Cet ouvrage produira sûrement avec le temps une révolution dans les esprits, et j’espère que les tyrans, les oppresseurs, les fanatiques et les intolérants n’y gagneront pas. Nous aurons servi l’humanité. Diderot
Parmi quelques hommes excellents, il y en eut de faibles, de médiocres & de tout à fait mauvais. De là cette bigarrure dans l’ouvrage où l’on trouve une ébauche d’écolier, à côté d’un morceau de maître ; une sottise voisine d’une chose sublime, une page écrite avec force, pûreté, chaleur, jugement, raison, élégance au verso d’une page pauvre, mesquine, plate & misérable. Diderot
Imaginez un monde où chaque individu peut accéder gratuitement à la totalité des connaissances de l’humanité. C’est ce que nous voulons faire. Jimmy Wales
Consulter [Wikipedia], c’est comme poser des questions à un type rencontré dans un bar. Vous pouvez tomber sur un physicien nucléaire ou… le premier cinglé venu! Paul Vallely
Wikipedia, c’est comme les toilettes publiques, vous ne savez jamais qui est passé avant vous. Robert McHenry
To put the Wikipedia method in its simplest terms: 1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published. 2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified. Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step: 3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy…The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him. Robert McHenry (The Faith-Based Encyclopedia, Tech Central Station Daily, 15 November 2004)
The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself…the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous…The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There’s a frantic race taking place online to become the most « Meta » site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites…What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google, and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments, and major universities have all gotten the bug. (…) It’s important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality…The question isn’t just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning…The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots. (…) For instance, most of the technical or scientific information that is in the Wikipedia was already on the Web before the Wikipedia was started. You could always use Google or other search services to find information about items that are now wikified. In some cases I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value. Since search engines are now more likely to point you to the wikified versions, the Web has lost some of its flavor in casual use. (…) It’s not hard to see why the fallacy of collectivism has become so popular in big organizations: If the principle is correct, then individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities. We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual… It’s safer to be the aggregator of the collective. You get to include all sorts of material without committing to anything. You can be superficially interesting without having to worry about the possibility of being wrong. Except when intelligent thought really matters. In that case the average idea can be quite wrong, and only the best ideas have lasting value. Science is like that. (…) Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals. These people focused the collective and in some cases also corrected for some of the common hive mind failure modes. The balancing of influence between people and collectives is the heart of the design of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing projects. There’s a lot of experience out there to work with. A few of these old ideas provide interesting new ways to approach the question of how to best use the hive mind…Scientific communities…achieve quality through a cooperative process that includes checks and balances, and ultimately rests on a foundation of goodwill and « blind » elitism — blind in the sense that ideally anyone can gain entry, but only on the basis of a meritocracy. The tenure system and many other aspects of the academy are designed to support the idea that individual scholars matter, not just the process or the collective. (…) Some wikitopians explicitly hope to see education subsumed by wikis. It is at least possible that in the fairly near future enough communication and education will take place through anonymous Internet aggregation that we could become vulnerable to a sudden dangerous empowering of the hive mind. History has shown us again and again that a hive mind is a cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot. Nasty hive mind outbursts have been flavored Maoist, Fascist, and religious, and these are only a small sampling. I don’t see why there couldn’t be future social disasters that appear suddenly under the cover of technological utopianism. Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism, The Edge, May 30, 2006)
Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket, complete with an elaborate hierarchy of users and policies about policies…Whereas articles once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site’s content, as of last October they represented seventy per cent. (…) Even Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that « a disaster » is not too strong a word for Wikipedia. In his view, the site is infested with « moonbats ». (Think hobgoblins of little minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing on their terrain. The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks, Raymond said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard: either it works or it doesn’t. There is no such test for truth.
On n’avait pas connu une telle mobilisation, une telle émotion du monde instruit depuis L’Encyclopédie de D’Alembert et Diderot (1772), accusée elle aussi de déposséder les « maîtres » de leur pouvoir. Bruno Le Gendre
Faut-il brûler Wikipedia ?
Wikipedia serait-elle en passe de donner enfin corps, trois siècles après et pour la première fois dans l’histoire humaine, au vieux rêve de Diderot, à savoir « l’accession de tous à la totalité des connaissances de l’humanité »?
Injures, manipulations, publicités déguisées, propagande, « blagues adolescentes », contre-sites, sites parodiques, dénonciations d’enseignants, écrivains ou journalistes, prise de position officielle de l’INRP pour dévoiement de la jeunesse (notamment comme pousse-au-crime de « copier-coller »), poursuites judiciaires …
Les attaques ne manquent pas, on le voit, contre l’encyclopédie collaborative en ligne Wikipedia.
Et c’est tout le mérite de la tribune du rédacteur en chef au Monde et professeur de journalisme Bruno Le Gendre il y a deux semaines de rappeler que, bulle papale exceptée, son illustre ancêtre (traduction à l’origine de la Cyclopædia de l’Anglais Chambers) avait elle aussi en son temps eu droit à de semblables détractions pour avoir « dépossédé les ‘maîtres’ de leur pouvoir ».
Et que, comme le confirment nombre d’études (Nature, Stern, MIT) et grâce à une véritable armée de cadres bénévoles (« administrateurs », « arbitres », « patrouilleurs » et « wikipompiers ») mais également à un système incroyablement strict et élaboré de régles, procédures de validation et d’outils de contrôle (comme le WikiScanner qui permet d’identifier immédiatement les auteurs de modifications ou le gel d’articles particulièrement exposés: Hitler, Bush), les erreurs ou malveillances y restent rares ou disparaissent relativement vite …
Faut-il brûler Wikipédia?
Bertrand Le Gendre
Le Monde
Le 16.03.08
Les critiques pleuvent sur Wikipédia tandis que son audience s’accroît. Quelque 625 000 articles sont désormais disponibles en français, rédigés par 360 000 volontaires (par comparaison, l ‘Encyclopædia Universalis propose 30 000 entrées). Ailleurs dans le monde, la popularité de Wikipédia ne se dément pas non plus. Chaque mois, ce sont 220 millions de visiteurs uniques qui s’y réfèrent, dans 250 langues, amendant, s’il le faut, les 9 millions de notices existantes.
Chacun peut apporter son écot à cette utopie raisonnée, sous l’oeil vigilant de tous : tel est son principe fondateur. Avec la conviction que la lumière jaillira de cette aventure collaborative, plus sûrement que d’un débat entre experts. Le succès est là, de plus en plus dérangeant. C’est vers Wikipédia que pointent tous les moteurs de recherche – Google, Yahoo!… – souvent comme premier choix. Faut-il s’en inquiéter ou s’y résoudre ? Faut-il brûler Wikipédia ou au contraire tenter d’en tirer parti ?
