A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at “don’t trust it”, because it was the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. Clearly people were trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001.
But despite the fact it now has been consulted trillions of times by billions of people (English Wikipedia alone is 5.2bn words long), it inspires an odd lack of curiosity. Even people donating to Wikipedia might say the money was “for the factcheckers”, though there aren’t any – not paid ones, anyway. Meanwhile, the internet in the social media era had begun to feel like a much uglier place, and some digital nostalgia was setting in: here was this holdover that had somehow survived; a website that functions – and even looks – much the same as it did 20 years ago.
You could say that I fell down a Wiki rabbit hole, especially when it came to the website’s early years. Almost everything important about the project came together quite quickly. Its amateurish, homegrown ethos was off-putting to a lot of writers and journalists, and that meant many questions about why it had worked had no answers.
Most of the people seriously interested in Wikipedia were a handful of academics – so I decided to write a book about it. I’m not a tech journalist. Instead, I have a background in the humanities.
Wikipedia actually does, too: philosophy, and even off-piste disciplines like town planning and poetry, played a much bigger role in its inception than pure technology. Ward Cunningham, who invented the wiki in the 1990s – that’s a webpage anyone can edit, and the foundational tool of Wikipedia – thought very carefully about how the power of computers might be democratised. He drew on all sorts of oblique concepts for it, such as constructivism and the Zen concept of wabi-sabi – beauty in imperfection – and it’s remarkable how well the culture he created has persisted.
Especially wabi-sabi – Wikipedia is, after all, always in a state of incompleteness. Philosophy drew Wikipedia’s co-founders together as well. Though Wales worked in tech and finance, he corresponded with philosophers for years.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
