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EVERYMAN'S ENCYCLOPEDIA: A more consistent -- but still cool -- site is goal of contributors’ first U.S. meeting
BY HEATHER NEWMAN
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
August 2, 2006
| Wikipedia "is the way people are looking for information," Kestenbaum said. |
| Local Wiki references |
| Michigan has thousands of references inside Wikipedia, ranging from local history to modern rock bands. Some excerpts: On the Detroit Tigers: "After years of being a laughingstock of the major leagues, the Tigers surged to the top of the American League standings in the first half of the 2006 season. ... The team has held the best record in baseball for most of the season. In addition, the team's success has attracted a whole new generation of fans, who had never seen winning baseball in their town before." On Henry Ford: "Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 -- April 7, 1947) was the founder of the Ford Motor Co. and father of the modern assembly line used in mass production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. As owner of the Ford company, he became one of" the "two or three richest and best-known people in the world. ... He had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace." On Kid Rock: "Kid Rock's talent can be illustrated by the fact he is credited on his albums for not only vocals, but guitar (steel, rhythm, electric and acoustic), bass, percussion, mixing, mellotron, keyboard, backing vocals, slide guitar, scratching, programming, producer and even banjo. He is famous for his high-energy personality on and off stage. " On Joe Louis Arena: "Several plans for a replacement arena have been raised for years; presently, JLA is considered somewhat outdated due to its lack of luxury boxes and other revenue-generating amenities. In addition, some proposals for the expansion of Cobo Hall have required JLA to be demolished. No firm plan for a replacement is in place." Heather Newman |
| What's a wiki? |
| Wikipedia defines it as, "A wiki (pronounced WICK-ee or WEE-kee) is a type of Web site that allows users to easily add, remove or otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration." Really, though, it's a bus. Ward Cunningham, who created the first Wiki in 1994 -- WikiWikiWeb, a computer science site -- named it after the WikiWiki line of buses at the airport in Honolulu, where he was vacationing. "Wiki-wiki" means "quick quick" or "hurry quick" in Hawaiian. While Wikipedia is easily the largest Wiki online at the moment, there are plenty of others to browse, covering a wide variety of topics. Some examples: www.wikihow.com/Main-Page -- An attempt to create the world's largest how-to guide. http://lostpedia.com/wiki/Main_Page -- A Wiki on topics related to the television show "Lost." www.wowwiki.com -- A Wiki about things related to the hugely popular video game "World of Warcraft." www.wikiindex.com/Welcome -- A Wiki all about Wikis, including a fairly comprehensive directory. Heather Newman |
| Wiki dos and don'ts |
| You can use Wikipedia to bolster your career, add some snap to your small talk and woo that lovely intellectual in your life. Just be careful not to fall into the common Wikitraps: DO use Wikipedia to look up information quickly on the interests of party guests or your boss. "Is that figurine a Precious Moments? I hear that's one of just a few porcelain figurine makers left in the world." DON'T use Wikipedia to put together your company's annual report. "And in conclusion, our sales in East Lansing, where the average IQ of the residents is 72 and it's foggy 320 days a year, will help to propel us into the 21st Century." DO use Wikipedia to look up tidbits you can add to your social conversations. "Isn't the Fisher Building amazing? I hear it's often called 'Detroit's largest art object.' " DON'T use Wikipedia as a substitute for going outside and having social conversations. "I disagree! I think the entry for 'sneeze' clearly shows more supposition than fact and needs attention paid to its etymology." |
| Dos and don'ts of Wikipedia |
| There are some traps to avoid with Wikipedia: DO use Wikipedia to look up tidbits to add to your social conversations. DON'T use Wikipedia to put together your company's annual report. • More dos and don'ts, and more facts about Wikipedia, 8A |
There's one place on the Web where you can go for authoritative articles on subjects from Zimbabwe currency to Grosse Pointe's connection to "The Simpsons."
It's Wikipedia.
And on Friday, hard-core volunteer writers and editors from Michigan and all over the world, who assemble the online encyclopedia, will pour into Harvard's law school for the first U.S. convention to debate the finer points of "Wiki style" for entries on the Web site visited by millions each month.