Décontenancés, les lettrés s’alarment pour la science et la raison. L’Institut national de recherche pédagogique a recensé vingt-deux motifs de se méfier de Wikipédia, parmi lesquels : « Les contributeurs sont au mieux des amateurs, au pire des perturbateurs. » « Les sources sont rarement indiquées, le contenu n’est pas vérifiable. »
Des sites exclusivement voués à la dénonciation de Wikipédia ont vu le jour : wikipedia-watch.org aux Etats-Unis, wikipedia.un.mythe.org en France. A en croire ce dernier, Wikipédia est « un projet anarchiste (…) entre les mains d’un gang ». A peine plus mesuré, l’écrivain et journaliste Pierre Assouline parle dans la revue Le Débat de « démagogie ambiante, qui consiste à dire aux gens : «Vous êtes des encyclopédistes si vous le voulez.» »
Les inventeurs de Wikipédia se moquent des critiques, ils croient en leur mission. C’est ce que ne cesse de répéter son cofondateur (en 2001), l’Américain Jimmy Wales : « Imaginez un monde où cha que individu peut accéder gratuitement à la totalité des connaissances de l’humanité. C’est ce que nous voulons faire. »
Ces accents prophétiques indisposent les savants. Ils maudissent ces électrons libres qui croient au darwinisme intellectuel plus qu’aux savoirs établis et ne respectent même pas le b.a.-ba du métier. « N ‘hésitez pas à être audacieux », recommande Wikipédia à ses contributeurs. « Tout n’a pas à être parfait du premi er coup » (puisque les articles que les internautes rédigent sont modifiables). On n’avait pas connu une telle mobilisation, une telle émotion du monde instruit depuis L’Encyclopédie de D’Alembert et Diderot (1772), accusée elle aussi de déposséder les « maîtres » de leur pouvoir. Ce parallèle invite à la prudence et au pragmatisme, plutôt qu’à la défense d’une corporation. Wikipédia est-elle fiable ? C’est pour l’internaute la seule question qui compte.
Contrairement à une idée répandue, la réponse est plutôt oui. Une étude de la revue Nature l’a comparée en 2005 à l ‘Encyclopædia Britannica. Sur quarante-deux sujets scientifiques retenus, Wikipédia avait commis 162 erreurs ou omissions, la Britannica 123.
En décembre 2007, Wikipédia a marqué un nouveau point contre ses détracteurs. Le magazine allemand Stern a publié les résultats d’une enquête portant sur cinquante articles piochés au hasard dans Wikipédia, version allemande, et dans l’édition en ligne de l’encyclopédie Brockhaus, dont l’accès est payant. Exactitude, clarté, exhaustivité, actualisation : le cabinet indépendant chargé de l’enquête a tout passé au crible. Dans 43 cas sur 50, Wikipédia l’a emporté.
Une étude du Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) confirme ce résultat. Elle montre qu’une obscénité introduite intentionnellement dans Wikipédia est « nettoyée » en moins de deux minutes par les wikipédiens. Ce qui ne veut pas dire que toutes les erreurs ou malveillances qui y figurent disparaissent aussi vite. En général, l’internaute de passage a intérêt à se méfier des articles récents, les moins retravaillés.
UNE NOUVELLE ÉCOLOGIE DE LA CONNAISSANCE
Wikipédia mène une guerre sans merci contre les provocateurs, les vandales et autres perturbateurs, qu’elle appelle les trolls. Un combat toujours recommencé dont sont chargés, chacun avec un rôle précis, les cadres bénévoles de Wikipédia, « administrateurs », « arbitres », « patrouilleurs » et « wikipompiers ». Injures, manipulations, publicités déguisées, propagande… rien n’est censé leur échapper. Les utilisateurs eux-mêmes sont invités à dénoncer ces hérésies, pour correction immédiate. Ici des liens politiques ajoutés, en pleine campagne municipale, à l’article sur Troyes. Là, dans la notice sur le hockey sur glace, « des modifications qui apparaîtront sensées au lecteur non averti ». Ailleurs des « blagues adolescentes ». La faute est souvent bénigne et involontaire, quelquefois révoltante et délibérée.
Au fur et à mesure que sa popularité augmentait, Wikipédia s’est dotée de règles plus strictes, d’outils de contrôle plus performants. Des articles ont été « gelés » par la Wikimedia Foundation, la tête de pont de la cyberencyclopédie en Floride : Hitler, Bush… Ils aimantaient trop les trolls.
Mieux, un WikiScanner permet aujourd’hui de repérer quel ordinateur a opéré une modification, donc à quelles fins. Wikipédia s’est ainsi aperçu qu’un employé de la municipalité de Levallois-Perret (Hauts-de-Seine) avait effacé de l’article consacré au maire, Patrick Balkany (UMP), certaines données désobligeantes.
Sous le feu des critiques et de la concurrence, Wikipédia évolue. Des projets d’encyclopédies contributives et gratuites voient le jour, dont les auteurs, à la différence de ceux de Wikipédia, sont des spécialistes dûment identifiés : Citizendium et Knol (Google), par exemple, aux Etats-Unis. Attentive à cette concurrence, la présidente de la Wikimedia Foundation, une agronome de 39 ans, la Française Florence Devouard, a annoncé que bientôt certains articles, considérés comme sûrs, ne seront plus modifiables.
La bataille continue pourtant de faire rage entre ceux qui accusent Wikipédia d’encourager les élèves et les étudiants à « copier-coller » et ceux qui saluent dans Wikipédia l’émergence d’une nouvelle écologie de la connaissance, à laquelle il vaut mieux préparer les jeunes générations plutôt que de diaboliser son succès.
Voir aussi:
Wikipédia le rêve de Diderot?
Marc Fernandez
Philosophie magazine
Avril 2007
Avec des textes écrits, corrigés et enrichis en permanence, et près de 350 millions de visiteurs par mois, l’encyclopédie en ligne Wikipédia est un succès mondial. Diderot y verrait-il la réalisation de son idéal de l’encyclopédie ? Un rapprochement osé, alors que sont remises en question la pertinence et la validité du savoir que diffuse cette oeuvre collective et collaborative.« Considérant la matière immense d’une encyclopédie, la seule chose qu’on aperçoive distinctement, c’est que ce ne peut être l’ouvrage d’un seul homme. […] Ouvrage qui ne s’exécutera que par une société de gens de lettres et d’artistes, épars, liés seulement par l’intérêt général du genre humain. […] Je les veux épars, parce qu’il n’y a aucune société subsistante d’où l’on puisse tirer toutes les connoissances dont on a besoin, et que, si l’on vouloit que l’ouvrage se fît toûjours et ne s’achevât jamais, il n’y auroit qu’à former une pareille société. » (1) Tel était le rêve de la création intellectuelle par l’échange et l’utopie du savoir pour tous qui animait Diderot en 1751, quand paraissait le premier volume de son Encyclopédie publiée avec d’Alembert. Trois siècles plus tard, l’encyclopédie libre Wikipédia, avec des textes écrits, corrigés et enrichis en permanence par des internautes issus de toute « la surface de la terre », affiche la même ambition : « Le but est de refléter de manière aussi exhaustive que possible l’ensemble du savoir académique. » Et en illustration…, la couverture de l’Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert ! Attirant chaque mois près de 350 millions de visiteurs, Wikipédia semble avoir réalisée cette « société » que le philosophe des Lumières appelait de ses voeux.
« Wikipédia n’est pas une réalisation finie mais un processus perpétuellement en cours. En ce sens, c’est l’encyclopédie la plus proche qui soit de ce que souhaitait Diderot », soutient Jean-Noël Lafargue, contributeur régulier de Wikipédia. Denis Diderot, pour qui l’utopie du savoir résidait plus dans la mise en relation des idées et des hommes que dans l’ordre des raisons, utilisait déjà dans Le Rêve de d’Alembert la métaphore de l’araignée pour établir un parallèle entre sa toile et le savoir. Symbole de la communication entre le centre et la périphérie, l’image de la toile d’araignée, qui montre comment l’information parvient au cerveau central qui l’interprète, constitue pour lui la figure même de l’intelligence en action. Jean-François Bianco, spécialiste de l’Encyclopédie, a montré, dans un article « Diderot a-t-il inventé le Web ? » (2), comment, parlant de « lignes », de « points », de « parcours » et de « liaisons », Diderot élaborait son encyclopédie sur le modèle d’une toile qui se tisse, d’un réseau. Utilisant les possibilités théoriquement infinies d’Internet, Wikipédia oppose à la traditionnelle conception statique et figée de l’encyclopédie comme simple somme d’articles, un modèle dynamique de développement de la connaissance.
