Andrew Dalby in his book, The World and Wikipedia, portrays the costs and benefits of the resource known as Wikipedia. He starts his book with a strong example of how volatile Wikipedia can really be. In his example, he mentions the 2009 Earthquake in Italy Shows how users initially based their articles with elementary info from rudimentary broadcasts from credible sources. Even though articles can only start out at a few lines, hundreds of different contributors add to the article as the news gets older; adding statistics and details of the incident. Eventually, the article explodes with information, editing old news with the newest and latest stuff. I thought this was amazing how one topic started generically by any random guy can turn into a reference backed up by multiple users all in matter of a few hours.
Wikipedia proved itself to be astonishing, however deceitful as Dalby later introduces a somewhat chaotic event. He describes that while many users can contribute so much, certain ones, incompetent ones, can destroy Wikipedia and all the credibility that it stands for. For example, Dalby mentions keykingz13, a one time user of Wikipedia who edited several pages that didn't really know what or who they were editing about. This type of destruction of legitimate information and recreation of 'fake' information is what makes Wikipedia seem so weak. Its instances like this that create havoc and distress in the Wikipedia World.
Another section of the book discusses the identity crisis in the online resource. He uses Richard W. Worth as an example, a politician who made changes to his own Wikipedia page using the user name ‘Richard Worth.’ This created a scramble in Wikipedia because of the fact that Worth revised several demising notes about himself and his career. Later, Dalby mentions that “Worth’s approach to Wikipedia was perfectly honest and open. That was his mistake.” (Pg 17) What can this tell us about Wikiedia? That people don’t possess the power to edit the information that the world tells about them? Where is the freedom in an encyclopedia that doesn’t accept information from the source itself? That is at the mercy of its critics?
On a lighter note of the Wiki, Dalby credits its unprecedented variability in language. He mentions that there are now 265 languages in Wikipedia. That means that there are thousands of articles all published for a different demographic spread of users. Never before has a encyclopedia granted its users the same information in hundreds of languages; freely edited by the people itself. Admittedly, some users prove incompetent, but amazingly, one topic can get the feedback of 5 different people from all over the world. As Dalby notes, this can all be credited to Jimmy Wales, who was the one to had the far-fetched visualization in the first place!
Dalby’s first appealing pro for Wikipedia came when he mentioned the Nature survey that paralleled Wikipedia’s performances with that of other sufficient and reliable sources like Britannica. This was a huge step up for Wikipedia because it’s most appealing characteristic was its openness to the public and its FREE resources. So when you have two competitors in the same market, where one makes you pay, and the other one gives it to you for free, of course the majority of the population will choose the free source; regardless of its “32%” error rate. Later on page 54, he states that, " The fans of the site believed it to be refreshingly democratic and claimed that over time, accurate comprehensive articles would materialize…”
I liked this book for the most part. But I feel that Andrew Dalby is somewhat repetitive in his argument on how good, or bad Wikipedia was. Perhaps he will come up with something new in the second part of the reading, but I felt that alot of the book put emphasis on the eligibility of the writers and their freedom to edit pages at their liking. I was especially surprised to read later that Dalby himself is a Wikipedian; it is hard to determine the authors stance on exactly what he perceives Wikipedia to be.
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