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Wikipedia rules

By MIKE MILIARD  |  December 12, 2007

And isn’t that risk a small price to pay for a resource that — rather than a pricey set of bound volumes that are updated only every decade or so — is free, easily accessible, sprawling, and constantly (often instantaneously) updated? To say nothing of one of Wikipedia’s greatest features: the ability to learn as you teach.

Alexander Glazkov (username: Solarapex), 33, came to Boston from Ukraine eight years ago. His raison de wiki is not so much to write what he knows as to teach himself about his adopted home as he writes. He’s written short entries on the Kharkiv River in Ukraine, which he knows well, but also about the Quabbin Aqueduct in West Boylston and the Winsor Dam in Belchertown.

He’s a member of the Massachusetts WikiProject, and the Arizona WikiProject, and he also founded WikiProject Geology — even though, at the time, he didn’t particularly care about rocks. “I found that geology didn’t have a project, but it deserved to,” he says. “Organizing this project, I became a fan of geology.”

He’s got the right idea, says Klein. “One usually makes a better editor of topics that one finds fascinating and new, rather than a topic on which one is a long-time expert.” Otherwise, he says, one runs the risk of bringing long-held biases to the editing process. And anyway, it’s much more fun to contribute to articles on subjects you’d like to learn about than ones you already know.

Vigilance vs. Vandalism
Wikipedia’s controversies are well-advertised. And many of them stem from the fact that large swaths of the site lie dormant and un-patrolled indefinitely, leaving them vulnerable to misinformation. One of the reasons GlassCobra joined up was that he had great affection for the Wiki ideal, and wanted to protect it. But, he says, “to put it plainly, Wikipedia doesn’t have nearly enough people as it needs to combat vandalism. We’re constantly undermanned.”

As an administrator, GlassCobra is forever scanning new edits — he has a watch list of about 4000 articles of his own choosing, which is sprawling even by Wiki standards — ever ready to swoop in and undo misinformation.

“I keep an eye on a lot of pages that get vandalized a ton,” he says. “Rappers, for example. You would not believe how often they get messed with. The page for Lil’ Wayne? That gets vandalized. All. The. Time. I keep an eye on wrestling pages, which also get vandalized a lot. Movie pages get vandalized often.”

And then there’s the ne plus ultra of fucked-with entries: George W. Bush. “It does get locked occasionally, but as a general rule we try not to lock it unless there’s constant vandalism from a lot of different people,” says GlassCobra. “If there’s a lot of vandalism from only one person, we wouldn’t lock the page — we’d block the person. Basically, we try to take the measure that will still allow people the most access to the page.”

But for all the quarrels that are inherent in Wikipedia’s free-for-all setup, the site is just as remarkable for the sense of community it fosters. “It’s so funny,” says Blackburn. “The interface of it is very cut-and-dry, black-and-white. But a lot of times it feels like a coffeehouse atmosphere. You have the actual articles, but you also have the discussion pages where people are arguing about knowledge, arguing about the littlest things.”

On page after page in this vast virtual salon, smart people talk and talk about every subject under the sun. “You really get a sense of camaraderie or friendship with people from all walks of life,” says Blackburn. “You also form a lot of relationships through people that have similar interests as you.”

For the compulsively curious, Klein insists, Wikipedia is “10 times better than being in a library with a talented reference librarian. If you start editing an arbitrary page of historical interest — a page about a particular Roman emperor, or a Japanese historical story — you come back a couple weeks later and you have messages from people who care about that. And you can talk to them.”

But, as with anything, there’s always the risk of too much of a good thing. “Wikipediholism” is defined on-site, only half jokingly, as “an obscure form of OCD” whose sufferers “endlessly track and monitor the edits of users with whom they have become obsessed. This disorder can lead to a serious decrease in productivity in all other areas of the victim’s life, like any other addiction.”

Swastikipedia?
There will always be discontent, both inside and outside Wikipedia’s ranks. Recently the English tech tabloid The Register reported that “controversy has erupted among the encyclopedia’s core contributors, after a rogue editor revealed that the site’s top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown [sic] on perceived threats to their power,” and that mistrust of this “ruling clique” had “rank and file . . . on the verge of revolt.”

