Chapter 8

The plagiarised material is amended or augmented by Wikipedia editors, with sometimes disastrous results

I would like (hypothetically) to write a short article about Ardmore, Alabama. I am not _particularly_ qualified in any way to write such an article. I am not a historian, nor a geographer. I have never lived in Ardmore, Alabama. I have been through there, though, as it is a small town not that far from my hometown.

Jimbo had always opposed the high falutin approach of the Nupedia academic specialists who were producing – slowly – articles on obscure subjects like ‘Atonality’ and ‘Hydatius’. This gave depth and respectability to the project, but at the expense of the broad coverage you would expect of a middlebrow reference work, such as articles on small towns, minor celebrities, TV shows and so on. The project also needed articles on places like Ardmore, Alabama, argued Jimbo.

Wikipedia finally gets the article on Ardmore when Derek Ramsey, a skinny computer science student, designs a program or ‘bot’ to import data from the US census database automatically into Wikipedia. Starting with Autaugaville, Alabama on 00:50, 6 October 2002, and ending at Upton, Wyoming on 03:06, 26 October 2002, he creates an entry on every town in the U.S.

Wikipedia turns into a project for aggregating material from the obsolete 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the 1914 Catholic Encyclopedia, and many other public domain sources. The plagiarised material is sometimes amended or augmented by Wikipedia editors, with often disastrous results. Bots are designed to correct spelling mistakes, add links, and, of course, to revert and to block vandals. The failure of the bots to correct all but the simplest and crudest errors in Wikipedia, combined with the optimistic belief that technology could solve the problems of building a comprehensive reference work, echoes earlier, failed, projects to develop machine intelligence.

See also

• Chapter 7

• Wikipedia through the Looking Glass
• Chapter 9