Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You (original) (raw)

Technology|Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/20/technology/fact-driven-collegial-this-site-wants-you.html

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Sept. 20, 2001

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September 20, 2001

Section G, Page

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FOR all the human traffic that the Web attracts, most sites remain fairly solitary destinations. People shop by themselves, retrieve information alone and post messages that they hope others will eventually notice. But some sites are looking for ways to enable visitors not only to interact but even to collaborate to change the sites themselves.

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) is one such site, a place where 100 or so volunteers have been working since January to compile a free encyclopedia. Using a relatively unknown and simple software tool called Wiki, they are involved in a kind of virtual barn-raising.

Their work, which so far consists of some 10,000 entries ranging from Abba to zygote, in some ways resembles the ad hoc effort that went into building the Linux operating system. What they have accomplished suggests that the Web can be a fertile environment in which people work side by side and get along with one another. And getting along, in the end, may ultimately be more remarkable than developing a full-fledged encyclopedia.

That is because Wikipedians, as they call themselves, can not only contribute whatever they want but can also edit entries posted by other writers as they see fit. Anyone who visits the site is encouraged to participate by a note at the bottom of each page that says, ''You can edit this page right now!'' While that may sound like a recipe for authorial anarchy, the quest for communal knowledge seems to have prevailed so far over any attempt to pit individual opinions against one another.

''It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work,'' said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder and the chief executive of Bomis, a San Diego search engine company that donates the computer resources for the project. ''There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.'' Instead, he said, ''there's a general consensus among all of the really busy volunteers about what an encyclopedia article needs to be like.''

He cited an entry on Bill Clinton as an example of how people might have different opinions on a topic but still be able to produce a consensus.

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