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Wikipedians Leave Cyberspace, Meet in Egypt

In Alexandria, 650 Devotees Bemoan Vandals, Debate Rules; Deletionists vs. Inclusionists

Alexandria, Egypt

The ancients ranked the Lighthouse of Alexandria, a 400-foot tower of stone, as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Just down the road, they overlooked a library that, beginning in the third century B.C., represented the greatest storehouse of knowledge anywhere on earth. The Great Library was the real wonder -- we can see that now.

The library's ghosts led Wikipedia to choose Alexandria last month for its largest gathering ever in meatspace. (In cyberspace the Wikipedians never stop gathering: It's a continuous round-the-clock rolling workfest.) The library managed to gather up most of the world's books, tens of thousands of papyrus scrolls -- and then it burned, not even a partial catalog surviving the cataclysm. Two millennia later, the Wikipedians are the library's heirs. Their online encyclopedia, going on eight years old, is many times more extensive than anything in print, comprising 2.5 million articles in English. Wikipedias have sprung up in 263 other languages, including Sanskrit, Choctaw and Twi. Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.

"In our minds, a library is often a place with a lot of dusty documents, poorly connected," declared the outgoing board chairwoman, Florence Devouard. Serving as host for Wikimania 2008 was a new library, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, an architectural wonder that overlooks the ceaselessly honking traffic on the Grande Corniche and the pale sea that swallowed Cleopatra's palace. A ragtag young band of 650 Wikipedians from 45 countries toted laptops and presentations for three days of exchanging geeky tradecraft and posing for group photographs. They're pilgrims, paying their own way to this Mediterranean littoral, wearing their fervor on their T-shirts.


How do you use Wikipedia? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Are you a Wiki deletionist? Inclusionist? Incrementalist? Discuss

The official language was English, but plenty of Arabic was spoken, and there was both pride and concern about the state of the Arabic Wikipedia: It's the 29th largest, with 66,000 articles, and the locals wish it could grow faster. It reminds more senior Wikipedians of the good old days, when the project was a scrappy, chaotic, dilettantish, amateurish, upstart free-for-all -- just a community Web site with no "Google power." That was then. Nowadays things are looking almost -- and to some this is a dirty word -- professional.

At least they can rest assured there's no money. Alone among the great Internet success stories, Wikipedia hasn't made anyone rich, despite its 50 million visitors a day. In fact, it hasn't made a dollar; it only ever loses money. It's supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit charity established for the purpose in 2002. The entire payroll amounts to 18 people, including one in Germany, one in the Netherlands, one in Australia and one lawyer. Wikipedia is not a business; it's a religion. "Go and spread the word of free knowledge and free speech," exhorts a speaker from Germany, Jakob Voss. And Jimmy Wales is their prophet.

Wikipedians recently held their largest-ever meeting at this new Alexandria, Egypt, library. ENLARGE

He's another unpaid volunteer. He is also Wikipedia's founder and self-described spiritual leader and, when he appears, a looming presence in Alexandria. Always near him are knots of young volunteers wearing jeans or hijab or both. They refer to him solemnly as "Jimbo." He's a trim 42-year-old who favors black shirts and a slightly Mephistophelian beard, and most Wikipedians revere him, but you wouldn't know that from the Jimmy Wales article in the encyclopedia, which rehearses some shady-sounding accusations: padding expenses, peddling pornography, editing his own Wikipedia page. (The last charge is actually true.)

So Mr. Wales hates his own entry. "It pains me very much," he tells me, "when I go to a conference and someone introduces me by reading from it." Even his birthday is disputed -- it's either yesterday or today -- and Wikipedians have perpetuated the dispute though thousands of words of online discussion, all archived for theoretical eternity. "That one's just stupid," Mr. Wales says. But if he's not in charge, who is?

