ESSAY - NOAM COHEN


In its seven years of existence Wikipedia has become one of the top 10 global Web sites. It has many fewer visitors than Google, yes, but it is in close proximity of Amazon and eBay. Hundreds of thousands of people - some anonymous, some using pseudonyms, others exactly who they say they are - have thus far come together to collaborate.

But contributors to Wikipedia have wondered lately if they are running out of topics. The obvious articles like“China”and“Moses”have been written and rewritten hundreds of times. There are more than 2.8 million articles on the English version of Wikipedia alone. Wikipedia in March got its first serious memoir,“The Wikipedia Revolution,”by Andrew Lih, an early Wikipedian, who writes about how“a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia.”

These concerns seem misplaced - Wikipedia can no more be completed than can New York City, which O.Henry said would be“a great place if they ever finish it.”With its millions of visitors and hundreds of thousands of volunteers, its ever-expanding list of articles and languages spoken, Wikipedia may be the closest thing to a metropolis yet seen online.

Like a city, Wikipedia is greater than the sum of its parts; for example, the random encounters there are often more compelling than the articles themselves. The search for information resembles a walk through an overbuilt quarter of an ancient capital. Wikipedia articles can send you down unlikely alleyways in two ways. First, there are links that direct you to the same article in another language, which sheds light on a culture. Spend time in German Wikipedia, and you find jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk with articles far longer than those written in their own language; you may also come upon odd areas of deep interest, like“pecherei,”the extraction of resin from trees and 15 different tools needed for the job.

Second, at the bottom of most articles, there are the categories - impromptu neighborhoods, or perhaps civic organizations, that bind together the virtual encyclopedia. There are the quirky kind, like this one I stumbled upon:“Literary devices playing with meaning.”It was in the latter category that I came upon the article “Mondegreen,”which describes the phenomenon of mishearing song lyrics, which led to “Soramimi,”a Japanese term for hearing lyrics in foreign languages as Japanese phrases, which led to the discovery that the heavy metal band Metallica has a line in“Enter Sandman”that frequently is heard by Japanese as“Let’s go to Chiyoda Life Insurance.”

Until recently, Wikipedia was able to operate on a budget of less than $3 million a year. Today it is still only $7 million, all donations and grants.

In“The City in History,”Lewis Mumford tried to explain how cities came to be:“In the earliest gathering about a grave or a painted symbol, a great stone or sacred grove, one has the beginning of a succession of civic institutions that range from the temple to the astronomical observatory, from the theater to the university.”

On Wikiepdia, a single article, say about the Mumbai attacks last year, can have more than 1,000 contributors. Their discussions on how best to write the article can occupy pages, all guided by one of Wikipedia’s founding principles:“Assume good faith.”

Wikipedia encourages contributors to mimic the basic civility, trust, cultural acceptance and self-organizing qualities familiar to any city dweller. Why don’t people attack each other on the way home? Why do they stay in line at the bank? The police may be an obvious answer. But this misses the compact among city dwellers. Since their creation, cities have had to be accepting of strangers - no judgments - and residents learn to be subtly accommodating, outward looking.

Just as the world has had plenty of creationists, temperance societies and ruralists, there is a professional class of Wikipedia skeptics. They, too, have some depraved behavior to expose: Wikipedia represents a world without experts! A world without commercial news outlets! A world lacking in distinction between the trivial and profound!

It’s all reminiscent of the accusations made against cities: They don’t produce anything! All they do is gossip! They think they are so superior! They don’t know the meaning of real work!

This argument represents a clash of ideas. It is clear from Mr.Lih’s account that nearly every time Wikipedia has come to a fork in the road where the project could have chosen to impose more restrictions on who could edit what, or even insist on a bit of expertise, it has said no. That has made all the difference. The vindication of those choices - by Wikipedia and cities - is proved each time some stranger overcomes his fear and decides to make a visit and stay awhile.