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Comments
Wikipedia rules
GlassCobra ROCKS! An excellent person. What a cool article!
By Archangel on 12/12/2007 at 8:10:25
Wikipedia rules
Yes! Thank you! Finally, a well-informed article on Wikipedia! This is a rare gem - most articles on Wikipedia seem to be either snide critics using sensational language or uninvolved advocates spewing trivial apologies of Wikipedia alongside meaningless statistics, and I'm glad to see that *someone* can write about the topic well for the public.
By Nihiltres on 12/13/2007 at 1:42:25
Wikipedia rules
This was a PR "puff piece" as Jimmy Wales is fond of saying. I would say the article spent about 6% of its words on criticism and 94% on flattery. Read the article about "History of western Eurasia" (the whole thing), and tell me that this is a good resource for anyone beyond a 6th-grade education. Read the article about "electric knife" and tell me if it seems "balanced" to devote about 20% of the article to how electric knives are used to trim foam for transvestites to pad their asses. No kidding, I tried to modify that article for the better, but instead of being thanked, I was blocked. Read about what happened to Taner Akcam at the airport, then tell me that all of the "good" that Wikipedia has done actually outweighs the deprivation of a man's civil liberties. Yes, I agree, this article is a rare gem. It is indeed RARE these days to still find a journalist who so blindly follows a cult. Did I mention the former COO of the Wikimedia Foundation is a convicted felon? Did I mention that the former Treasurer was found to be in contempt of court surrounding a hearing about how he was hiding $800,000 from a rightful plaintiff? Did I mention that the Foundation is budgeting more than $500,000 for the new Executive Director's salary and staff for 2008, not to mention $180,000 for the lawyer who denies having known anything about the COO's felony background. Wikipedia has become a hyperbolic parody of what all its critics have claimed it was. We can't even make fun of it any more, because it's so laughable at face value.
By Gregory Kohs on 12/13/2007 at 11:14:33
Wikipedia rules
Gregory Kohs: //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Electric_knife&action=history doesn't back up your claims - none of these users was banned for removing something. Anybody who wants to learn about the real reason why Gregory Kohs was banned from Wikipedia by Jimmy Wales can read about it <a href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-09/MyWikiBiz">here</a>. In short, Kohs is a marketer whose company "MyWikiBiz" offered to create Wikipedia articles for companies, at prices ranging from $49 to $99. - Abuse of Wikipedia for commercial and personal promotion (COI, "conflict of interest" edits) is a big problem for Wikipedia, which could have received a bit more attention in the article. But the site is not entirely without defence, as the blocking of Kohs proved.
By HaeB on 12/15/2007 at 5:35:23
Wikipedia rules
The Bathrobe Cabal strikes again!
By LaraLove on 12/17/2007 at 11:47:12
Wikipedia rules
This is a great article. I just want to provide one correction. There is no arbitrary sales figure that a book must reach to achieve "notability" status on Wikipedia; no 5,000 benchmark. We use the word notable in a sense peculiar to Wikipedia and in keeping with what Wikipedia is--an encyclopedia and therefore a tertiary source. The general notability standard we use is not some arbitrary and subjective test, nor a judgment call such as whether we've heard of it as a vernacular interpratation of that word might lead some to believe. What we have devised is a standard that asks whether the World has taken note of the subject by publishing information about it in reliable sources. It is usually formulated as "being the subject of significant treatment in reliable sources". We have subject specific standards of notability which sometimes define other bases, give guidance on applicability of the general standard, and even provide resources for locating the necessary reliable sources. We have a book notability standard set forth at a page titled "Wikipedia:Notability (books)", of which which I was a primary contributor and the creator. See //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_%28books%29
By Fuhghettaboutit on 01/08/2008 at 9:16:43
Wikipedia rules
In response to HaeB -- I was blocked from Electric knife editing: //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:ZD_Netman Also, the COI policy arose AFTER the foundation of MyWikiBiz, so it's kind of funny to blame my company for violating a Wikipedia "rule" that didn't exist at the time! Another Wikipediot!
By Gregory Kohs on 02/21/2008 at 6:42:52

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