Wikipedia: Analysis pt. 1

This week's assigned reading was on Andrew Dalby's "The World and Wikipedia: How we are editing reality". I have to say, this is my favorite book assigned this semester. It offers a brief history of encyclopedias as well as both the negative and positive aspects of using Wikipedia. One point of interest he wrote about was Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View guidelines, which indicate that articles should be written without bias. Of course, it is quite difficult to do this for any human. Dalby managed to write objectively throughout the book thus far, which I thought was interesting. I would have expected a lot of fanfare for the positive aspects of Wikipedia; Dalby wrote extensively and provided many examples regarding the dissenters of Wikipedia. He speaks of the story of John Seigenthaler, whose Wikipedia article’s biography included mention of his suspected involvement in the Kennedy assassinations, which was thoroughly false. Wikipedia’s administrators chose to disallow anonymous creation of articles after that particular event, though it kept anonymous editing of created articles. One aspect I found particularly interesting was that Reference.com and Answers.com downloaded Wikipedia’s data and showed it as their own, making it much more difficult for Seigenthaler to remove the false statements about himself from their databases. Dalby writes: “The two mirror sites, Reference.com and Answers.com, were much harder for Seigenthaler to deal with. Their pages could not be edited. They went on displaying the offensive text for some weeks, until the next Wikipedia download arrived.” (Dalby 59) This shows that even in its infancy, with rumors flying of its legitimacy, other websites were created devoted only to mimicking Wikipedia.
The book thus far contrasts interestingly with Postman’s Technopoly, last week’s reading. Dalby writes with a much more objective touch to his writing, allowing himself to see both the negatives and positives of Wikipedia. Postman, on the other hand, is a true and proven Technophobe. He fears the embracing of technology our culture has shown, and wishes for it to stop.
This book broadens my knowledge on the impact of Wikipedia on our culture, and the ramifications of having generally correct information at our fingertips, 24/7. I expect for this to be touched on more in the second half of the book, but I am interested to err away from the history of Wikipedia and predict the future and how it will create it for us.