Wikipedia:Press coverage/An encyclopedia that is alive

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This article, from Wired magazine, is one of the first statements of the qualitative difference between Wikipedia and its predecessor encyclopedias, namely that

Wikipedia articles are alive.

Previous formulations of this concept, which have been previously published, include the statements:

• Wikipedia will never stop growing
• Wikipedia will never be finished

Reference: Pink, Daniel. "The Book Stops Here". Wired. March 2, 2005. Pages: Cover - "Wikipedia: the self-organizing library of the future", 007, 124-129, 136, 139. [1]

• Daniel Pink did quite a bit of research to compile Wired's first paper-edition article on Wikipedia, including attending the New York meetup in December. He covers Wikipedia quite comprehensively: it covers Wikipediaholism, the history of Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales, User:Raul654, User:Angela ("an astonishingly dedicated Wikipedian"), User:Carptrash, User:Bryan_Derksen, User:Lord Emsworth, User:Ram-Man and User:Kingturtle (unfortunately, no mention of Ta bu shi da yu, but no publication is perfect). Also covers an observed Wikipedian heirarchical structure (anons at bottom, registered users next, admins next, ). Covers vandalism: most notably Jimmy Carter and the replacement of the image on that article with a nose-picking pic, also deals with Islamism vandalism. Choice quote: "It turns out that Wikipedia has an innate capacity to heal itself. As a result, woefully outnumbered vandals often give up and leave. (To paraphrase Linus Torvalds, given enough eyeballs, all thugs are callow.) What's more, making changes is so simple that who prevails often comes down to who cares more. And hardcore Wikipedians care. A lot."

  The article also wryly notes that "The God-King drives a Hyundai." and covers Larry Sanger's kuro5hin article about anti-elitism. It cover the different views of Larry and Jimbo: Larry wants better editorial control, Jimbo wants a stable 1.0 revision. The author, however, takes a completely different tack:

  "But both Sanger's critique and Wales' reaction miss a larger point: You can't evaluate Wikipedia by traditional encyclopedia standards. A forked Wikipedia run by academics would be Nupedia 2.0. It would use the One Best Way production model, which inevitably would produce a One Best Way product. That's not a better or worse Wikipedia any more than Instapundit.com is a better or worse Washington Post. They are different animals.

  "Encyclopedias aspire to be infallible. But Wikipedia requires that the perfect never be the enemy of the good. Citizen editors don't need to make an entry flawless. They just need to make it better. As a result, even many Wikipedians believe the site is not as good as traditional encyclopedias. "On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give Wikipedia a 7.8 in reliability," Kvaran told me in New Mexico. "I'd give Britannica an 8.8." But how much does that matter? Britannica has been around since before the American Revolution; Wikipedia just celebrated its fifth birthday. More important, Britannica costs $70 a year; Wikipedia is free. The better criterion on which to measure Wikipedia is whether this very young, pretty good, ever improving, totally free site serves a need - just as the way to measure Britannica is whether the additional surety that comes from its production model is worth the cost.

  "There's another equally important difference between the two offerings. The One Best Way approach creates something finished. The One for All model creates something alive. When the Indian Ocean tsunami erupted late last year, Wikipedians produced several entries on the topic within hours. By contrast, World Book, whose CD-ROM allows owners to download regular updates, hadn't updated its tsunami or Indian Ocean entries a full month after the devastation occurred. That's the likely fate of Wikipedia's proposed stable, or snapshot, version. Fixing its contents in a book or on a CD or DVD is tantamount to embalming a living thing. The body may look great, but it's no longer breathing.

  "'You can create life in there,' says Wiki­pedian Oliver Brown, a high school teacher in Aptos, California. "If you don't know about something, you can start an article, and other people can come and feed it, nurture it." For example, two years ago, Danny Wool was curious about the American architectural sculptor Lee Lawrie, whose statue of Atlas sits nearby Rockefeller Center. Wool posted a stub - a few sentences on a topic - in the hopes that someone would add to it. That someone turned out to be Kvaran, who owned several books on Lawrie and who'd photographed his work not only at Rockefeller Center but also at the Capitol Building in Lincoln, Nebraska. Today, the Lawrie entry has grown from two sentences to several thorough paragraphs, a dozen photos, and a list of references. Brown himself posted a stub when he was wondering how many people were considered the father or mother of something. Today Wiki­pedia lists more than 230 people known as the father or mother of an idea, a movement, or an invention. And that number will likely be higher tomorrow. As the father of this new kind of encyclopedia puts it, "Wikipedia will never be finished."