New Yorker on Wikipedia
The New Yorker has a generally great expository (KNOW IT ALL - Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? by Stacy Schiff) that ably captures Wikipedia’s most interesting corners. But this deserves a big whaaa?
Wales—who resembles a young Billy Crystal with the neuroses neatly tucked in—recalls the enchantment of pasting in update stickers that cross-referenced older entries to the annual supplements.
One Wikipedian said, “By far the best article I have ever read about Wikipedia.”
I agree.
UPDATE: This nugget was too good to leave out. To those who say leave encyclopedia writing to the experts…
When I showed the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam his entry, he was surprised to find it as good as the one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He was flabbergasted when he learned how Wikipedia worked. “Obviously, this was the work of experts,” he said.
technorati tags:wikipedia, newyorker, article, commentary, mustread
August 22nd, 2006 04:05
[…] This piece, along with the New Yorker piece in July by Stacy Schiff (Know It All), give some of the best reporting on the Wikipedia phenomenon so far. Good historical perspective in both. Some areas that have not been written about much - the dynamics of edit wars, how community consensus is reached and how new policy is proposed and decided. I hope to address these things in my book about Wikipedia. […]