|
|
Wikipedia: It's Wicked
Here's a great example of the Internet as it should be: A font of constantly updated knowledge -- available for free.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a place on the Internet where educated folk pooled their knowledge for nothing, conscientiously building up a huge, orderly and free database on subjects as varied as wind gradients and the yellow-wattled lapwing?
Actually, it's already happened. It's an online encyclopedia called Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), and it probably qualifies as the largest ever collaborative effort on the Internet. Late last month it reached a milestone: 200,000 entries (compare that with 60,000 at MSN Encarta Premium, Columbia's 51,000 entries, and Encyclopedia.com's 57,000 articles). By the end of this year, Wikipedia is expected to have about 330,000 articles.
But of course, quantity doesn't necessarily equal quality. So I ran a few checks on some recent topics. What about bird flu? Britannica's online (www.britannica.com) service found 75 responses to "avian influenza," none of which seemed to have anything specific. Encyclopedia.com had nothing. I couldn't log onto the MSN Encarta Web site at www.encarta.com ($5 a month, $30 a year) because, I was told: "Your market is not currently supported." The three-CD deluxe version of Encarta had nothing on bird flu, even after I updated it online.
But Wikipedia? Entering "bird flu" or "avian influenza" in the search box took me straight to the right page, with information about infection, bird flu in humans, prevention and treatment, and a link to the World Health Organization's avian-influenza fact sheet. The page had been modified the previous day to update statistics on fatalities to add the suspected case of human-to-human transmission in Vietnam.
This, I have to say, is impressive knowledge management. And it wasn't a fluke: I tried "ricin," the toxin that was recently found in the U.S. Senate mail room. On Britannica it took me a couple of jumps before I found out that ricin is a poison derived from the castor-oil plant; Columbia Encyclopedia only mentioned this in passing, as did Encyclopedia.com. Encarta Deluxe did a much better job, with an article that had been updated two weeks before. (However, if I hadn't updated the contents, and had used only the CD's data, I wouldn't have found anything.) Wikipedia still won, though, with a page dedicated to the subject, and updated to include the discovery of ricin traces in the homes of a suspected terrorist ring in London last year.
So how does all this happen? How can such a huge database be maintained, and stay free? Wikipedia was set up three years ago by Jimmy Wales, a 37-year-old Internet entrepreneur who lives in Florida with his three-year-old daughter, a Hyundai and a mortgage. He wanted, he says, "to distribute, for free, a complete and comprehensive encyclopedia in every language of the world, easily and affordably accessible to even the poorest and most oppressed people." (He admits it sounds corny and made up, but all good things do …)
Anybody visiting the site can update, add or edit any entry as they see fit, via an online form. They don't even have to register first. The reason it works is, in part, because the software is really easy to use, and saves all copies of whatever has been changed or deleted. (This is where the "wiki" bit comes in: It's Hawaiian for "quick," and Wikiwiki is the open-source collaborative software that Wikipedia is run on, but that's another story.)
The most obvious concern, with all this freedom, is abuse. What is there to stop people with bad intentions, or just bias, altering, defacing or deleting content? How can we be sure that what we're reading is accurate, if anyone can contribute? The answer: peer pressure. It's not that this kind of thing doesn't happen; it's just that it's fixed so quickly most people won't notice. That's because the software is set up so that, while anybody can change anything they want, other folk can see what has been changed and, if necessary, alter it or change it back. With about 200 regulars watching the site, and another 1,000 or so frequently monitoring, there are a lot of folk watching out for wreckers, zealots and the misinformed.
Recent research by a team from IBM found that most vandalism suffered by Wikipedia had been repaired within five minutes. That's fast: "We were surprised at how often we found vandalism, and then surprised again at how fast it was fixed," says Martin Wattenberg, a researcher in the IBM TJ Watson Research Centre, in Cambridge, Mass.
Of course, this doesn't mean everything is going to be accurate or unbiased. But once again, the sheer volume of people actively involved tends to lead towards some sort of consensus based on facts. And the rules, such as they are, tend to help rather than hinder. The goal, for example, of all posts is NPOV, which stands for Neutral Point of View. There is no hierarchy, beyond Mr. Wales as a kind of benevolent dictator. But even he doesn't interfere much. Instead, users talk out controversies online, and only rarely pull the plug on someone. As Mr. Wales himself puts it: "There's an institutional danger if we start kicking people out that ideological considerations might play a role that we don't want them to play. An encyclopedia is a neutral reference standard."
While such discussions can be heated, they reveal the high caliber of contributors: I trawled around and found some recent spats about Belorussian President Alexander Lukashenko, the Arab-Israeli conflict and atheism. If that's the level of debate, the material can't be bad.
So where is all this going? Mr. Wales has just raised $50,000 in donations from users and fans to upgrade computers (he asked for $20,000) and hopes to raise some more by selling a version of the database to Yahoo. In the long run, however, he wants to find a way to get a hard copy of the encyclopedia to folk who don't have easy access to information. He's kind of hoping someone like talk-show host Oprah Winfrey might be interested in helping out.
