Wikipedia spreads love, knowledge

If you’ve ever used an encyclopedia – and, if you’re reading this, I assume you have – you may… If you’ve ever used an encyclopedia – and, if you’re reading this, I assume you have – you may remember leafing through outdated volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica at the library. In this computer age of ours, though, reading books for knowledge is growing increasingly useless. New information can’t be printed fast enough to meet the demand for access; the obvious alternative to print is the Internet.

Prior to 2001, students looking to do encyclopedic research online had two main options: a pay service like Encyclopedia Britannica Online, unnecessarily expensive for the casual researcher, or a semi-“free” service like Microsoft Encarta, whose free articles lacked length and breadth. Then came Wikipedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation is not the first project of its kind, but it has become famous for its acclaimed free encyclopedia, Wikipedia. It posits on its homepage: “Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”

A tremendously ambitious, yet undeniably noble goal. I can imagine a world where knowledge is no longer a commodity to be purchased, where everyone has access to and can benefit from human knowledge.

The beauty of the Wikimedia project lies in its level of collaboration. Wikipedia has articles written in more than 100 world languages and can be accessed and edited by anyone that has Internet access available to them.

Although the spirit of the wiki is to allow for free-flowing modification of publicly available information, articles can be temporarily locked by the benevolent moderators. This measure exists for obvious reasons. Without control, wiki projects would succumb to chaos and ultimately decay.

But ultimately, most wiki users are kind, sane, thoughtful individuals that seek to contribute. That’s what makes Wikipedia and other such collaborations – like the Mozilla Foundation, producer of the popular Firefox Web browser – work as well as they do.

Publicly available knowledge should be free. Why should I pay for that which can be readily translocated from person to person? If there exists public knowledge, is it unreasonable to expect it to be readily accessible by all humans? Making knowledge available only helps people. As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

What’s so exciting about the wiki movement is the empowerment it gives to its users. You, the one who accesses the data, have the ability to make any changes you see fit. You have the ability to discuss with others the validity of a source or collaborate to decide the direction of an article. It allows for a living, breathing reference: an invaluable tool in our never-static world.

The open collaborative model of the wiki philosophy is perfectly suited for the compilation of encyclopedic knowledge. Its strength lies in availability: quantity over quality. That may seem absurd, considering the opposite is true when judging the value of information. But wiki works because of the way it encourages the survival of valid information, and the elimination of frivolous and incorrect details.

This is not to say that Wikipedia should be anyone’s sole research source. Nor am I advocating using it to replace conventional research. Wikipedia is a tool – powerful, nonetheless – that can be employed to enrich knowledge.

For-pay sites like Encarta are generally maintained by a staff of researchers who are paid to inquire about facts and determine the validity of the knowledge they’re compiling. Most of these researchers are very thorough in the work they do, but they do have a short-coming: There aren’t enough of them to properly document all that we currently know. Furthermore, I don’t envision a rapid growth in these people to keep up with the exponential growth of human knowledge.

The wiki concept allows experts who may not to work in academic research to voluntarily author – and edit – articles online without pressure.

Interestingly, Wikipedia was the source of most of the research I did for this column. While I concentrate here on mainly Wikipedia, Wikimedia has other notable research tools like Wiktionary – the free dictionary – and WikiBooks – freely available online textbooks. I suggest that everyone know how to use these priceless resources.

Karim isn’t famous enough to have his own Wikipedia article yet. E-mail him at kab85@pitt.edu.