like a biological system, it evolves, selecting for traits that help it stay one step ahead of the predators and pathogens in its ecosystem.
The traditional process of creating an encyclopedia—professional editors, academic writers, and peer review—aims for perfection. It seldom gets there, but the pursuit of accuracy and clarity results in a work that is consistent and reliable, but also incredibly time-consuming and expensive to produce. Likewise for most other products of the professional publishing industry: One can expect that a book will, in fact, have printing on both sides of the pages where intended and will be more or less spelled correctly. There is a quality threshold, below which the work does not fall.
With probabilistic systems, though, there is only a statistical level of quality, which is to say: Some things will be great, some things will be mediocre, and some things will be absolutely crappy. That’s just the nature of the beast. The mistake of many of the critics is to expect otherwise. Wikipedia is simply a different animal from Britannica . It’s a living community rather than a static reference work.
The true miracle of Wikipedia is that this open system of amateur user contributions and edits doesn’t simply collapse into anarchy. Instead, it has somehow self-organized the most comprehensive encyclopedia in history. Reversing entropy’s arrow, Jimmy Wales’s catalytic moment—putting up a few initial entries and a mechanism for others to add to them—has actually created order from chaos.
The result is a very different kind of encyclopedia, one completely unbounded by space and production constraints. It offers all the expected entries of any world-class reference work and then hundreds of thousands of unexpected ones, ranging from articles that go into textbook-like depth in fields such as quantum mechanics to biographical entries on comic book characters. Or, to put it another way, it’s got all the hits plus a huge number of niches.
The classic model of the encyclopedia is a curated list of received cultural literacy. There is the basic canon, which must be recognized by authorities. Then, there are other entries of diminishing length until you get to that line at which the priests of Britannica decide “This is not worthy.” There, the classic encyclopedia ends. Wikipedia, on the other hand, just keeps going .
In a sense, you can think of Wikipedia as equivalent to Rhapsody, the music site. There are the popular top 1,000, which can be found in any encyclopedia: Julius Caesar, World War II, Statistics, etc. These are like the hit songs. With these, Wikipedia is competing with professionals at their best, who produce well-written, authoritative entries that deploy facts with the easy comfort that comes with great scholarship. The main advantage of the user-created Wikipedia model for these entries is its ability to be up-to-date, have unlimited length and visual aids (such as photos and charts), include copious links to support material elsewhere, and perhaps, better represent alternate views and controversies.
In the middle of the curve, from the 1,000th entry to where Britannica ends at 120,000, are the narrower subjects: Caesarian Section, Okinawa, Regression Analysis, etc. Here, the Wikipedia model begins to pull ahead of its professional competition. Unlimited space means that the Wikipedia entries tend to be longer and more comprehensive. While the average length of a Britannica entry was 678 words in 2006, more than 200,000 Wikipedia entries (more than two entire Britannicas ) were longer than that. Meanwhile, the external links and updated information emerge as a key advantage as Wikipedia becomes a launching place for further research.
Then there is the Tail, from 120,000 to 1 million. These are the entries that Wikipedia has that no other encyclopedia even attempts to include. Its articles on these subjects—Caesar Cipher, Canned Spam, Spearman’s Rank Correlation
The traditional process of creating an encyclopedia—professional editors, academic writers, and peer review—aims for perfection. It seldom gets there, but the pursuit of accuracy and clarity results in a work that is consistent and reliable, but also incredibly time-consuming and expensive to produce. Likewise for most other products of the professional publishing industry: One can expect that a book will, in fact, have printing on both sides of the pages where intended and will be more or less spelled correctly. There is a quality threshold, below which the work does not fall.
With probabilistic systems, though, there is only a statistical level of quality, which is to say: Some things will be great, some things will be mediocre, and some things will be absolutely crappy. That’s just the nature of the beast. The mistake of many of the critics is to expect otherwise. Wikipedia is simply a different animal from Britannica . It’s a living community rather than a static reference work.
The true miracle of Wikipedia is that this open system of amateur user contributions and edits doesn’t simply collapse into anarchy. Instead, it has somehow self-organized the most comprehensive encyclopedia in history. Reversing entropy’s arrow, Jimmy Wales’s catalytic moment—putting up a few initial entries and a mechanism for others to add to them—has actually created order from chaos.
The result is a very different kind of encyclopedia, one completely unbounded by space and production constraints. It offers all the expected entries of any world-class reference work and then hundreds of thousands of unexpected ones, ranging from articles that go into textbook-like depth in fields such as quantum mechanics to biographical entries on comic book characters. Or, to put it another way, it’s got all the hits plus a huge number of niches.
The classic model of the encyclopedia is a curated list of received cultural literacy. There is the basic canon, which must be recognized by authorities. Then, there are other entries of diminishing length until you get to that line at which the priests of Britannica decide “This is not worthy.” There, the classic encyclopedia ends. Wikipedia, on the other hand, just keeps going .
In a sense, you can think of Wikipedia as equivalent to Rhapsody, the music site. There are the popular top 1,000, which can be found in any encyclopedia: Julius Caesar, World War II, Statistics, etc. These are like the hit songs. With these, Wikipedia is competing with professionals at their best, who produce well-written, authoritative entries that deploy facts with the easy comfort that comes with great scholarship. The main advantage of the user-created Wikipedia model for these entries is its ability to be up-to-date, have unlimited length and visual aids (such as photos and charts), include copious links to support material elsewhere, and perhaps, better represent alternate views and controversies.
In the middle of the curve, from the 1,000th entry to where Britannica ends at 120,000, are the narrower subjects: Caesarian Section, Okinawa, Regression Analysis, etc. Here, the Wikipedia model begins to pull ahead of its professional competition. Unlimited space means that the Wikipedia entries tend to be longer and more comprehensive. While the average length of a Britannica entry was 678 words in 2006, more than 200,000 Wikipedia entries (more than two entire Britannicas ) were longer than that. Meanwhile, the external links and updated information emerge as a key advantage as Wikipedia becomes a launching place for further research.
Then there is the Tail, from 120,000 to 1 million. These are the entries that Wikipedia has that no other encyclopedia even attempts to include. Its articles on these subjects—Caesar Cipher, Canned Spam, Spearman’s Rank Correlation
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