January 16, 2011
“A Subset of All Human Culture”
For Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary, The Atlantic asked leading thinkers to contribute their thoughts about the site and its importance over the past decade. I personally enjoyed Alan Jacobs’ contribution, which considers Wikipedia’s own sense of its history:
No one understands the true genius of Wikipedia if they look only at the current version of any given page. James Bridle makes this clear when he explains why he decided to record the Wikipedia debate about how to recount the story of the Iraq war: “Wikipedia is a useful subset of the entire Internet, and as such a subset of all human culture. It’s not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot.” (The books are cool, but they are frozen in time: who knows how Wikipedia’s account of the war may change in the coming years or even decades?)
This extraordinary temporal inclusiveness does not just dramatically increase the usefulness of Wikipedia as a “resource for collating” and a “framework for understanding;” it also means that Wikipedia contains, within itself, the tools for its own evaluation. We don’t just have to assert that the whole project is on an endless upward trajectory, or, conversely, that it’s always regressing towards the mediocre mean: by studying the history, we can go a hell of a long way towards finding out.
In a way, it helps to think of Wikipedia — and by extension, the internet itself – as an ongoing conversation.
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