On Wikipedia, "Web 2.0" and eventualism.

[reddragdiva]

There's a long rant on Wikipedia (and the so-called Web 2.0) by Nicholas G. Carr called The amorality of Web 2.0. I wrote a lengthy response which Mr Carr has posted as his latest entry. (Goodness!) I've put the lengthy response below, as I posted it. (With links added for jargon. It's a Wikipedia post, I have to pepper it with links!)

Everything you've written here is a valid opinion, and commercial encyclopedias are doomed anyway because (as Microsoft is finding out with Linux) it's hard to compete with free. (I eagerly await EB putting out TCO studies on Wikipedia.)

Speaking as someone who's highly involved in it (I write stuff, I'm an administrator, I'm on the Arbitration Committee, I'm a mailing list moderator, I do media interviews), Wikipedia is of mediocre quality with some really good bits. If you hit the "Random page" link twenty times, you'll end up mostly with sketchy three-paragraph stub articles.

That said, the good bits are fantastic. Although articles good enough to make "Featured Article" status (which are indeed excellent) tend to be hideously esoteric; somehow getting more general articles up to that sort of quality is not facilitated at present.

Encyclopedia Britannica is an amazing work. It's of consistent high quality, it's one of the great books in the English language and it's doomed. Brilliant but pricey has difficulty competing economically with free and apparently adequate (see Worse is better — this story plays out over and over again in the computing field and is the essence of "disruptive technology"). They could release the entire EB under an open content license, but they have shareholders who might want a word about that.

So if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have to be a good Wikipedia. So those who care about getting a good encyclopedia are going to have to work out how to make Wikipedia better, or there won't be anything.

I've made some efforts in this direction — pushing toward a page-rating feature, a "Rate this page" tab at the top, which, unlike an editorial committee, will actually scale with the contributor base and will highlight areas in need of attention. (See Article validation feature and En validation topics — the feature is currently waiting on an implementation the lead developer thinks won't kill the database.) Recent discussion on the WikiEN-L mailing list has also included proposals for a scaleable article rating system.

Wikipedia is likely to be it by first-mover advantage and network effect. Think about what you can do to ensure there is a good encyclopedia in ten years.

I could rewrite that more clearly, to fix the obvious holes my dear nitpicking readers will now comment on — I dashed it off in about half an hour while making and eating dinner last night — but it'll do.

(Eventualism: "a tendency amongst Wikipedians, which focuses on the eventual value of Wikipedia, in the Long Now, rather than the immediate value. Contrast immediatism; the opposite viewpoint.")

(Web 2.0: a Wired/Negroponte-style dot-com wank phrase that means less the more closely you look.)

Comments

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

Rasmus had a couple of pithy comments about the name "Web 2.0" last night.

On a related note, are you familiar with Placeopedia ?

[reddragdiva]

I think "Web 2.0" sounds like Wired/Negroponte dot-com wank. Names like that may only may sense to apply in retrospect.

I haven't used Placeopedia, but I do recall you mentioning it ;-)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Worse, it's (Tim) O'Reilly wank.

[reddragdiva]

Which is worse, because then it might involve substance. Meh.

[zotz.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it's necessarily true that Britannica is threatened. Libraries are likely to still have money for subscriptions, just as the library here has a sub to the online OED (great work perk, incidentally) - and libraries were always the primary market for the large reference works anyway.

Of course, it's possible that Wikipedia might approach the perceived quality of Britannica in the medium term, in which case the threat would be real, but I wouldn't take that for granted.

[reddragdiva]

It's in our grasp. I understand c't did a study pitting the de: Wikipedia against Brockhaus (the German equivalent of Britannica) and the German Encarta in a blind test — give articles from all three on a subject to an expert — and Wikipedia won. (I don't have a link or a translation to hand.) And the DVD-ROM of de: Wikipedia sold out its first pressing of 10,000 at €10 each in two days. That's why I'm REALLY PUSHING for the article rating feature on en:.

[reddragdiva]

And I agree EB probably isn't as doomed as it might be - they survived their previous doom in the 1990s and might be lean enough to make it through this one, if they don't starve to death.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

I keep seeing "EB" and thinking EB.

[daneel-olivaw.livejournal.com]

Libraries are likely to still have money for subscriptions

Libraries are glorified combination of internet cafes, OAP reading rooms, care-in-the-community day centres and a half-way-house between Blockbuster and CashConverter in terms of CD and DVD rental. In 10 years they'll look like Starbucks (probably due to being owned by them), or be shut - the lot of them. My basis for this opinion - my mother is Reference Librarian for Lancashire (and has been for about 10 years now), and if she had the funding for a Britannica in every branch she'd spend the money on replacing several hundred other books per branch instead.

[zotz.livejournal.com]

A sub to an online version is a lot cheaper than paper copies. I've no idea if the nearest part of the university library has a paper OED, and it's likely that OUP are getting far less money in total from the Uni than they were, but as they'll spend far less on printing, that isn't necessarily a bad thing for the OED.

I imagine the same is true of other libraries. And as they aren't going away - the number of visits to UK public libraries is apparently rising nicely - I wouldn't take it for granted that the more traditional reference works will disappear.

[daneel-olivaw.livejournal.com]

Ah, but why is it rising? 2.5 years ago (in, IMO, one of the more foresighted and risky pieces of Governmental funding in recent times) libraries were given a small mountain of computers in order to provide internet access to all. This has been a roaring success, though a large proportion of the clientelle actually already have internet access at home, they simply don't see the need to pay for it when they can use the library bandwidth for free. How many of these people have (as a result of this initiative) become borrowers and users of the other services is far harder to quantify. What happens one these machines come to the end of their useful life (within a year), given that the funding that established the service was a one-off, is a major concern. If no funding comes forward, I'd postulate that you'll see a dip of similar magnitude to the rise observed in recent times.

[zotz.livejournal.com]

This is possible, but not certain, and doesn't really comment on the first part of the argument, that libraries will be able to continue to fund reference works through more efficient and cheaper online subscriptions.

[daneel-olivaw.livejournal.com]

I have minimal data on the first part, so was skirting around direct critique of it! Online subs are cheaper, but still not cheap, and library funding is dropping over time. Switching to online also blurs the line regarding what is the best manner in which to provide the service to the most users - if, say, the majority of a county council's users have internet access at home, do you provide EB-Online at a library, or via a portal on the CC website (and sack the librarian)?

[reddragdiva]

Wikipedia vs Brockhaus and Encarta; full breakdown of experts' results; Wikimedia press release.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

the library here has a sub to the online OED (great work perk, incidentally)

That would be a terrible work perk. I'd get fired for never getting any work done.

sounds like..

[gurubob.livejournal.com]

the comparison you made is similar to Adams' prediction of the demise of the Encyclopaedia Galactica at the hands of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy... wildly popular due to it's cheapness despite being highly apocryphal.

perhaps Wikipedia should put "don't panic" on the main page.