Wikipedia is the place wired hipsters go for info. Completely peer-posted and edited by a dedicated force of thousands of readers-turned-editors including hundreds of Michiganders, www.wikipedia.org has made the leap to being one of the premiere destinations on the Web and is on the verge of becoming its own verb, like Google.
The number of articles on the site has skyrocketed to more than 4.6 million worldwide (more than 1.2 million in English). And Wikipedia is so popular that many general searches on Google will net a Wikipedia entry somewhere in the top five results.
Michael Karazim, a 22-year-old graduate student from Spring Arbor, says he uses the site 10 hours a week. He's contributed articles on Spring Arbor history and local roads and highways.
"I do enjoy using it, personally," he said. "It makes it really easy to go from topic to topic."
Part of Wiki's allure -- it's become one of the 20 most-visited sites on the Web -- is its quick summaries of everything from presidential biographies to television show plotlines.
But many who visit to check out a topic on the fly find themselves staying, drawn into the web of articles created by the words in each entry that link to other entries.
At lunch Monday, Karazim was reading a BBC news report on Zimbabwe and the dollar when he ran across a term he had never heard before, a "bearer check."
"I immediately went to Wiki," he said. That article said it was a check that is treated like cash -- it's payable to whomever happens to be in possession of the slip of paper it's written on.
But the entry also explained why the country had bearer checks and how they were used, and links in the item led him to other discussions of the euro, the governmental situation in Zimbabwe, reserve currency and eventually the U.S. dollar.
It's that serendipity that keeps people browsing Wiki long after they would have closed a paper encyclopedia.
Still, Wikipedia -- supported by a nonprofit foundation with donations -- has often been the source of controversy.
The reason it has reached its enormous size and popularity is because of the volunteer efforts of thousands of amateur and professional writers and editors who post, discuss and refine each entry.
But the fact that anyone can edit any article leads to inaccuracies, some of which are caught sooner than others.
Coincidentally, the most controversial inaccuracy in Wikipedia so far was about a figure best known in journalism circles: former editor of the (Nashville) Tennessean newspaper John Seigenthaler Sr.
As a prank, an operations manager of a delivery service in town edited Seigenthaler's biography to suggest that he was linked with the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.
The hoax went unnoticed for four months, when it was drawn to Seigenthaler's attention. He blasted the site in a column published in USA Today.
Wikipedians admit that the site does see a fair amount of changes -- some well-meaning, some not -- that result in articles containing inaccurate information or information with a point of view, a no-no in Wiki circles.
"Some of the pages get vandalized a lot," said Larry Kestenbaum, clerk and register of deeds for Washtenaw County and a frequent Wiki contributor. "Malcolm X. The Kennedy assassination. The East Lansing page."
But despite edits motivated by everything from religious views to football rivalries, most pages are reasonably accurate, he said.
Part of that is because people tend to track the articles they've contributed or edited, noting changes and reverting those pages or correcting errors that have been added.
He has all the county pages in Michigan on a watch list that he checks once a day, for example, which shows him changes.
"It's very easy to be dubious about it because any random person can make changes. But on the whole, most people are well-intentioned," he said. "Given the amount of traffic Wikipedia gets, the number of changed pages is relatively small."
And it's actually the urge to correct or update information that most Wikipedians say has sucked them into contributing to the site.
Every time a change is made, the previous versions of the page are saved, so later editors can see exactly what happened and revert the page if necessary.
Kestenbaum says if he doesn't get in to fix a change on a Michigan page within an hour, someone else has usually beat him to it.
If a page is frequently changed, it can be locked by the site's core group of administrators. The pages are run by a nonprofit foundation.
"This is the way people are looking for information," Kestenbaum said. "They're looking to Wikipedia for it, so Wikipedia better be ready for it."
He compares Wikipedia to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," the often-flippant, always-friendly electronic encyclopedia from the Douglas Adams novel of the same name. That too was compiled by correspondents from all over the universe.
"There's no way that an organized, paid editorial staff could ever keep up with all this stuff," he said. "It's still impossible. But it's less impossible."
Contact HEATHER NEWMAN at 313-223-3336 or hnewman@freepress.com.
Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.
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