Au début de l’an 2000, en Floride, naît dans l’esprit de Jimmy Wales l’idée d’une encyclopédie d’un nouveau genre. « Le mouvement du logiciel libre m’impressionnait, explique l’ancien courtier en bourse et patron du site Bomis.com, un moteur de recherche hébergeant des contenus de divertissement. Je voulais étendre ce concept au partage des connaissances et créer une encyclopédie gratuite, produite de manière collective par les internautes. » Il choisit Larry Sanger, jeune docteur en philosophie, pour être rédacteur en chef et faire respecter la neutralité de point de vue, principe directeur du projet. L’encyclopédie en ligne Nupédia voit le jour, hébergée sur les serveurs de Bomis. Mais les contributions sont rares et la validation des textes par un groupe d’experts se révèle fastidieuse. Un an après son lancement, Nupédia compte à peine vingt-cinq textes finalisés.
On est en 2001, et un nouveau système de gestion de contenus de sites web, dont le logiciel est libre, fait fureur sur le Net : c’est le Wiki (« vite » en hawaïen). La nouveauté ? Un site Wiki peut être modifié en permanence par ses visiteurs. Jimmy Wales et Larry Sanger décident alors de lancer Wikipédia, conçu à l’époque comme un réservoir d’articles pour Nupédia. Le succès est au rendez-vous. En quelques mois, les textes affluent, des groupes de « wikipédiens » se constituent dans le monde. En un an, le trafic est tel que l’encyclopédie doit se doter de serveurs dédiés. Jimmy Wales crée une fondation à but non lucratif, Wikimedia, à laquelle les internautes et les entreprises peuvent adresser leurs dons. En 2007, le budget atteindrait 6 millions de dollars !
Un succès qui donnerait le vertige à Diderot. Mais pas à Larry Sanger. Il quitte le projet, en 2002, quand Nupédia (validée par les experts) est abandonné au profit de Wikipédia. « J’étais contre, et je le suis toujours, cette idée d’encyclopédie non validée par des experts. J’ai préféré partir pour tenter de créer mon propre projet, Citizendium », explique ce professeur d’épistémologie à l’université de l’Ohio (lire encadré ci-dessous). Le désaccord porte sur le fondement idéologique même de Wikipédia : dans une société libre, les experts n’ont pas à monopoliser la parole. Chacun a un droit égal à l’expression, chacun a le droit de dire ce qu’il sait sur Wikipédia, pourvu qu’il présente ses opinions pour ce qu’elles sont ou que d’autres le fassent pour lui. Autant dire que, dans cette optique, « le problème du contrôle par les experts est à relativiser », explique David Monniaux, enseignant en informatique à l’École nationale supérieure et membre du Conseil d’administration de Wikimédia France. D’abord, parce qu’une partie importante des contributions ne sont pas de nature à demander une expertise technique : « Nul besoin d’être un expert pour écrire que le président de la République française est élu au suffrage universel. » Ensuite, parce qu’« il paraît impossible que les rédacteurs de l’article “Arithmetical hierarchy” n’aient pas une certaine expertise en logique mathématique », poursuit le chercheur.
Il n’empêche que, de par son concept, l’encyclopédie en ligne faite par tous et pour tous produit des erreurs et des articles subjectifs, voire est la proie de vandales. « Certes, Wikipédia peut être corrigée n’importe quand par n’importe qui, rappelle Jean-Noël Lafargue. Le sérieux des contributeurs tient lieu d’expertise. Le principe est d’apporter au public une connaissance “banale”. Il ne s’agit pas d’éclairer le monde par des réflexions inédites ou des informations exclusives, mais de compiler le ou les points de vue significatifs sur un sujet, d’exposer les faits. » Soit. Mais qu’en est-il des thèmes plus controversés ? L’expérience des lecteurs-contributeurs est souvent celle d’articles où les internautes s’affrontent à coup d’ajouts ou de restaurations de versions antérieures du texte lors de « guerres éditoriales ». Ce que critique Larry Sanger : « Wikipédia est devenue une communauté virtuelle dirigée par un gang. Celui qui parle le plus fort finit par avoir raison. » Wikipédia ne saurait en effet garantir une protection contre les erreurs ni même contre le sabotage. L’une des « affaires » les plus médiatisées concerne John Seigenthaler, journaliste et écrivain, dont un article insinuait, fin 2005, qu’il était impliqué dans les assassinats des frères Kennedy. Une « erreur » qui est restée en ligne plusieurs mois.
Pour limiter les dégâts et offrir des textes dont le contenu soit au plus près de la vérité, l’organisation de Wikipédia met peu à peu en place ses garde-fous. « Les gens pensent qu’il n’y a pas de relecture, parce qu’il n’y a pas de comité scientifique. Ils se trompent. Les utilisateurs relisent en permanence l’encyclopédie. Et nous demandons aux rédacteurs de fournir le maximum de sources possibles afin de vérifier les informations », explique Christophe Henner, salarié d’une entreprise de services, membre du conseil d’administration de Wikimédia France et contributeur régulier.
Par ailleurs, si tout le monde peut écrire dans l’encyclopédie, tous les participants ne sont pas dotés du même pouvoir. Il existe des grades : administrateur, arbitre, patrouilleur, pompier, etc. Chacun a un rôle bien défini. Les arbitres tranchent les conflits entre utilisateurs, les patrouilleurs surveillent les dernières modifications dans les articles, tandis que les pompiers jouent les médiateurs. Des procédures de contrôle se multiplient. Car « Wikipédia s’est développée très vite », souligne Florence Devouard. Elle a succédé à Jimmy Wales en 2006 et préside, depuis Clermont-Ferrand, la Wikimedia Foundation dont le siège est en Floride. « Si, dans l’ensemble, tout se passe bien, il faut maintenant établir des mécanismes de décision plus rapides et faire le ménage dans les contenus. Wikipédia doit cesser d’abriter une masse d’informations non significatives. »
Le système est censé assurer le triomphe de l’objectivité, de la vérité, ou à tout le moins du consensus sur la futilité, les erreurs et les opinions partisanes. La véracité émergerait ainsi d’un autocontrôle de la communauté wikipédienne. La concurrence des idées conduirait à l’élimination progressive des erreurs. « Comme si la vérité était au bout du temps, ironise la philosophe Barbara Cassin, auteur de Google-moi (3). Ce que les wikipédiens désignent sous le nom de “vérité” n’émerge jamais que de la “doxa”, de la simple opinion continue. Le projet me séduit, mais je suis déçue de n’y retrouver qu’une “opinionisation” du savoir. Le “tous” ne produit finalement que du quantitatif. La masse des opinions ne fait pas quelque chose qui excède l’opinion et qui soit proche de la connaissance. » Car, dans la multitude d’entrées de l’encyclopédie en ligne, on trouve peu d’articles de fond qui accompliraient un travail pédagogique ; la plupart se limite à des données. « Dans l’Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert, fait remarquer Barbara Cassin, la connaissance était sous-tendue par un objectif politique et social. L’encyclopédie, c’est aussi une “paideia”, c’est-à-dire une formation, une éducation du peuple. » Wikipédia, avec sa structure éclatée, se présente sans ordre ni sens de lecture, sans méthode d’accès réfléchie à la connaissance. On perd ici le sens étymologique de l’encyclopédie qui est celui d’un parcours formateur dans la connaissance, au profit d’une recherche immédiate d’information.
