Andrew Lih on Wikipedia
I just read Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution, in preparation for an interview I’m doing on March 25 for the Berkman Center. It will be held in Griswold Hall, room 110. (Actually, the actual location hasn’t been announced yet. But somewhere at Harvard.) It’s a terrific book.
Andrew tells the story historically, providing tons of context and background. As the title makes clear, he thinks Wikipedia is epochally important, but the book isn’t about touting Wikipedia and gesticulating towards its implications. Rather, given that Wikipedia is at least rather interesting, how did it get there? The simple story we’ve heard so frequently — it’s the encyclopedia we all wrote in our spare time — masks a complex mix of personality, theory, politics, social interaction, software and hardware. Andrew doesn’t shy away from the controversies and tells the story from a neutral point of view … neutral given that he implicitly thinks Wikipedia is overall pretty awesome. In that he mirrors Wikipedia itself: It is (overall) neutral given that the contributors agree that a group-authored encyclopedia that aims for NPOV is worth working on.
If you want to understand Wikipedia, I highly recommend this book, especially in tandem with How Wikipedia Works by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates, a terrific and detailed explanation of the intricacies of Wikipedia’s structure, ethos, rules, and hierarchy.
Hmm … does it tell the history accurately, in the face of many myths which have grown out of the Wikipedia hype? For example, many people don’t realize how Wikipedia was originally “at least theoretically a commercial operation”, with much discussion about potentially putting advertising on the site. See the examination in my recent Guardian column:
Wikipedia isn’t about human potential, whatever Jimmy Wales says
David,
Will your interview video be available on YouTube or somewhere? We love you giving lectures !
I still remember your lecture at Library of Congres about blogs….
Are you going to touch the semantic wikipedia extensions like semantic-mediawiki.org ??
Seth, you’ll have to judge whether you think Andrew is neutral enough and accurate according to your understanding of events. He does discuss Sanger’s email that suggests the possibility of including ads, and the subsequent flameage.
Mirek, 1. The Berkman Center videos and posts lots of events. Perhaps this one. 2. I wasn’t going to ask about semantic extensions, but perhaps I will now. Thanks! 3. Thanks for the compliment.
Sanger’s email? Don’t you mean Wales’s email? There’s also more than one – the real background on this topic is quite different from the fiction usually peddled. For example:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-November/013127.html
“I know that not many people share my curious political views, but to
me, it’s much worse to seek money from governments, i.e. to ask them to take money by force from others, than it is to accept advertising money.”
Basically, since you’ve seen the book (I presume). I’m asking for a quick indication of whether it’s worth the effort for me to seek it out.
Very useful and lightning, thanks.
Thanks for the article you mention some really good points.
apropos semantic web wikipedia direction, I found interesting, though quite basic and not very new, article at:
The End of Google