All in good faith

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia, by Andrew Lih

Who would have known that mixed into the aggregate at the foundations of what by now must be the most consulted encyclopedia in the history of the world would be Ayn Rand, options-pricing theory, Kropotkin, table napkins, soft porn and a Hawaiian airport shuttle-bus?

This being the internet, you might have guessed at soft porn — a sometime minor business interest of its founder Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales. But the rest? These are interesting times for the culture of knowledge, and the story of the evolution of Wikipedia, with its utopian belief in collective good faith, its roots in hacker culture and its history of ingenious bricolage, is at the centre of them.

One of Wikipedia’s only non-negotiable policies is NPOV, or ‘Neutral Point of View’ — a rule, as you’ll have noticed, that Andrew Lih’s subtitle cheerfully violates. His book comes with the endorsement and co-operation of the Wikimedia Foundation, so expect a certain amount of boosterism. The opening pages like to use words like ‘phenomenon’, and the sort of prolepsis signalled by ‘little did they know at the time…’ But another acronymic catchphrase among Wikipedians is AGF: ‘Assume Good Faith.’

AGF. This is a touching, interesting story, and an important one. Thanks to Wikipedia, more knowledge is more available to more people than at any other time in human history, and it is available for free.

What’s remarkable about Wikipedia is not, surely, how inaccurate it is, but how accurate. It is not that it attracts vandals and dopes, but that it attracts millions of people donating their energy and expertise and hours of their time for free; and that they not only outnumber the vandals and dopes, but succeed in keeping them at bay.