Une problématique que les wikipédiens eux-mêmes n’ignorent pas. Déjà, en décembre 2004, au sujet de ce que devrait être un article « encyclopédique », un des contributeurs, surnommé Caton, a affirmé, sans craindre l’ironie, qu’« au fond, Wikipédia renseigne sur les oeuvres que Descartes a écrites comme on peut se renseigner sur des horaires de train » (4) : « […] On peut très bien avoir beaucoup d’informations, et être néanmoins au degré zéro de la connaissance […]. C’est pourquoi le danger de toute encyclopédie est de sombrer dans l’insignifiance et le vide culturel. L’information pour l’information est l’opposé de l’instruction, du savoir et de l’amour de la connaissance. » Le débat fait rage, y compris au sein de la communauté. Pour tenter d’y répondre, Wikimédia France organise, en octobre prochain, à la Cité des sciences et de l’industrie à Paris, un colloque « Wikipédia et les experts » (5). « C’est un problème inextriquable, admet Barbara Cassin. Si l’on instaure un comité scientifique, on dénature l’instantanéité du projet. Malgré ses inconvénients, l’information qu’offre Wikipédia a cet avantage de ne pas être orpheline : elle cite des sources, renvoie à des liens, etc. Si l’on s’en sert comme d’un point de départ qui nous permette de tirer un fil pour entamer une recherche, alors c’est parfait. Maintenant, est-ce qu’à partir de là, vous avez assez de matériau pour en faire un usage intelligent ? C’est une question qu’il leur faudra affronter pour poursuivre cette magnifique aventure. »
Sans doute, l’enthousiasme de Christophe Henner, pour qui « Wikipédia a dépassé tous les rêves de Diderot », doit être mesuré. Des Lumières au Web, l’apparition d’un nouveau mode de communication pose toujours la même question : que modifie-t-il dans notre système de connaissance ? Sa capacité à « changer la façon commune de penser » définissait pour Diderot le critère ultime d’une « bonne » encyclopédie : « L’ouvrage qui produira ce grand effet général, aura des défauts d’exécution ; j’y consens. Mais le plan et le fond en seront excellents. L’ouvrage qui n’opérera rien de pareil, sera mauvais. Quelque bien qu’on en puisse dire d’ailleurs ; l’éloge passera, et l’ouvrage tombera dans l’oubli. »
Si Wikipédia ne change pas radicalement notre façon de penser, l’encyclopédie du XXIe siècle traduit certainement un changement du statut de la connaissance. L’accès au savoir passe désormais par une communauté de bénévoles, tous professeurs et élèves à la fois. La relation de maître à disciple, matrice historique de l’éducation, a disparu pour laisser place au partage universel du savoir à travers la libre communication. Au risque d’oublier parfois la formation du jugement critique, essentielle pour savoir s’orienter dans la masse des informations disponibles .
(1) Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, de Diderot et d’Alembert (article « Encyclopédie », rédigé par Diderot). Tous les textes de l’Encyclopédie sont disponibles sur le site du projet « Analyse et traitement informatique de la langue française » (Atilf) du CNRS
(2) Article consultable sur le site « Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie »
(3) Google-moi : la deuxième mission de l’Amérique, de Barbara Cassin (Albin Michel)
(4) Wikipédia : Quelle encyclopédie ?
(5) Colloque Wikipédia
Voir également:
On March 1st, Wikipedia, the online interactive encyclopedia, hit the million-articles mark, with an entry on Jordanhill, a railway station in suburban Glasgow. Its author, Ewan MacDonald, posted a single sentence about the station at 11 P.M., local time; over the next twenty-four hours, the entry was edited more than four hundred times, by dozens of people. (Jordanhill happens to be the “1029th busiest station in the United Kingdom”; it “no longer has a staffed ticket counter.”) The Encyclopædia Britannica, which for more than two centuries has been considered the gold standard for reference works, has only a hundred and twenty thousand entries in its most comprehensive edition. Apparently, no traditional encyclopedia has ever suspected that someone might wonder about Sudoku or about prostitution in China. Or, for that matter, about Capgras delusion (the unnerving sensation that an impostor is sitting in for a close relative), the Boston molasses disaster, the Rhinoceros Party of Canada, Bill Gates’s house, the forty-five-minute Anglo-Zanzibar War, or Islam in Iceland. Wikipedia includes fine entries on Kafka and the War of the Spanish Succession, and also a complete guide to the ships of the U.S. Navy, a definition of Philadelphia cheesesteak, a masterly page on Scrabble, a list of historical cats (celebrity cats, a cat millionaire, the first feline to circumnavigate Australia), a survey of invented expletives in fiction (“bippie,” “cakesniffer,” “furgle”), instructions for curing hiccups, and an article that describes, with schematic diagrams, how to build a stove from a discarded soda can. The how-to entries represent territory that the encyclopedia has not claimed since the eighteenth century. You could cure a toothache or make snowshoes using the original Britannica, of 1768-71. (You could also imbibe a lot of prejudice and superstition. The entry on Woman was just six words: “The female of man. See HOMO.”) If you look up “coffee preparation” on Wikipedia, you will find your way, via the entry on Espresso, to a piece on types of espresso machines, which you will want to consult before buying. There is also a page on the site dedicated to “Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia” (Stalin’s birth date, the true inventor of the safety razor).
Because there are no physical limits on its size, Wikipedia can aspire to be all-inclusive. It is also perfectly configured to be current: there are detailed entries for each of the twelve finalists on this season’s “American Idol,” and the article on the “2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict” has been edited more than four thousand times since it was created, on July 12th, six hours after Hezbollah militants ignited the hostilities by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers. Wikipedia, which was launched in 2001, is now the seventeenth-most-popular site on the Internet, generating more traffic daily than MSNBC.com and the online versions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal combined. The number of visitors has been doubling every four months; the site receives as many as fourteen thousand hits per second. Wikipedia functions as a filter for vast amounts of information online, and it could be said that Google owes the site for tidying up the neighborhood. But the search engine is amply repaying its debt: because Wikipedia pages contain so many links to other entries on the site, and are so frequently updated, they enjoy an enviably high page rank.
The site has achieved this prominence largely without paid staff or revenue. It has five employees in addition to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s thirty-nine-year-old founder, and it carries no advertising. In 2003, Wikipedia became a nonprofit organization; it meets most of its budget, of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, with donations, the bulk of them contributions of twenty dollars or less. Wales says that he is on a mission to “distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language,” and to an astonishing degree he is succeeding. Anyone with Internet access can create a Wikipedia entry or edit an existing one. The site currently exists in more than two hundred languages and has hundreds of thousands of contributors around the world. Wales is at the forefront of a revolution in knowledge gathering: he has marshalled an army of volunteers who believe that, working collaboratively, they can produce an encyclopedia that is as good as any written by experts, and with an unprecedented range.
