The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality

Citation

Mason, D. (2010), "The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality", The Electronic Library, Vol. 28 No. 5, pp. 756-757. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471011082031

Wikipedia is a major player in the internet world, it is consulted and relied upon daily by millions of information seekers. But how reliable is it, who are the people who contribute to it, as more and more people add to it will it get better or worse? This book is an exploration of Wikipedia: its origins, its development and its future.

The future of Wikipedia is important: most people who use it have never consulted any other encyclopaedia and it is now beginning to drive all other fact sources out of business.

The statistics of Wikipedia are truly astonishing: more than one new article is added per minute, 1,700 articles a day, 50,000 a month, there are currently more than three million entries. As well as the English edition, there are editions in over 250 languages, including Latin and Esperanto. And yet no one owns it, no one is responsible for it, there are no guarantees of authenticity and no claims to authority.

This book is an insider's view of how Wikipedia began and how it is evolving. It is informal, chatty, irreverent and extremely well researched. Dalby describes the birth, growth and impact of Wikipedia in fascinating detail. He covers all the well known issues that surround an open source work that anyone can edit, but with the benefit of inside knowledge, and each side of an argument is illustrated by actual quotations from the sources. It describes the mechanisms that have evolved to prevent vandalism; how they eliminate vanity publishing, identify self editing by public figures; the rules they follow to improve reliability, to prevent impersonation. These are all necessary because at the heart of Wikipedia is the issue of trust. This is dealt with in detail in the last two chapters. Dalby discusses all the reasons why people do not trust it now, and makes a convincing argument for it becoming more, not less, trustworthy as time goes on.

The book is all about the dynamic interplay between the writers, editors and users. The result is a rare glimpse of the constant daily give and take between the anonymous article writers and the volunteer editors. The picture that emerges is of a self regulating and eclectic community of editors; a lively, free‐wheeling, erudite, cantankerous and dedicated bunch of people who are creating the world's biggest information resource for no reason other than that they can. The result is at turns thought provoking, funny, surprising and always impressive. Who would have thought that a book about an encylopedia could be more interesting than the encyclopedia itself?