Just So and A Glimpse Of What Is Possible
In his post titled “Works in Practice - But Not in Theory” Karim refers to a (subscription) NYT article which described how over 2000 people participated in creating a page on Wikipedia about the Virginia Tech Massacre. This communal act to record a piece of history is as powerful a single indication of what is possible as I have read about yet.
The endless wrangling about the value of Wikipedia and online information gathering in general tends to polarize between the establishment and the anti-establishment.
As an example, Michael Gorman’s recent series of 6 posts on the Britannica Blog generated many responses, including Danah Boyd’s heartfelt knowledge access as a public good. The sentence in her post that expresses best my own feelings on the issue is “But why do purported experts spend so much time arguing against it rather than helping make it a better resource?” Indeed.
In a related digression, I note that I would not personally buy or read Andrew Keen’s new book Cult of the Amateur (reading a number of reviews and quotes was more than enough for me). Among my reasons is the fact that I view this kind of popular doomsday critique as exploitative and the opposite of constructive. Certainly criticism is important; we can not improve things without identifying and understanding flaws and problems, but I don’t believe that crying about how bad things are can improve anything by itself. I also believe that, since I know there are plenty of knowledgeable, optimistic, and even (ssh) credentialed individuals on the internet, putting the spotlight on what the author finds repellent and unattractive is somewhat insulting, regardless of how well it is veiled as social commentary.
We all know that there’s plenty of vapid narcissism in our 15 seconds of fame media culture. We all know that there’s a lot of crap on the internet. There are bad things and bad people in every one of my favorite cities, too. If I do spend time reading any popular culture books, I’d rather read Malcolm Gladwell telling me about how Giuliani improved one of my favorite cities by applying, among other things, the Broken Windows Theory.
I regretfully agree that Wikipedia content is sometimes inadequate and occasionally abysmal, yet I still see its value as enormous (my artistically talented son’s drawings at age 5 weren’t as good as they’d become eventually either). Meanwhile, where else could over 2000 people come together at a moment’s notice to create such a public record as the page on the Virginia Tech massacre?
Where else on the web, for that matter, except perhaps on one of eBay’s livelier forums, do over 2000 non tech people who are for the most part strangers to one another come together over a common interest on any given day? There are certainly many vigorous communities where gatherings of this size and the production of a record could occur, but few that are non tech, business or academic, and no others (that I know of) that are completely public. Restricted access usually applies to readers as well as contributors.
Instead of tearing down what isn’t perfect, we should be actively improving on it, and also using it as inspiration to build more and better.