No one. You can look it up: "Wikipedia's present power structure is a mix of anarchic, despotic, democratic, republican, meritocratic, plutocratic, and technocratic elements," according to Meta-Wiki, which (naturally) is the wikipedia about Wikipedia. Anyone can edit an article, anonymously, hit and run. From the very beginning that has been Wikipedia's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The result is often what you'd expect from reading "Lord of the Flies." For example, I was sorry to discover that the brief entry on me ended, at one time, with the sentence, "James eats poop." A vandal had left his mark. Most vandalism gets caught rapidly these days: Vigilance is maintained by the "recent-changes patrol" and squadrons of self-described vandal fighters.

Illustration by Joe Zeff Design Inc.

'There are a lot of people whose entire Wikipedia life is dedicated to fighting vandals," James Forrester, an old-timer (since 2002) tells one session. No one seems really happy about this. "We're not here to bash vandals, we're here to write an encyclopedia," says another Wikipedian, Charles Matthews, who is meanwhile a mathematician and an expert in combinatorial game theory. But vandalism never ends, and in its subtler forms it can elude the vandal fighters. Jimmy Wales once found that his entry had been edited to say that he enjoys playing chess. "It sounds plausible," he tells me. "I'm the sort of person who would play chess; I like the idea of it. It just turns out I don't." He tries not to read his own entry too often.

Even without vandals, even without trolls and sock-puppets and other notorious malefactors, anarchy can always break out. Because everyone in the world has the power to edit, Wikipedia has long been plagued by the so-called edit war. This is like a house where the husband wants it warm and the wife wants it cool and they sneak back and forth adjusting the thermostat at cross purposes. One Wikipedian says "potato," another says "potahto," and they reverse each other's edits ad infinitum. There have been edit wars over gods and edit wars over commas. "Betwixt" or "between"? Is the Conch Republic (aka Key West) really a "micronation"? Is it "Daylight Saving Time" or "Daylight Savings Time"? You may know the answer for sure; rest assured, a significant faction of humanity knows you are wrong and can prove it. At the end of 2006, people concerned with the "Cat" article could not agree on whether a human with a cat is its "owner," "caregiver" or "human companion." Invective was hurled. Over a three-week period, the argument extended to the length of a small book.

Anyone looking at the ebb and flow of edit wars may wonder how equilibrium can ever be established. Yet invariably factions reach accommodation, and articles tend to be, if not perfectly consistent, amazingly accurate. This, too, is part of the maturing of Wikipedia. All editors are created equal, but they don't stay equal. There are unmistakable signs of hierarchy (another dirty word). A longtime trusted user can become an "administrator," with special powers: to protect articles, to delete articles, and, in cases of vandalism or other bad behavior, to block other users. In Alexandria, as newbies mingled with old-timers, complaints were heard: The community has gotten less friendly; its organization is more "top down." And who administers the administrators? There are "stewards," "sysops" and "arbitrators."

"It changes the dynamic, and think I miss the old days," Kat Walsh, aka Mindspillage, a law student and Wikimedia board member, tells an introspective session called "Welcome to the Wiki-Cabal." There's no glory in adminship -- "It's like going around behind people and picking up the trash." Articles get rated now, too: A "good" article must have met the "good article criteria" and passed through the "good article nomination process," always subject to "good article reassessment." Predictably, the emergence of hierarchy has demanded a structure of policy and rules.

Rules include "Avoid peacock terms" (acclaimed, charismatic, seminal) and "weasel words" (many think, critics say). Also "Be bold" and "Use common sense" and "Do not disrupt Wikipedia to make a point." Also "Check your fiction": do not write, "Trillian is Arthur Dent's girlfriend. She was taken away from Earth by Zaphod ..." but rather, "Trillian is a fictional character from Douglas Adams's radio, book and now film series 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.' "

But it's still Wikipedia. Another rule -- it has its own page -- is "Ignore all rules."

Wiki is not paper. This is a dictum so fundamental as to require its own encyclopedia page (see also "Wiki ist kein Papier" and "Wikip&eacute;dia n'est pas sur papier"). It means there is no physical or economic limit on the number or the length of articles. Bits are free. "Any kind of metaphor around paper or space is dead," Mr. Wales says. So he feels no need to worry that the Britney Jean Spears entry is much, much longer than the James Madison one. "All those people who are obsessively writing about Britney Spears or 'The Simpsons' or Pok&eacute;mon -- it's just not true that we should try to redirect them into writing about obscure concepts in physics," he says. "Wiki is not paper, and their time is not owned by us. We can't say, 'Why do we have these employees doing stuff that's so useless?' They're not hurting anything. Let them write it."

