Open source encyclopedia? Users maintain Wikipedia

There?s a tremendous amount of information online, as we all know. But there?s still a need for encyclopedias. The benefit of an encyclopedia is ?organization.? While you can find the answer to just about anything by searching in Google, you won?t necessarily find it all nicely organized ? you?ll find a little bit here and a little bit there.

There?s another advantage to encyclopedias: authority. Again, you can find any answer online through a search engine, but how do you know the information is right? An encyclopedia, such as the ?daddy of them all,? Encyclopedia Britannica, has qualified editors who select qualified writers. There?s at least some kind of ?guarantee? that the information is ?correct.?

But here?s a weakness of most encyclopedias ? timely they?re not! After reading an article about online encyclopedias in the Manchester Guardian, I set up a temporary account at Britannica.com (you can get 72 hours for free).

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I wanted to take a look at the tsunami coverage. Sure enough, as pointed out by the Guardian journalist, Britannica discussed tsunamis, but not ?the? tsunami; that?s just too recent. Take a look at this, from the main tsunami article in Britannica: ?Perhaps the most destructive tsunami was the one that occurred in 1703 at Awa, Japan, killing more than 100,000 people.? Old news. The Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 has killed more than three times that number, perhaps many more.

But there?s another encyclopedia that does discuss the recent tsunami. Wikipedia (Wikipedia.org) has an extensive article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. In fact although I?ve long been a fan of Encyclopedia Britannica ? my family had a set when I was a child, and I even sold the damn things for a few months many years ago ? quite frankly I?m a real Wikipedia convert.

Their articles are often more detailed, with more background materials ? the Wikipedia Indian Ocean earthquake article (which of course has no Britannica equivalent) has maps, photos, satellite images, a detailed casualties chart, country by country, and hundreds of links to other materials, including photos, animations and videos.

In fact not only is there a 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake article, there?s a 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake category, with about 20 articles on its effect on the Maldives, on Myanmar, even on Norway, a minute-by-minute timeline, and so on.

But where does this information come from? Wikipedia, after all, is free. That?s right; Britannica charges $12 a month, or $70 a year, but Wikipedia charges … zilch. Yet Wikipedia has about 463,000 articles in English, of which around 20,000 were written over the last month or so, 150,000 written over the last four or five months.

There are also hundreds of thousand of articles in dozens of other languages, from Afrikaans to Zulu, from Spanish to Sicilian. It?s the world?s largest encyclopedia, built over four years and growing by 700 articles every day!

Wikipedia, if you haven?t guessed so far, is an ?open source? encyclopedia. What Linux is to the world of operating systems, Wikipedia is to the encyclopedia world. It?s created by many thousands of writers … anyone, in fact, can submit an article to the encyclopedia. How, then, do we know whether what we are reading is valid? Where?s the ?authority? under such a system?
Wikipedia is ?collaboratively edited and maintained by thousands of users.? Articles get posted and are very quickly reviewed. Anyone can edit an article, though Wikipedia?s information page states that half of all edits are done by just 2.5 percent of users. The encyclopedia has a review process, too, to resolve disputes about articles.

It?s hard to imagine that such a process can actually work, and Wikipedia has many critics. But other people have reported experiments in which they add incorrect information to articles, only to find that it?s removed within hours.

Wikipedia is a massive experiment in collaborative publishing, and most critics ignore the weaknesses of more traditional encyclopedias ? why assume that everything you read in Britannica is correct and unbiased?

The really fascinating thing about Wikipedia is that it?s one more example of the sort of massed, voluntary, altruistic action that the Internet has made possible. Just as the Internet enabled open-source software, it?s now enabling open-source information (sometimes known as ?copyleft?). And just as open-source software development can produce some really great software, I don?t believe there?s any reason to think open-source publishing can?t produce really great information resources. Britannica, you?d better watch out!

Peter Kent is the author of ?Search Engine Optimization for Dummies? and many other computer- and Internet-related books. For more information, see www.iChannelServices.com.