Over to you, Oprah. And if you know something about something, do your bit by adding, editing or correcting entries. I tried it, and the warm fuzzy feeling you get is great. 维基百科：分享天下知识 如果网上有那么一个地方，让受过教育的人们分文不取地汇总他们的知识，有意识地建立一个庞大、有序但免费的数据库，涵盖的主题从风速梯度到麦鸡无所不包，这岂不妙哉？ 其实，这一切已经出现了。它就是网上百科全书维基百科( www.wikipedia.org)，它可能是互联网上最大的合作数据资料馆。上月末，该网站达到了一个新的里程碑：输入条目达到了20万（相比之下，MSN Encarta Premium的条目为6万，哥伦比亚百科全书(Columbia)的条目有5.1万，Encyclopedia.com的文章条目有5.7万。）到今年年末，维基百科收录的文章有望达到33万篇。 但当然，数量多并不一定说明质量高。因此我在这些百科全书网站上搜索了几个最近的热门话题。看看禽流感(bird flu)？大英百科全书(Britannica)网络版( www.britannica.com)给出了75个有关"禽类流感"(avian influenza)的结果，没有一个给出了具体解释。Encyclopedia.com的查看结果是一片空白。我没法上MSN Encarta的网站 www.encarta.com（每个月付费为5美元，一年付费为30美元），我被告之："您所在市场尚未获得支持。"内容总量有三张光盘之多的Encarta对禽流感只字未提，就连我在网上取得的最新版本也是如此。 那么维基百科呢？在搜索栏输入"bird flu"或"avian influenza"后，网站打开了一个包涵有关感染、人类所患禽流感、预防和治疗等信息的网页，上面还有一个指向世界卫生组织(World Health Organization)禽流感情况介绍表的链接。该网页前一日刚刚更新，录入了最新的死于禽流感的患者统计数据，增加了越南人与人之间传播禽流感的疑似病例的数目。 我必须说，这就是令人叹为观止的知识管理。而且这不是一个特殊例子：我还试著查了"蓖麻毒素"(ricin)，这是最近在美国参议院邮件收发室发现的一种毒素。我在大英百科全书网络版上点击了好几下，才找到一个解释，称蓖麻毒素是由蓖麻油作物中提炼的一种毒素；哥伦比亚百科全书和Encyclopedia.com一样也只是随便提了一句。Encarta Deluxe提供的结果就要好得多，它给出了一个两周前更新的文章。（不过，如果我没有更新网络内容，而只是使用CD上的资料的话，那就什么都搜索不到了。）维基百科再次胜出，它有一个专门的网页介绍这个专题，其更新内容包括了一篇介绍去年在伦敦的一个恐怖份子嫌疑犯团伙住处发现蓖麻毒素线索的文章。 那么这一切到底是怎么回事呢？这个巨大的资料库是如何维护、而且保持免费开放的呢？维基百科是吉米?威尔士(Jimmy Wales)三年前建立的，这位37岁的互联网创业者和他三岁的女儿住在美国佛罗里达，他还有一辆现代汽车(Hyundai)以及一幢抵押贷款买来的房子。他说，他想"用世界上每一种语言免费传递一个完整而全面的百科全书，即使最贫穷和最受压迫的人也能轻松查阅。"（他承认这听起来有些粗鄙和做作，但一切好的东西都这样....） 任何访问该网站的人都可以对其进行更新，通过一个在线格式增加或编辑他们觉得合适的条目。他们甚至不需要事先注册。这个网站之所以成功的部分原因是它的软件用起来实在是容易，而且保存了所有被删改的全部条目内容。（这就是"wiki"的意义所在：它在夏威夷土著语中是"快速"的意思，维基百科运行的Wikiwiki是一个源代码开放的合作软件，不过那又是另外一个故事了。） 由于没有任何约束，最明显的一个问题是滥用行为。怎样阻止不怀好意的人，或持有偏见的人篡改、丑化或删除内容呢？如果任何人都可以输入内容，那么我们怎能确定我们读到的内容是准确的呢。答案是：来自网友的压力。这种事情不是不会发生；而且问题很快被纠正了，以致人们都不会注意到。那是因为这个软件的建立是为了其他人都能看到有什么内容变了，而且如有必要可以再修改它或将之改回来。很多网友都在警惕捣乱分子、狂热份子和被误导的人在该网站上的活动，大约有200个正式成员常年监督网站的编辑，另有大约1,000人经常监测网站。 IBM的一个研究小组最近发现，维基百科遭遇的多数破坏活动5分钟内就能修复。速度够快的：IBM TJ华生研究中心(IBM TJ Watson Research Centre)的研究员，马丁?沃登博格(Martin Wattenberg)说，"我们对破坏活动的频繁感到吃惊，但让我们再次感到吃惊的是这些破坏很快就被修复了。" 当然，这并不意味著它的每项内容都是准确或不偏不倚的。但大量网友的积极参与基本可以在基本事实上达成一致。网站的规则往往是有助于内容建设的，而不是妨碍它的发展。比方说，所有条目都是"观点中立的"(Neutral Point of View, NPOV)。除了威尔士这位温和慈善的独裁者以外，这里没有等级之分。但即便是他也不能干预很多事情。相反，用户可以在网上说出不同意见，而且只有很少数的用户有针对某些个人的行为。威尔士自己就说："如果我们将某些人剔除出去，那就存在一个制度性的危险，即意识形态的因素可能会起到我们都不愿看到那么一个作用。一部百科全书是一个中立的参考标准。" 那么这个百科全书网站发展前景如何呢？威尔士从用户和发烧友那筹集到5万美元的捐款来升级电脑（他本来试图融资2万美元），而且希望将资料库的一个版本卖给雅虎(Yahoo)以筹措更多资金。不过，他希望未来能想个办法制作一本印刷版的百科全书，提供给那些难以获得信息的人们。他衷心希望脱口秀主持人奥普拉?温弗莉(Oprah Winfrey)能出手相助。 奥普拉，现在轮到你了。如果知道点什么，那就加到这个网站中来，或编辑或纠正其中的条目。我试过了，心中有一股暖流流过，感觉很棒。
|
