wikipedia!

According to author James Beniger, “the progressive digitalization of mass media and telecommunications content begins to blur earlier distinctions between the communication of information and its processing, as well as between people and machines” (292). As these lines have most certainly been blurred, the internet has now reached a point where it no longer simply mimics content that transposed from other media, but has created a new environment community which builds on the pervious shortcomings of the internet and other limitations of technology in the linage of the telegraph.

This shift has begun to appear as new technologies begin to immerge within the internet which create uses which could never been seen within the limitations of the previous medium. More and more, the internet is applied in ways that content providers never could have predicted or imagined. Media scholars Bolt and Grusin predicted that “Web and Internet applications refashion the newer perceptual media of radio, television, and telephone more aggressively than they refashion print,” however, the internet has allowed for a new definition of print to immerge (312). This phenomenon is the immergence of information community website called a wiki. A wiki, according to Wikipedia, “is a type of website that allows anyone visiting the site to add, to remove, or otherwise to edit all content, very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing” (Wikipedia) This new form of publishing offers many applications (including non-print specific uses) however, the most famous of the wiki enabled sites is Wikipedia. Wikipedia an online encyclopedia which “is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to a computer, web browser and Internet connection”(Wikipedia). This means, that under the implementation of the Wiki ideal, that the vast database of knowledge is completely maintained by those who use it. Any user can update and change a page, and anyone who registers for free can create their own entry. And this volunteer work force has produced nothing to scoff at. At 3.8 million articles over 130 active languages, Wikipedia is showing itself to becoming one of the largest and most up to date encyclopedias in the world, as new events are sometimes documented as they are in the news (Wikipedia).

As Wikipedia compares to the standard of the medium, the Encyclopedia Britannica has only 120,000 articles while the English version of Wikipedia contains over a million. According to independent studies, Wikipedia has four errors for every three found in the Encyclopedia Britannica However, it is estimated that an improper change to a Wikipedia article is fixed by one the over 2,000 hits a second the page receives within five minutes of being flagged as an error. The community of information is the new advantage of this technology, and allows for an unprecedented level of collaborate communication and expansion of information.

What makes wiki technology so revolutionary however is the community aspect which it adds to the instantaneous processing and gathering of information which is fostered by the democratic approach to creating a body of knowledge. By keeping the editing process open, wikis have allowed for the fundamental shift of how information is packaged and presented to the masses. Take for example the classic Encyclopedia Britannica. This work is compiled by an elite set of editors who put the volumes together every year, picking and choosing what articles enter the book, and ultimately controlling what knowledge is important, and what is not. Wikipedia is not authored by individuals, but by the masses, who establish a sufficient norm to knowledge, and create and maintain this body for the sake of creating. This community has been brought into the information environment, and is effectively changing the way in which standard information is brought to the masses, in that it is brought by the masses. “In a page on researching with Wikipedia, its authors argue that Wikipedia is valuable for being a social community. That is, authors can be asked to defend or clarify their work, and disputes are readily seen” (Wikipedia). Thus, wikis introduce a social factor for creating information and allows individuals to collaborate and work together instantaneously. This scale of voices and instantiations collaboration is not seen in any other media.

This direct access to digital information was preexisting in the old internet environment; however, it is this instant collaboration by the masses at once which could not be obtained by any previous technology, and has huge implications on how the media environment will continue to evolve and grow. It is a very exciting notion to consider when discussing how this wiki concept will effect other information environments as it begins to be more accepted. Shopping, News, and other web based comities will take this technology even further, and apply them in ways which are unpredictable.

In fact, the democratizing ideals of the wiki technology have already begun to spread across the larger media environment. Digg.com is a tech based news site which all of the stories are posted from users, and front page content is determined by how much a story is “dugg” (voted for) by the users. According to Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com “there's no handful of editors in a smoke-filled back room deciding which stories are important; the masses are deciding.” It is this type of implementation which has the power to change the entire news media. In the pervious internet environment, blogging allowed anyone to be a journalist, but under these new rules, there is now a blogging-worthy news portal to submit these stories to, which accept them for what they are, and let the masses decide if their content is worth reading.

Limitations on the wiki environment could very much stem from the same limitations which befall Wikipedia itself. Interestingly enough, on of Wikipedia’s greatest assets and strengths is also its biggest weakness, in the fact that anybody can change an article. This allows for information to be false or for someone to create a completely bogus entry on a “crackpot idea” (Wikipedia). But this idea comes back to the age old proverb “you’re just as good as your weakest link.” In the case of wiki and surrounding democratic styled web pages, this is an issue. There is a reason for professionalism in media, and just because the masses now can create their own information environment does not mean they will be successful in creating a stable, lasting community which offers them the same expertise and commitment as older forms of media had allowed. However with that said, there could be something said for the knowledge of a masses, and communities who can build an insurmountable amount of information in such a short time is something un-ignorable. According to James O’Donnel,

[Once] that tension is worked out, an important but flawed or preliminary treatment of some vital subject will, but the time it has been worked over, discussed, revised, enhanced, and reworked by as many hands as care to turn the job will become the ultimate postmodern authorless creation. Keeping the many cooks form spoiling the broth will be important, but bringing together all of the world’s available talent to solve a given problem will be a luxury we rarely have today (308).

Time has been conquered by the telegraph, in its instantaneous transfers of information across vast distances. The obstacle of matter was overcome by the internet, allowing whole books and movies to be transported at the speed of light. With the introductions of wiki, space has been defeated, allowing thousands of people to collaborate on something as small as precise as a single sentence in a single moment. They allow for information to be processed even faster than before, but allow for the total end product to be even more massive that a library of encyclopedias. Wikis and other democratic style changes will completely revolutionize the internet, and bring this medium into full maturity. To put this argument into perspective and to understand the power and benefits of this grandiose shift can be summed up by the sheer fact that “Wikipedia includes a good, balanced article on the history of Britannica, Britannica has not a word to say about Wikipedia, as it rapidly becomes one of the most significant phenomena on the Net” (Johnson).