Wikipedia is an online community devoted not to last night’s party or to next season’s iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more immune to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site. Nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse. Senators and congressmen have been caught tampering with their entries; the entire House of Representatives has been banned from Wikipedia several times. (It is not subtle to change Senator Robert Byrd’s age from eighty-eight to a hundred and eighty. It is subtler to sanitize one’s voting record in order to distance oneself from an unpopular President, or to delete broken campaign promises.) Curiously, though, mob rule has not led to chaos. Wikipedia, which began as an experiment in unfettered democracy, has sprouted policies and procedures. At the same time, the site embodies our newly casual relationship to truth. When confronted with evidence of errors or bias, Wikipedians invoke a favorite excuse: look how often the mainstream media, and the traditional encyclopedia, are wrong! As defenses go, this is the epistemological equivalent of “But Johnny jumped off the bridge first.” Wikipedia, though, is only five years old. One day, it may grow up.
The encyclopedic impulse dates back more than two thousand years and has rarely balked at national borders. Among the first general reference works was Emperor’s Mirror, commissioned in 220 A.D. by a Chinese emperor, for use by civil servants. The quest to catalogue all human knowledge accelerated in the eighteenth century. In the seventeen-seventies, the Germans, champions of thoroughness, began assembling a two-hundred-and-forty-two-volume masterwork. A few decades earlier, Johann Heinrich Zedler, a Leipzig bookseller, had alarmed local competitors when he solicited articles for his Universal-Lexicon. His rivals, fearing that the work would put them out of business by rendering all other books obsolete, tried unsuccessfully to sabotage the project.
It took a devious Frenchman, Pierre Bayle, to conceive of an encyclopedia composed solely of errors. After the idea failed to generate much enthusiasm among potential readers, he instead compiled a “Dictionnaire Historique et Critique,” which consisted almost entirely of footnotes, many highlighting flaws of earlier scholarship. Bayle taught readers to doubt, a lesson in subversion that Diderot and d’Alembert, the authors of the Encyclopédie (1751-80), learned well. Their thirty-five-volume work preached rationalism at the expense of church and state. The more stolid Britannica was born of cross-channel rivalry and an Anglo-Saxon passion for utility.
Wales’s first encyclopedia was the World Book, which his parents acquired after dinner one evening in 1969, from a door-to-door salesman. Wales—who resembles a young Billy Crystal with the neuroses neatly tucked in—recalls the enchantment of pasting in update stickers that cross-referenced older entries to the annual supplements. Wales’s mother and grandmother ran a private school in Huntsville, Alabama, which he attended from the age of three. He graduated from Auburn University with a degree in finance and began a Ph.D. in the subject, enrolling first at the University of Alabama and later at Indiana University. In 1994, he decided to take a job trading options in Chicago rather than write his dissertation. Four years later, he moved to San Diego, where he used his savings to found an Internet portal. Its audience was mostly men; pornography—videos and blogs—accounted for about a tenth of its revenues. Meanwhile, Wales was cogitating. In his view, misinformation, propaganda, and ignorance are responsible for many of the world’s ills. “I’m very much an Enlightenment kind of guy,” Wales told me. The promise of the Internet is free knowledge for everyone, he recalls thinking. How do we make that happen?
As an undergraduate, he had read Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 free-market manifesto, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which argues that a person’s knowledge is by definition partial, and that truth is established only when people pool their wisdom. Wales thought of the essay again in the nineteen-nineties, when he began reading about the open-source movement, a group of programmers who believed that software should be free and distributed in such a way that anyone could modify the code. He was particularly impressed by “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” an essay, later expanded into a book, by Eric Raymond, one of the movement’s founders. “It opened my eyes to the possibility of mass collaboration,” Wales said.
The first step was a misstep. In 2000, Wales hired Larry Sanger, a graduate student in philosophy he had met on a Listserv, to help him create an online general-interest encyclopedia called Nupedia. The idea was to solicit articles from scholars, subject the articles to a seven-step review process, and post them free online. Wales himself tried to compose the entry on Robert Merton and options-pricing theory; after he had written a few sentences, he remembered why he had dropped out of graduate school. “They were going to take my essay and send it to two finance professors in the field,” he recalled. “I had been out of academia for several years. It was intimidating; it felt like homework.”
After a year, Nupedia had only twenty-one articles, on such topics as atonality and Herodotus. In January, 2001, Sanger had dinner with a friend, who told him about the wiki, a simple software tool that allows for collaborative writing and editing. Sanger thought that a wiki might attract new contributors to Nupedia. (Wales says that using a wiki was his idea.) Wales agreed to try it, more or less as a lark. Under the wiki model that Sanger and Wales adopted, each entry included a history page, which preserves a record of all editing changes. They added a talk page, to allow for discussion of the editorial process—an idea Bayle would have appreciated. Sanger coined the term Wikipedia, and the site went live on January 15, 2001. Two days later, he sent an e-mail to the Nupedia mailing list—about two thousand people. “Wikipedia is up!” he wrote. “Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.”
Wales braced himself for “complete rubbish.” He figured that if he and Sanger were lucky the wiki would generate a few rough drafts for Nupedia. Within a month, Wikipedia had six hundred articles. After a year, there were twenty thousand.
Wales is fond of citing a 1962 proclamation by Charles Van Doren, who later became an editor at Britannica. Van Doren believed that the traditional encyclopedia was defunct. It had grown by accretion rather than by design; it had sacrificed artful synthesis to plodding convention; it looked backward. “Because the world is radically new, the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too,” Van Doren wrote. “It should stop being safe—in politics, in philosophy, in science.”
In its seminal Western incarnation, the encyclopedia had been a dangerous book. The Encyclopédie muscled aside religious institutions and orthodoxies to install human reason at the center of the universe—and, for that muscling, briefly earned the book’s publisher a place in the Bastille. As the historian Robert Darnton pointed out, the entry in the Encyclopédie on cannibalism ends with the cross-reference “See Eucharist.” What Wales seems to have in mind, however, is less Van Doren’s call to arms than that of an earlier rabble-rouser. In the nineteen-thirties, H. G. Wells lamented that, while the world was becoming smaller and moving at increasing speed, the way information was distributed remained old-fashioned and ineffective. He prescribed a “world brain,” a collaborative, decentralized repository of knowledge that would be subject to continual revision. More radically—with “alma-matricidal impiety,” as he put it—Wells indicted academia; the university was itself medieval. “We want a Henry Ford today to modernize the distribution of knowledge, make good knowledge cheap and easy in this still very ignorant, ill-educated, ill-served English-speaking world of ours,” he wrote. Had the Internet existed in his lifetime, Wells might have beaten Wales to the punch.
Wales’s most radical contribution may be not to have made information free but—in his own alma-matricidal way—to have invented a system that does not favor the Ph.D. over the well-read fifteen-year-old. “To me, the key thing is getting it right,” Wales has said of Wikipedia’s contributors. “I don’t care if they’re a high-school kid or a Harvard professor.” At the beginning, there were no formal rules, though Sanger eventually posted a set of guidelines on the site. The first was “Ignore all the rules.” Two of the others have become central tenets: articles must reflect a neutral point of view (N.P.O.V., in Wikipedia lingo), and their content must be both verifiable and previously published. Among other things, the prohibition against original research heads off a great deal of material about people’s pets.