Anyway, James Madison is well covered, and so, for that matter, is just about any important person, place, or topic you can think of. The Encyclopedia Britannica has long since been left behind. This, too, makes people wistful for the old days. Not that Wikipedia can ever be finished -- the universe being a moving target -- but that the low-hanging fruit has been found.

Looked at another way, in its newfound maturity, the English-language Wikipedia is brushing up against certain boundaries, touching on problems that have a whiff of something like infinitude. Borges anticipated the issue in his story "The Library of Babel": the infinite library, increasingly indistinguishable from the universe itself. At present Wikipedia does not just have one article on Pok&eacute;mon, the media franchise, trading-card game and manga series. A jungle has grown, secondary articles and side articles, including entries for each of the 493 Pok&eacute;mon creatures, from Bulbasaur to Arceus. Back in the real world, Wikipedia has, or aspires to have, detailed entries describing the routes, intersections, and histories of every numbered highway and road in the United States. There are pages for all known enzymes and RNAs, and soon there will be a page for every human gene.

In Wikipedia terms, a culture clash has emerged between deletionists and inclusionists. Deletionists want to keep the bar relatively high. Recently they managed to delete the Port Macquarie Presbyterian Church, New South Wales, Australia, on grounds of non-notability, and the "List of Films With Monkeys in Them," on grounds of "listcruft." Still, even deleted articles survive, on Deletionpedia: 50,000 and counting.

Inclusionists, meanwhile, keep saying, "Wiki is not paper."

Things fission and multiply. The Wikipedia pages on Deletionism and Inclusionism will lead you, if you care to follow, to pages on Mergism and Incrementalism. Also to Factionalism -- because the factions have formed not only Associations of Deletionist Wikipedians and Inclusionist Wikipedians but also (can it ever end?) the Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn't Mean They Are Deletionists. Fighting back against deletions is the Article Rescue Squadron. "The deletionists should be aware that all their patriotic work is for naught, as one day all those articles are coming right back," says the user called Jidanni.

'It's a struggle that always came up at the margins," Mr. Wales says, "but as we become bigger and bigger and bigger it becomes a much larger thing." He worries particularly about Biographies of Living Persons, "a huge policy area for us that causes a lot of conflicts and a lot of complaints and a lot of complicated ethical concerns." The more obscure a person is, the harder it is to maintain quality -- to catch hatchet jobs, for example. Wikipedia insists on verifiable sources,meaning written sources, but more and more of the world's information is not written on paper; it is part of an oral or an online tradition.

Wikipedia has reached a delicate point, I think. Unlike trivial edit wars, the battle between deletionists and inclusionists has no clear path to peace, because ultimately both sides have a claim on Wikipedia's core values. The deletionists carry the banner of quality, of verifiability, of trust. The inclusionists say that more information is always better: Any article that can be deleted can be improved instead. Information glut? Bring it on. They quote Stanislaw Lem: "We want the Demon, you see, to extract from the dance of atoms only information that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines, blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and almanacs, and calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever appeared in any newspaper in the Universe, and telephone books of the future...."

To continue down the path of comprehensiveness, Wikipedia will need to sustain the astonishing mass fervor of its birth years. Will that be possible? No one knows. Certainly the fervor was on display in Alexandria. Mr. Wales himself tries not to take sides, but if the practical worries could be forgotten -- if Wikipedia had the resources to maintain the quality of even the most obscure entries -- he, personally, would open the doors even wider. The Library of Babel doesn't scare Mr. Wales. "I'd be happy to have, in theory, a good, neutral biography on every single person on the planet," he says. "I mean why not, right?"

James Gleick is the author, most recently, of "Isaac Newton." He is working on a history of information.

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