Mastering the unruly mob

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/07/2007 (6871 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

AS anyone who has gone Googling will tell you, Wikipedia is evolving into the font of all human knowledge.

Need an explanation of Einstein’s theory of relativity? Want to know where Premier Gary Doer went to high school? Curious about who voices those anonymous cameos in the new Simpsons movie?

These facts — and several hundred million others — are but a few keystrokes away on the global Internet encyclopedia written and edited in 250 languages by a cadre of, at last count, 6.9 million registered volunteers, 4.95 million of whom write in English.

So you can imagine how thrilled I felt to be in a Wikipedia pilot seat, here in Winnipeg, beside someone with the ability and the power to help shape what the world learns.

“I like to work behind the scenes,” says Mitchell Duce, who is among 1,284 English-language Wikipedians holding the status of administrator.

“This means the Wikipedian community decided that I can be trusted with some extra buttons that most users do not have.”

You decide to post a self-serving article about yourself? Mitchell can take it down.

You insert a few nasty phrases into the article about Prime Minister Stephen Harper? Mitchell can bar you from Wikipedia for a few days or, if you persist, forever.

He can lock down the pages most prone to vandalism — say, the one about U.S. President George W. Bush — and he can exercise the final say on the never-ending discussion about page deletions.

Oh, one other thing. Mitchell is 13.

“I don’t tell people on the site my age,” says Mitchell, who will enter Grade 8 at Golden Gate School in September.

“Some will have less respect for me than they do now.”

Mitchell lives with his parents, Adrian and Darlene, and younger brother Miles, in a modest bungalow in Westwood.

“He has always wanted to know the wheres and whys of everything,” says Darlene, 49, who works as a part-time real estate agent’s assistant. (Adrian, 48, is an aircraft mechanic.)

“Mitchell was very slow to start speaking, but he was reading the newspaper with total comprehension well before kindergarten.”

Needless to say, he gets excellent grades, but not A’s in everything, especially if the subject isn’t his favourite.

“I sometimes don’t hand in my assignments on time,” he admits sheepishly.

But last year he scored 100 in his computer class, and Darlene recalls the time when his Grade 5 English teacher asked her to stop helping him with his assignments.

“I wasn’t helping him,” she says. “But the teacher didn’t believe that he could write at that level by himself.”

You will not find details of Mitchell’s precociousness on his Wikipedia user page. Like the vast majority of Wikipedians, he works under an alias, a “user name,” as it were.

In cyberspace, people exist primarily as minds. Just as their ages do not matter, their geographical locations are of no consideration.

As of Friday, 47 users have categorized themselves as “Wikipedians in Manitoba,” 27 as “Wikipedians in Winnipeg.” There are likely hundreds more, but they have not declared their place of residence.

As part of Wikipedia’s fanatical transparency, it is simple to see a list of every edit a user has made. Thus, someone who spends a lot of time on articles with Manitoba content might reasonably be expected to live here. But there is no guarantee.

Two other Manitoba users, “Mzajac” and “Consumed Crustacean,” are also classified as administrators. But I decided to seek out Mitchell first, out of both curiosity and skepticism.

Who exactly is this boy genius living among us? And does the fact that a 13-year-old can hold a trusted spot in this utopian endeavour prove that its critics are correct in saying it cannot be taken seriously?

On the latter point, my doubts are assuaged soon after meeting him. He seems totally normal, except for being hyperarticulate and having a brain that idles at twice the average speed.

Like many boys his age, he pretty much lives on the computer, but he also plays the flute in his school band and volunteers at a YMCA day camp. He is the youngest judge with the Manitoba Speedskating Association (to help out with his brother’s sport of choice).

He takes me down to his computer for a Wikipedia tutorial. It’s a sweltering afternoon, and Darlene brings us iced tea and chocolate cake.

First, he helps me register and select a user name. You don’t need to register to edit Wikipedia articles, but you do to write new ones.

Over the next two hours, Mitchell shows me how to make edits and insert coding, how to communicate behind the scenes with other users and how to check article edits, who has made them and when.

I retain maybe 10 per cent of what he throws at me. Way too often, I hear myself exclaim, “Neat!”

Mitchell displays an astonishing grasp of Wikipedian philosophy and ethics. He sees his role largely as that of a policeman (hall monitor might be a better analogy in his case) who patrols the site to keep chaos at bay.

He started contributing to Wikipedia only last November. He wrote his first article about his school. Soon he was writing about one of his big interests, video games.

But he understood that his age and education still limit him as a writer. He found his calling, as he says, as “metapedian,” a contributor who buzzes around behind the scenes, talking with others about rules and regulations.

In June, a fellow user nominated him to the group as an administrator. He went through a formal application process, and then other users had the chance to vote “yes” or “no.” Forty-five supported him, four opposed him. On June 27, he was admitted to the inner sanctum.

“You could have scraped him off the ceiling that day, he was so happy,” Darlene recalls.

While outright factual errors and ease of vandalism are the main raps against Wikipedia, dumb errors of emphasis are incredibly common. Major historical figures get a paragraph or two, while ephemeral TV shows and video games are subject to lengthy treatises. (This is why Wikipedia has 1.9 million articles and the Encyclopedia Brittanica has but 120,000.)

I note with amusement an entry on a Winnipegger whose main claim to fame was writing a Free Press editorial page column for a few years.

The piece is longer than the entry on John W. Dafoe, the Free Press‘s editor from 1901 to 1944 and one of the most influential journalists Canada has produced.

“But someone can fix that anytime,” Mitchell says. “Maybe it’s a project for you.”

To date, most teachers and professors do not allow their students to use Wikipedia, and this makes sense. It has only been in existence for six years, and many of the facts on it, even if they are accurate, are unsourced.

But the rate at which it is expanding (and improving) would indicate that its influence cannot be contained. On July 1, The New York Times published an extensive piece about how the site has become a go-to source for breaking news ever since the April 16 Virginia Tech massacre.

“(Wikipedia) is either one of the noblest experiments of the Internet age,” the Times said, “or a nightmare embodiment of relativism and the withering of intellectual standards.”

Count me in the first camp. I’m heading home to do some research on Dafoe. That entry needs improving. And the best thing is, I’ve made a great new friend to help me when I get confused.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

Be wise, revise

FINDING an error in Wikipedia is like shooting fish in a barrel.

However, you must aim quickly, because the online encyclopedia — whose goal is to make the sum of human knowledge available to all for free — is constantly being revised.

Errors and vandalism tend to crop up — and stay uncorrected longer — in articles that get little traffic.

Articles on contentious subjects, and prominent ones, evolve into accurate and neutrally written documents.

The sheer volume of people watching dissuades those with impure motives.

In January 2006, the scientific journal Nature compared accuracy of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica in 42 randomly selected articles.

Wikipedia contained 162 mistakes, Britannica 123.

Britannica Inc. characterized Nature‘s study as flawed and misleading and called for a retraction. Nature refused.

No doubt, Wikipedians promptly correct their errors. But Britannica‘s are entombed until the next printing.

Wikipedians understand the pitfalls of their endeavour better than anyone else.

They have drafted (communally, of course) an essay on the site called Replies to Common Objections. It can be found at wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RCO.

Wikipedia, the joke goes, “doesn’t work in theory, only in practice.”

Wikipedia by the numbers

(as of July 2007)

1.9 million — articles

9.7 million — pages (including user profiles, template help, portals and redirects)

152 million — edits by all users since July 2002

15.75 — average edits per page

4.95 million — English-language users

1,284 — English administrators

250 — Wikipedia languages

9 — Wikipedia’s ranking among popular websites