Insofar as Wikipedia has a physical existence, it is in St. Petersburg, Florida, in an executive suite that serves as the headquarters of the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia and its lesser-known sister projects, among them Wikisource (a library of free texts), Wikinews (a current-events site) and Wikiquote (bye-bye Bartlett’s). Wales, who is married and has a five-year-old daughter, says that St. Petersburg’s attractive housing prices lured him from California. When I visited the offices in March, the walls were bare, the furniture battered. With the addition of a dead plant, the suite could pass for a graduate-student lounge.
The real work at Wikipedia takes place not in Florida but on thousands of computer screens across the world. Perhaps Wikipedia’s greatest achievement—one that Wales did not fully anticipate—was the creation of a community. Wikipedians are officially anonymous, contributing to unsigned entries under screen names. They are also predominantly male—about eighty per cent, Wales says—and compulsively social, conversing with each other not only on the talk pages attached to each entry but on Wikipedia-dedicated I.R.C. channels and on user pages, which regular contributors often create and which serve as a sort of personalized office cooler. On the page of a twenty-year-old Wikipedian named Arocoun, who lists “philosophizing” among his favorite activities, messages from other users range from the reflective (“I’d argue against your claim that humans should aim to be independent/self-reliant in all aspects of their lives . . . I don’t think true independence is a realistic ideal given all the inherent intertwinings of any society”) to the geekily flirtatious (“I’m a neurotic painter from Ohio, and I guess if you consider your views radical, then I’m a radical, too. So . . . we should be friends”).
Wikipedians have evolved a distinctive vocabulary, of which “revert,” meaning “reinstate”—as in “I reverted the edit, but the user has simply rereverted it”—may be the most commonly used word. Other terms include WikiGnome (a user who keeps a low profile, fixing typos, poor grammar, and broken links) and its antithesis, WikiTroll (a user who persistently violates the site’s guidelines or otherwise engages in disruptive behavior). There are Aspergian Wikipedians (seventy-two), bipolar Wikipedians, vegetarian Wikipedians, antivegetarian Wikipedians, existential Wikipedians, pro-Luxembourg Wikipedians, and Wikipedians who don’t like to be categorized. According to a page on the site, an avid interest in Wikipedia has been known to afflict “computer programmers, academics, graduate students, game-show contestants, news junkies, the unemployed, the soon-to-be unemployed and, in general, people with multiple interests and good memories.” You may travel in more exalted circles, but this covers pretty much everyone I know.
Wikipedia may be the world’s most ambitious vanity press. There are two hundred thousand registered users on the English-language site, of whom about thirty-three hundred—fewer than two per cent—are responsible for seventy per cent of the work. The site allows you to compare contributors by the number of edits they have made, by the number of articles that have been judged by community vote to be outstanding (these “featured” articles often appear on the site’s home page), and by hourly activity, in graph form. A seventeen-year-old P. G. Wodehouse fan who specializes in British peerages leads the featured-article pack, with fifty-eight entries. A twenty-four-year-old University of Toronto graduate is the site’s premier contributor. Since composing his first piece, on the Panama Canal, in 2001, he has written or edited more than seventy-two thousand articles. “Wikipediholism” and “editcountitis” are well defined on the site; both link to an article on obsessive-compulsive disorder. (There is a Britannica entry for O.C.D., but no version of it has included Felix Unger’s name in the third sentence, a comprehensive survey of “OCD in literature and film,” or a list of celebrity O.C.D. sufferers, which unites, surely for the first time in history, Florence Nightingale with Joey Ramone.)
One regular on the site is a user known as Essjay, who holds a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law and has written or contributed to sixteen thousand entries. A tenured professor of religion at a private university, Essjay made his first edit in February, 2005. Initially, he contributed to articles in his field—on the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara. Soon he was spending fourteen hours a day on the site, though he was careful to keep his online life a secret from his colleagues and friends. (To his knowledge, he has never met another Wikipedian, and he will not be attending Wikimania, the second international gathering of the encyclopedia’s contributors, which will take place in early August in Boston.)
Gradually, Essjay found himself devoting less time to editing and more to correcting errors and removing obscenities from the site. In May, he twice removed a sentence from the entry on Justin Timberlake asserting that the pop star had lost his home in 2002 for failing to pay federal taxes—a statement that Essjay knew to be false. The incident ended there. Others involve ideological disagreements and escalate into intense edit wars. A number of the disputes on the English-language Wikipedia relate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to religious issues. Almost as acrimonious are the battles waged over the entries on Macedonia, Danzig, the Armenian genocide, and Henry Ford. Ethnic feuds die hard: Was Copernicus Polish, German, or Prussian? (A nonbinding poll was conducted earlier this year to determine whether the question merited mention in the article’s lead.) Some debates may never be resolved: Was the 1812 Battle of Borodino a victory for the Russians or for the French? What is the date of Ann Coulter’s birth? Is apple pie all-American? (The answer, at least for now, is no: “Apple trees didn’t even grow in America until the Europeans brought them over,” one user railed. He was seconded by another, who added, “Apple pie is very popular in the Netherlands too. Americans did not invent or introduce it to the Netherlands. You already plagiarized Santa Claus from our Saint Nicholas. Stop it!”) Who could have guessed that “cheese” would figure among the site’s most contested entries? (The controversy entailed whether in Asia there is a cultural prohibition against eating it.) For the past nine months, Baltimore’s climate has been a subject of bitter debate. What is the average temperature in January?
At first, Wales handled the fistfights himself, but he was reluctant to ban anyone from the site. As the number of users increased, so did the editing wars and the incidence of vandalism. In October, 2001, Wales appointed a small cadre of administrators, called admins, to police the site for abuse. Admins can delete articles or protect them from further changes, block users from editing, and revert text more efficiently than can ordinary users. (There are now nearly a thousand admins on the site.) In 2004, Wales formalized the 3R rule—initially it had been merely a guideline—according to which any user who reverts the same text more than three times in a twenty-four-hour period is blocked from editing for a day. The policy grew out of a series of particularly vitriolic battles, including one over the U.S. economy—it was experiencing either high growth and low unemployment or low growth and high unemployment.
Wales also appointed an arbitration committee to rule on disputes. Before a case reaches the arbitration committee, it often passes through a mediation committee. Essjay is serving a second term as chair of the mediation committee. He is also an admin, a bureaucrat, and a checkuser, which means that he is one of fourteen Wikipedians authorized to trace I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse. He often takes his laptop to class, so that he can be available to Wikipedians while giving a quiz, and he keeps an eye on twenty I.R.C. chat channels, where users often trade gossip about abuses they have witnessed.
Five robots troll the site for obvious vandalism, searching for obscenities and evidence of mass deletions, reverting text as they go. More egregious violations require human intervention. Essjay recently caught a user who, under one screen name, was replacing sentences with nonsense and deleting whole entries and, under another, correcting the abuses—all in order to boost his edit count. He was banned permanently from the site. Some users who have been caught tampering threaten revenge against the admins who apprehend them. Essjay says that he routinely receives death threats. “There are people who take Wikipedia way too seriously,” he told me. (Wikipedians have acknowledged Essjay’s labors by awarding him numerous barnstars—five-pointed stars, which the community has adopted as a symbol of praise—including several Random Acts of Kindness Barnstars and the Tireless Contributor Barnstar.)
Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket, complete with an elaborate hierarchy of users and policies about policies. Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, two researchers at I.B.M. who have studied the site using computerized visual models called “history flows,” found that the talk pages and “meta pages”—those dealing with coördination and administration—have experienced the greatest growth. Whereas articles once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site’s content, as of last October they represented seventy per cent. As Wattenberg put it, “People are talking about governance, not working on content.” Wales is ambivalent about the rules and procedures but believes that they are necessary. “Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it’s a bunch of random people interacting,” he told me.
For all its protocol, Wikipedia’s bureaucracy doesn’t necessarily favor truth. In March, 2005, William Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey, in Cambridge, was briefly a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had contributed. After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse effect, the case went into arbitration. “User William M. Connolley strongly pushes his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own,” his accuser charged in a written deposition. “His views on climate science are singular and narrow.” A decision from the arbitration committee was three months in coming, after which Connolley was placed on a humiliating one-revert-a-day parole. The punishment was later revoked, and Connolley is now an admin, with two thousand pages on his watchlist—a feature that enables users to compile a list of entries and to be notified when changes are made to them. He says that Wikipedia’s entry on global warming may be the best page on the subject anywhere on the Web. Nevertheless, Wales admits that in this case the system failed. It can still seem as though the user who spends the most time on the site—or who yells the loudest—wins.
Connolley believes that Wikipedia “gives no privilege to those who know what they’re talking about,” a view that is echoed by many academics and former contributors, including Larry Sanger, who argues that too many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly confident of their own opinions. He left Wikipedia in March, 2002, after Wales ran out of money to support the site during the dot-com bust. Sanger concluded that he had become a symbol of authority in an anti-authoritarian community. “Wikipedia has gone from a nearly perfect anarchy to an anarchy with gang rule,” he told me. (Sanger is now the director of collaborative projects at the online foundation Digital Universe, where he is helping to develop a Web-based encyclopedia, a hybrid between a wiki and a traditional reference work. He promises that it will have “the lowest error rate in history.”) Even Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that “ ‘disaster’ is not too strong a word” for Wikipedia. In his view, the site is “infested with moonbats.” (Think hobgoblins of little minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing on their terrain. “The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks,” Raymond said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard: either it works or it doesn’t. There is no such test for truth.
Nor has increasing surveillance of the site by admins deterred vandals, a majority of whom seem to be inserting obscenities and absurdities into Wikipedia when they should be doing their homework. Many are committing their pranks in the classroom: the abuse tends to ebb on a Friday afternoon and resume early on a Monday. Entire schools and universities have found their I.P. addresses blocked as a result. The entry on George W. Bush has been vandalized so frequently—sometimes more than twice a minute—that it is often closed to editing for days. At any given time, a couple of hundred entries are semi-protected, which means that a user must register his I.P. address and wait several days before making changes. This group recently included not only the entries on God, Galileo, and Al Gore but also those on poodles, oranges, and Frédéric Chopin. Even Wales has been caught airbrushing his Wikipedia entry—eighteen times in the past year. He is particularly sensitive about references to the porn traffic on his Web portal. “Adult content” or “glamour photography” are the terms that he prefers, though, as one user pointed out on the site, they are perhaps not the most precise way to describe lesbian strip-poker threesomes. (In January, Wales agreed to a compromise: “erotic photography.”) He is repentant about his meddling. “People shouldn’t do it, including me,” he said. “It’s in poor taste.”
Wales recently established an “oversight” function, by which some admins (Essjay among them) can purge text from the system, so that even the history page bears no record of its ever having been there. Wales says that this measure is rarely used, and only in order to remove slanderous or private information, such as a telephone number. “It’s a perfectly reasonable power in any other situation, but completely antithetical to this project,” said Jason Scott, a longtime contributor to Wikipedia who has published several essays critical of the site.
Is Wikipedia accurate? Last year, Nature published a survey comparing forty-two entries on scientific topics on Wikipedia with their counterparts in Encyclopædia Britannica. According to the survey, Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Britannica’s, a result that, oddly, was hailed as a triumph for the upstart. Such exercises in nitpicking are relatively meaningless, as no reference work is infallible. Britannica issued a public statement refuting the survey’s findings, and took out a half-page advertisement in the Times, which said, in part, “Britannica has never claimed to be error-free. We have a reputation not for unattainable perfection but for strong scholarship, sound judgment, and disciplined editorial review.” Later, Jorge Cauz, Britannica’s president, told me in an e-mail that if Wikipedia continued without some kind of editorial oversight it would “decline into a hulking mediocre mass of uneven, unreliable, and, many times, unreadable articles.” Wales has said that he would consider Britannica a competitor, “except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within five years.”
Larry Sanger proposes a fine distinction between knowledge that is useful and knowledge that is reliable, and there is no question that Wikipedia beats every other source when it comes to breadth, efficiency, and accessibility. Yet the site’s virtues are also liabilities. Cauz scoffed at the notion of “good enough knowledge.” “I hate that,” he said, pointing out that there is no way to know which facts in an entry to trust. Or, as Robert McHenry, a veteran editor at Britannica, put it, “We can get the wrong answer to a question quicker than our fathers and mothers could find a pencil.”
Part of the problem is provenance. The bulk of Wikipedia’s content originates not in the stacks but on the Web, which offers up everything from breaking news, spin, and gossip to proof that the moon landings never took place. Glaring errors jostle quiet omissions. Wales, in his public speeches, cites the Google test: “If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist.” This position poses another difficulty: on Wikipedia, the present takes precedent over the past. The (generally good) entry on St. Augustine is shorter than the one on Britney Spears. The article on Nietzsche has been modified incessantly, yielding five archived talk pages. But the debate is largely over Nietzsche’s politics; taken as a whole, the entry is inferior to the essay in the current Britannica, a model of its form. (From Wikipedia: “Nietzsche also owned a copy of Philipp Mainländer’s ‘Die Philosophie der Erlösung,’ a work which, like Schopenhauer’s philosophy, expressed pessimism.”)
Wikipedia remains a lumpy work in progress. The entries can read as though they had been written by a seventh grader: clarity and concision are lacking; the facts may be sturdy, but the connective tissue is either anemic or absent; and citation is hit or miss. Wattenberg and Viégas, of I.B.M., note that the vast majority of Wikipedia edits consist of deletions and additions rather than of attempts to reorder paragraphs or to shape an entry as a whole, and they believe that Wikipedia’s twenty-five-line editing window deserves some of the blame. It is difficult to craft an article in its entirety when reading it piecemeal, and, given Wikipedians’ obsession with racking up edits, simple fixes often take priority over more complex edits. Wattenberg and Viégas have also identified a “first-mover advantage”: the initial contributor to an article often sets the tone, and that person is rarely a Macaulay or a Johnson. The over-all effect is jittery, the textual equivalent of a film shot with a handheld camera.
What can be said for an encyclopedia that is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and sometimes illiterate? When I showed the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam his entry, he was surprised to find it as good as the one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He was flabbergasted when he learned how Wikipedia worked. “Obviously, this was the work of experts,” he said. In the nineteen-sixties, William F. Buckley, Jr., said that he would sooner “live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” On Wikipedia, he might finally have his wish. How was his page? Essentially on target, he said. All the same, Buckley added, he would prefer that those anonymous two thousand souls govern, and leave the encyclopedia writing to the experts.
