Wikipedia and the future of knowledge

Wikipedia is by now ubiquitous as the first port of call for information on any and all areas of knowledge. Most of us appreciate its immediacy and its reach, even while admitting its faults. But on a broader scale, what are its possible consequences for the future of human knowledge? Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, pitted himself in debate against Andrew Keen, a self-styled contrarian and a fighter against the internet’s unstoppable tide of democratization. The debate is a fascinating one, and provides something of an hors d’oeuvres for our thoughts on the matter.

The main thrust of Andrew Keen’s argument seemed to be that the lack of any proper editorial presence on Wikipedia means that it inevitably suffers as a source of knowledge (as opposed to a source of information). Wikipedia does not properly organise knowledge in the way that a paper encyclopaedia, or more generally a professionally edited encyclopaedia like Britannica does. Furthermore, the anonymity means that the authors and contributors don’t feel accountable for their writing: they are under no editorial pressure and are not paid, so there is no way, as Keen sees it, to guarantee quality.

Jimmy Wales takes these arguments seriously, and confronts them head on. He agrees that Wikipedia is far from perfect as a source of knowledge—that is, one is unlikely to become well-educated merely from reading very many of its entries. He sees this as a slight problem, and one which he hopes in some way to rectify. But any encyclopaedia of Wikipedia’s scale is likely to find it impossible to give any real structure to its information. Can you imagine converting it into a print version? The number of years spent and the number of people employed to give some kind of order to the number of articles written about entirely inconsequential nuggets would be wasted: after all, it would take so long for the reader to trawl through this information, it certainly would not be worth it. Which gives us a clue, I think, as to Wikipedia’s true value. It will probably never be an organised source of knowledge—the kind of thing which can give the gift of a more rounded education—and given the rate at which new entries are added or modified, shouldn’t aspire to be.

Most of the problems that Keen sees in Wikipedia are rendered irrelevant, as Wales shows, merely by the fact that the nature of the internet makes such objections obsolescent. He points out that the lengths of entries are often disproportionate to the importance of the subjects they deal with, potentially giving the reader a false appreciation of relative cultural value. For instance, the article on Harry Potter could be longer than that on Hamlet (it isn’t). This, as Wales points out, would have been a fair criticism had it been the case with Britannica, given that paper and ink are limited and have to be apportioned according to the importance of the subject matter. But no such problem exists in the digital world, where space is, for all intents and purposes, unlimited. Again, this infinitude is Wikipedia’s defining factor—given its size, there can be no real centralization or tight editorial control, so the aim is not to be an educator, but just to be a provider of isolated information.

Well, what is wrong with that? Perhaps the question should instead be, what is right with that? Jimmy Wales is an idealist, and rightly says that Wikipedia provides free education to many people in parts of the world that otherwise would not have access to it. But this is a highly problematic statement to make, as he himself realises. One can’t use the site unless one has internet access and the ability to read (preferably in English). With those things, Wikipedia is certainly a great aid to learning: a child in Kenya might find out a great wealth of things that would otherwise require an extensive local library (and in purely financial terms, it is obvious which of those is preferable). But clearly it can do little more than that. Leaving aside the question of what a malnourished child would do with knowledge of quantum theory, Wikipedia has the problem of being limited by its infinitude. That is inherent in its nature, and does not detract from it. But given Wales’ noble ambition to bring free learning to everyone in the world, and that we would all like to see that ambition realised, it is surely time for someone to devise an educational website that can fulfil the functions that Keen asked of Wikipedia. Such a site could model itself loosely on Wikipedia and its democratic spirit, but be stricter on content—that is, it would contain only the kind of material one would find in schools and universities, and nothing about Hannah Montana. With its greater strictness on content, and greater level of editorial control, it could provide centralized focus for the learner, and perhaps even provide a means of testing their progress in different subjects. Wikipedia is almost certainly an improvement on all previous encyclopaedias, if only in size and price, but it is not the answer to the question of educating the world. For that, an entirely new vision is needed.