Re: Wikipedia?

["Imre Simon" <imres.g@gmail.com>]

Marion,

may I suggest a couple of starting points for such a rational 
discussion, which I happen to think to be an excellent 
suggestion?

I would like to start with a remark.

Lawrence Lessig, in a recently revised edition ("CODE version 
2.0", downloadable at http://codev2.cc/ ) of his 1999 Opus 
Magnus, "CODE and Other Laws of Cyberspace", put this very 
impressive dedication:

TO WIKIPEDIA, THE ONE SURPRISE THAT TEACHES MORE THAN ANYTHING 
HERE.

So why we don't just stop for a while and try to think through 
what might have motivated such an unusual dedication? Of course, 
I will not introduce here neither Lawrence Lessig, nor his books 
and many activities. But I will say that according to alexa.com 
wikipedia.org is the twelfth most visited domain (and still going 
up). Among western domains there are *only* seven domains more 
popular than wikipedia.org, namely yahoo.com, msn.com, 
google.com, youtube.com, myspace.com, live.com and orkut.com. All 
commercial and mighty enterprises. And *nothing else*.

Now, unless we assume that people are stupid and that lately they 
have nothing better to do than chase unreliable information in an 
encyclopedia (of all places), we have to give a credit to the 
surprise mentioned in the above dedication and really stop to try 
to think it over.

Actually, thinking it over might not be an easy job. Not at all. 
Wikipedia, in particular, and Social Production, in more general 
terms, are very profound phenomena of the Internet age and they 
do require plausible, consistent, academic explanation! Lots of 
it, indeed.

The best one I know of so far is Yochai Benkler's recent book, 
"The Wealth of Networks, How Social Production Transforms Markets 
and Freedom", Yale University Press, 2006, which is also 
downloadable at http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks . I 
would recommend reading Chapter 3, "Peer Production and Sharing" 
for those who don't have time to read the whole book. In that 
Chapter there are altogether 6 or 7 pages dedicated to the 
working environment of wikipedia and which elucidates many of the 
perplexities which appear in earlier messages in this thread and 
in similar list discussions.

The best thing, of course, would be to read the entire book which 
is much much deeper than an explanation of wikipedia. 
Understanding wikipedia, though, is essential to follow the 
book's academic, brilliant and profusely multi-disciplinar 
analysis of Social Production.

I hope that this might be helpful. I am not a member of this list 
but I will try to follow up on this thread in the coming days.

Cordially Yours,

Imre Simon
http://www.ime.usp.br/~is/


Marion Sumerianlibrarian <marionsumerianlibrarian@yahoo.com> wrote:

> your points are all so very, very true!
>
> yet these are points that has been made quite a few times on the
> liblicense list -- as well as at innumerable other sites, and in
> a wide variety of formats.
>
> it almost seems as if no one follows the wiki thread even one or
> two steps back, never mind incorporating the points that have
> been made (hashed and re-hashed), before posting a consummately
> elegant response on web4lib.
>
> the issue for me becomes: how could we then proceed with an
> organized discussion of the wikipedia phenomenon, and all of the
> interesting questions and responses that pertain to it, in a
> fashion that brings new information to the table, and moves the
> discussion forward in productive, possibly creative way?
>
> would a wiki, or a blog, be an appropriate forum for extending
> this discussion among information organization professionals and
> students aspiring to the profession?
>
> marion s