Not A Blog™

As anyone who has had the combination of idle time and an internet connection knows, Wikipedia is the ultimate time-waster. For all the bashing I’ve done on the online encyclopedia, it is ever useful. I cite it all the time, and I spend countless hours there clicking through the links from one arcane topic to the next. (Ever plug “Wikipedia” into Wikipedia? It’s postmodernirific!) Wikipedia is one of the first sites I’ve seen that actually makes useful use of hyperlinks they way they were designed to be used. It doesn’t just send you to another related page or someone else’s site. It sends you to a page which describes the concept being talked about in its own article. There are no more excuses to not know something. How many conversations end with a disagreement of fact and the statement, “Just wait until I get on Wikipedia”?

It has been stated many times over that Wikipedia’s strength is the fact that the wiki model allows anyone to edit it. Certainly this aids in its popularity, but it’s not the real reason that the site is so popular. After all, there were other “freely editable” models similar to Wikipedia (though perhaps not as approachable), years before the Wiki model showed up. The real reasons everyone likes it are much simpler, to the point where they’re blindingly obvious, and yet I’ve never heard anyone talk about these strengths as positive things in and of themselves. Still, I call these the real strengths because I believe they foster everything else, including the community.

1. It’s Free

A few times in its past, Wikipedia has almost run out of money, and the staff periodically does fund-raising drives to try and avoid this. Like public radio, a large portion of its operating budget comes from Researchers Like You. Unlike public radio, these drives aren’t annoying. But either way, it’s not costing you any money to hit up the site for your quick info-fix. Whereas in the past, people might flounder without definite knowledge—too lazy or cheap to actually research the answer at a library with a real encyclopedia—now everyone gets their information for free. It’s a good thing knowledge and ideas aren’t copyrightable, or the Encyclopaedia Britannica would be suing school kids much like the RIAA.

2. It’s Instant

In the past, I’ve had a CD version of some encyclopedia available to me. I never used it. I never used it because it took a large amount of time to find the disc, insert it in the drive, load the menu and then finally get around to pulling up the article you were looking for. This is opposed to Wikipedia where you hit a key to bring up a new window, fly on over to the site and type what you’re looking for in the search box. It’s just about instant.

I don’t think this can be disregarded because if something comes along that’s even faster, Wikipedia is going to have competition. I’ve seen this happen, too. I used to use dictionary.com for everything, but now when I’m on my Mac, I usually bring up the dictionary & thesaurus dashboard widget instead. Why? It’s faster. Wikipedia may very well have a dashboard widget, too. (At least it doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to make one.) At this point, it’s reputation is pretty well established and it would take a lot more to dethrone it, I believe, than a simple boost in speed from some other site. But it wouldn’t have become popular in the first place if it weren’t so instant.

3. It’s Not Constrained to Paper

This one is the big no-brainer, but I think it’s really the most important point. This was sort of the crux of the whole thing because I found myself recently searching for an article on Lancaster County’s Central Market. To be fair, Central Market has a bit of trivia going for it, namely that it’s the oldest continuously operating farmer’s market in the US. But even so, that’s not the sort of thing that would have it’s own entry in a stuffy old-fashioned encyclopedia. The dead tree versions are limited by the amount of dead tree substrate they wish to include in their many volumes full of the stuff, and so space is limited. But online, as the saying goes, there’s no extra cost to host more data. (Or it’s so negligible at this point, the cost is essentially zero.)

I was reading something else, too, where someone was complaining about how some small time web-comic artists have their own Wikipedia page. This person’s complaint was that these guys haven’t really done anything noteworthy; why should they get a page? Well, if you think about it, why shouldn’t they have a page? If a fan or whomever wants to create a page for them, more power to them. How much space does this waste? None, really. And yet, if it helps even one person who does research into the webcomic later on, it would have to be considered beneficial.

Wikipedia, in its defense, does keep a handle on this sort of thing. I’m not sure that they censor “vanity pages” on a regular basis, but my impression (and I could be wrong on this) is that they have a sort of “impact on culture” factor that they take into account. I don’t really care about how all that works, but the point is: even discounting the multitudes who haven’t done anything worthy of listing on the Wikipedia, there are still plenty people who could legitimately be on there, and having this extra data laying around isn’t any sort of burden—unlike a meat-space encyclopedia, where there are real space considerations, and even some important things are going to get the short stick.

All this stuff serves to encourage a community of viewer interaction. It’s not that the fact that the common man can edit it that makes Wikipedia the success it is. It’s these other things: cost (none), speed (instant), and constraints on amount of information (few). Those things have to happen before it makes sense to have a community editable model—and before such a model would work.

What differentiates Wikipedia from other internet sites is the wiki model. The great thing about it is that it’s still under development. A free environment was too free—too open to vandalism. Some models are a bit too closed, which fosters cliques of established editors hassling the new guys. Wikipedia has, as I’ve mentioned in the past, a certain amount of this. We don’t know, yet, where the balance is. But whatever the ideal, it’s not correct to say that the reason for its success is the open model. The reasons for its success are more fundamental; the open model builds on these more basic aspects. After all, the vast majority of people who visit Wikipedia don’t contribute any information at all, but they do contribute to its success.

-Ted