On Finding Flow, Flotsam and Jetsam

The issues I have with Wikipedia are not the usual rants one hears from classroom teachers. No, I do not forbid my students use of Wikipedia. In fact, we work in wikis of our own in order to gain an appreciation of how wikis work. The issue I have stems from what I just read in the NY Review of Books article “The Charms of Wikipedia” By Nicholson Baker. Baker writes more of an essay about how the Wikipedia community works than a review of the Pogue Press/O’Reilly book Wikipedia: The Missing Manual by John Broughton, but that aside. Baker brings out that there seems to be a trend these days whereby the community of editors is favoring exclusionary practices over inclusion that seems to be the benefit of an electronic text that is not constrained by the physical limitations economic demands of print media. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of practicing judicious editing and careful fact-checking, but why exclude items because a small group of editors deem the listing nonnotable? Jimmy Wales himself, asserted in September 2007 that he believes that “if people want an article about every Pokemon character, then hey, let it happen.” Baker too is in inclusionist when it comes to Wikipedia, and clearly positions himself as such by recounting his own participation in the community of editors.

“Still, a lot of good work—verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange—is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow, almost grade-schoolish notion of what sort of curiosity an on-line encyclopedia will be able to satisfy in the years to come”

I’m surprised that Baker did not develop the argument further. I want to know if the trend towards exclusionary practices and the speed with which articles are labeled “nonnotable” and earmarked for removal are really the result of schoolish provincialism as he proposes, or if it is something else. Certainly there is a tension between the preponderance of data being added to Wikipedia and the ability of editors to reasonably keep up with their self-described job of shepherding that data and shaping it into reliable information. Is the urge to purge coming out of the fact that the current active editors have little understanding of and/or patience for developing expertise in vastly divergent areas of knowledge that is needed to keep Wikipedia reliable? Baker reports:

In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists—some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the “web-comic articles purge of 2006.

Where, if not in Wikipedia, will such valuable information be aggregated? I’m thinking of attending the NY Wikipedia Meet-Up on March 6th 16th in NYC. See link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC. Any other NYC folks interested in attending?