capacity, which in recent years has become very cheap. And this may be the final lesson of this fascinating experiment in mass collaboration, at least for the moment. By tracking every change and addition, no matter how minute and by supporting discussion pages for each entry, the “wiki” technology spawns a complexity that fundamentally affects the very fabric of the project itself. In celebrating its own process, it elevates that process above the goal of creating content and lends a certain degree of difficulty and digital noise to the overall experience. Wikipedia documents everything because it’s easy to do so. It includes articles on every train station in England not because it should but because it can. In the final analysis, technology and process trump judgement and even that prized Wikipedia characteristic, common sense. 

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More information . . .

Buy Wikipedia: The Missing Manual at Amazon

Common Sense Entry in Wikipedia

Research on Wikipedia Content