How is Wikipedia an appropriate model for how social media might be more effectively designed to promote truth rather than discord?
Subject: Crowdsourcing - Wikipedia
Event: Wikipedia launched, 2001
[Wikipedia] is one of the few remaining places that retain the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by volunteers . . . . -Richard Cooke
On March 13, 2012, The New York Times announced that after 244 years, The Encyclopedia Britannica would no longer produce its print edition.
First published in 1768, the Encyclopedia Britannica became the most recognized and authoritative reference work ever published in English. Its more than 4,000 contributors included Nobel Prize winners and American presidents.
In the 1950s, The Britannica was sold door-to-door, and many American
families invested in the multi-volume repository of knowledge, paying in monthly installments. The last print edition, produced in 2010, consisted of 32 volumes and weighed 129 pounds. Its price tag was $1,395.
Although it went out of print in 2012, the true end of the Encyclopedia Britannica began 11 years earlier, on January 15, 2001, when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched their free, web-based encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Instead of Nobel Prize winners, Wales and Sanger took the counterintuitive approach of inviting the public to write and edit its content. This approach, commonly known as crowdsourcing, allows Wikipedia to capitalize on the internet’s power to reach a wide number of writers and readers. As The New York Times wrote in 2012,
. . . Wikipedia has moved a long way toward replacing the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds. The site is now written and edited by tens of thousands of contributors around the world, and it has been gradually accepted as a largely accurate and comprehensive source, even by many scholars and academics. (1)
Wikipedia’s reputation as a reliable source grew stronger in 2005 when the peer-reviewed journal Nature published a study comparing science articles in The Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. The scientists comparing the articles discovered no significant difference in the accuracy of the two encyclopedias' content (2).
In his 2021 book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch holds up Wikipedia as a model of how social media platforms might better unite rather than create division. Unlike social media, Wikipedia is reality-based and truth-driven rather than ad-driven or revenue-driven. There is only one page per subject, and when readers go to a subject page, everyone sees the same page. Furthermore, Wikipedia is a reality-based community where all entries are public and any entry can be challenged and corrected. Wikipedia’s over one thousand administrators monitor all content to make sure that entries are supported with reliable evidence and sources. These administrators also have the ability to monitor block users who vandalize pages (3).
As of 2020, Wikipedia features over 6 million articles in English as well as additional content in 300 languages.
Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: When compared with ‘The Encyclopedia Britannica,’ what made ‘Wikipedia’ such a counterintuitive idea in 2001?
Challenge - My Favorite Wiki Topic: Of all its millions of articles, what is one Wikipedia article you would recommend? What are some interesting factoids found in the article?
ALSO ON THIS DAY:
January 15, 1892: The original rules for “Basket Ball” were published in The Triangle, the newspaper of Springfield College.
Sources:
1-Bosman, Julie. “After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses” The New York Times 13 March 2012.
2-Giles, Jim. Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head. Nature 14 Dec. 2005.
https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a
3-Rauch, Jonathan. The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021: 138-141.
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