Over breakfast in early May, I asked Cauz for an analogy with which to compare Britannica and Wikipedia. “Wikipedia is to Britannica as ‘American Idol’ is to the Juilliard School,” he e-mailed me the next day. A few days later, Wales also chose a musical metaphor. “Wikipedia is to Britannica as rock and roll is to easy listening,” he suggested. “It may not be as smooth, but it scares the parents and is a lot smarter in the end.” He is right to emphasize the fright factor over accuracy. As was the Encyclopédie, Wikipedia is a combination of manifesto and reference work. Peer review, the mainstream media, and government agencies have landed us in a ditch. Not only are we impatient with the authorities but we are in a mood to talk back. Wikipedia offers endless opportunities for self-expression. It is the love child of reading groups and chat rooms, a second home for anyone who has written an Amazon review. This is not the first time that encyclopedia-makers have snatched control from an élite, or cast a harsh light on certitude. Jimmy Wales may or may not be the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us tooling down the interstate, with but a squint back at the railroad. We’re on the open road now, without conductors and timetables. We’re free to chart our own course, also free to get gloriously, recklessly lost. Your truth or mine? ♦
EDITORS’ NOTE:
The July 31, 2006, piece on Wikipedia, “Know It All,” by Stacy Schiff, contained an interview with a Wikipedia site administrator and contributor called Essjay, whose responsibilities included handling disagreements about the accuracy of the site’s articles and taking action against users who violate site policy. He was described in the piece as “a tenured professor of religion at a private university” with “a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law.”
Essjay was recommended to Ms. Schiff as a source by a member of Wikipedia’s management team because of his respected position within the Wikipedia community. He was willing to describe his work as a Wikipedia administrator but would not identify himself other than by confirming the biographical details that appeared on his user page. At the time of publication, neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name. Essjay’s entire Wikipedia life was conducted with only a user name; anonymity is common for Wikipedia administrators and contributors, and he says that he feared personal retribution from those he had ruled against online. Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia—as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”
Voir de plus:
Cyberclinic: Who are the editors of Wikipedia?
Rhodri Marsden
The Independent
12 December 2007
Judging by all the jibes Wikipedia receives, you might have come to the conclusion long ago that it is a collection of fantasies penned by daydreamers. The American satirist Stephen Colbert has even coined the term « wikiality », the process of « creating the reality one wants to believe in ».
But the online encyclopedia, which all of us can add to and edit, has a policing structure to ensure there is no foul play. Contentious or mischievous alterations tend to be quickly flagged by a team of administrators, who have been granted privileges to delete pages, lock articles from being changed and deter users from editing.
But rather than be commended, they’re suffering more and more accusations of heavy-handedness. Last week, allegations against certain administrators came to a head on a site called Wikipedia Review, where people debate the administrators’ actions.
A former member of Wikipedia’s arbitration committee has claimed that up to 90 per cent of people who are banned from editing entries are excluded for no good reason. One Wikipedia user living in Utah recently discovered they had been banned from editing; this was because one of their neighbours happens to be Judd Bagley, an executive of a company called Overstock, who has been in a long-running battle with Wikipedia over the content of certain pages. Administrators had simply blocked 1,000 homes in his area, just to be on the safe side that Bagley couldn’t get online to make changes.
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, has admitted that the site isn’t truly democratic, saying that « the core community appreciates when someone is knowledgeable, and [when someone] shouldn’t be writing ». But the power that Wikipedia admins have to make those judgements on our behalf will, sadly, always be in danger of going to their heads.
Diagnosis required
Might all these instant messaging services finally be starting to work in tandem? And what are the best ways to track people down online?
Voir encore:
Avoid Wikipedia, warns Wikipedia chief
It can seriously damage your grades
« the stupid media watches everything I do now » – Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia co-founder founder Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales has warned students not to refer to Wikipedia, reports the US education weekly The Chronicle.
Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has earned them fail grades.
« They say, ‘Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia' » and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he has no sympathy for their plight, noting that he thinks to himself: « For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia, » the journal reports.
Wales didn’t, alas, suggest renaming the project to something more appropriate, like « Jimbo’s Big Bag of Trivia« , as we’ve advised before. He put the blame squarely on the students. And while Wikipedians love to blame everyone but themselves for their predicament, in large part, he’s correct.
What’s more interesting is that Wikipedian’s guardians see its new found infamy as an opportunity to forge a marketing strategy for the troubled project.
Last year criticism of the site, which is popular with teenagers and the unemployed, was met with the counter-attack that the user was being morally delinquent if they failed to correct the mistakes themselves.
This view was wittily summarized by Lore Sjoberg, here, in a faux FAQ:
The person who was accused of murdering Kennedy didn’t realize that it’s his job to monitor his own Wikipedia entry at all times and fix mistakes. By not doing so, by allowing his entry to contain libelous information, he was in essence accusing himself of murdering Kennedy. The Wikipedia board of directors is hoping that the courts will accept this as a confession and convict him of assassination. At that point, his Wikipedia entry will be 100 percent true, proving that the system works.
Sjoberg later explained:
« Sites are the responsibility of those who choose to contribute to them. You can’t pick a site and declare it to be everyone else’s problem. In the end, though, this isn’t Wikipedia’s fault. Last I checked, there’s nothing on the site saying ‘Wikipedia: The Online Encyclopedia You’re Obliged to Edit.' »
Slumming it with Jimbo
So now the second line of defense takes prominence (we ran up a a taxonomy of popular Wikipedians’ whinges here last year) – and it’s a variation on caveat lector. It stresses the fact that no resource can be trusted. You can see this line of argument being practiced in the comments beneath the Chronicle‘s article. Whether the idea is to make people so distrustful of resource material that they need a tinfoil hat before they embark on their research, or whether it’s simply to condition them to the low-grade, poorly written material found on Wikipedia we don’t know. If it’s the latter, it brings to mind the beleagured Tourist department of a rundown and polluted seaside town, urging visitors to « Enjoy Our Beach! Ignore the radioactive oil slicks! ».
And so, perhaps, by setting the bar so low, then Wikipedia may be redeemed. You can see why we’ve characterized the project as essentially Utopian. This is a highly optimistic strategy, if nothing else.
But if the purpose is to promote Wikipedia as a « jumping off point » for studies, then the advice may be even more harmful than we first supposed. Students have two great resources at their disposable: a mine of material that isn’t and never will appear on the World Wide Web, the primary plankton for Wikipedians. And even better, helpful librarians will be able to tailor a bespoke bibliography for the student, bringing years of resource mining experience and specialist skills to the task. If your « jumping off point » for a project is such a librarian, then intelligence will reward intelligence. If your « jumping off point » is Wikipedia, and its over-reliance on web dross, then stupidity will reward stupidity.
We may as well let them get on with it – and let nature take its course.
But ironies abound, and you’re probably reaching for the mailto: already with your favourites. Here are just a couple we enjoyed.
While academics may balk at the suggestion, the educational system rewards rote cutting and pasting, leaving little room for critical thinking. This pervades both junk lit-crit and junk science, which are increasingly the flavour of the day throughout academia. So what could be a more appropriate resource for an ignorant and lazy student, than reference material prepared exclusively by other ignorant and lazy students?
We also have one piece of advice for any student insane enough to cite Wikipedia: have patience. Wait until you have secured academic tenure, or, say, an untouchable bench seat in the circuit courts.
Then you can be as insane as you like, and quote Wikipedia to your heart’s content. And no one will be able to do a damn thing about it. ®
jcdurbant 
If, for whatever purpose, I am easy cash at a table I will merely get up and do something else. It might also be an indicator of how much money you will be betting for your sport. We don’t even attempt to be that way, we just are.
J’aimeJ’aime