Friday, January 05, 2007
Today, a second feature article that I contributed to substantially has ended up on Wikipedia. Here it is:
Late last year I ended up collaborating with another contributor to Wikipedia and largely between the two of us we managed to bring up a previously negligible article on this particular Ancient Egyptian pharaoh up to snuff
In my opinion it's too bad that the Wikipedia-powers-that-be opted to go with the mummy head as the "lead picture" for the article. There's a much better image of a shabti that has this king's likeness, but I gather that as it is ultimately derived from a scanned image in a book, they would instead prefer to use an image that is free and clear of any copyright, and the mummy image (which originally was taken in the late 1890s) fits the bill. Still, it is somewhat gruesome image to be greeted with when you load up Wikipedia.
Luckily I have built up a decent personal reference library on the general subject, so I was able to add to the article, as well as source some of the graphics that were used on the page (at least one from an out-of-copyright text that I was familiar with on the Project Gutenberg site). It's a hobby.
It is interesting how much Wikipedia has become one of those "essential" Web sites, on par with search engines like Google or news services like Slashdot. Despite the bad press that the site sometimes gets, and I just about everybody I work with uses it in their daily and professional lives extensively. Sure there are individual articles that you need to take with a large grain/box/dried-up seabed of salt, but so long as one is aware of this you can find a lot of genuinely useful information on a lot of topics in an easy-to-find place.
From my time as a reader and as a frequent contributor to the site, the types of articles that are vandalized the most (almost always by people who do not have accounts – signing an article addition using only an I.P. address is enough to warrant further scrutiny by any upstanding editor) tend to be biographical articles, television shows or places. The vandalism is usually pretty obvious, like the persons who replaced the entire content of this article earlier today with "batty", or "Dahh Timmy", or "he was silly". Everything on Wikipedia is under version control, so it is easy to revert such changes quickly. In addition to attentive human editors and admins there are anti-vandal bots that look for typical vandal phrases, so the more obvious cases don't usually stand for more than a minute, typically stamping an additional ban on the vandal editor to boot. On the whole the system is getting better and the information seems to be getting more and more reliable over time. And given the usual vector I see for vandalism I for one am an advocate that anyone who edits ought to go through the bother of registering first. (There are lots of good anonymous contributions, but they are far outweighed by the number of anonymous vandals).
Arguably articles like the Ahmose I collaborated on are good test cases as to why Wikipedia is useful and worthwhile. IMHO the article is arguably better and more complete than any single piece I have run across in any other reference work I have seen -- I very much doubt that any one expert (or two) would spend as much time and effort on this subject as did the group of people who ended up contributing to this article.
The other thing I like about Wikimedia is that it is the one project must in keeping with what the founder of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee originally had in mind that the Web ought to be a place where you can not only view Web pages, but amend them with new/better information. It was a vision that couldn't easily be done in the early 1990s, but Wikipedia shows that this idea can bear fruit. I have used it as a reference for work and for play, and where possible, I like contributing back some of my time and effort into something that is genuinely useful and is quickly becoming the source for summary info on just about any topic.
Labels: Ahmose I, Feature Article, Google, Project Gutenberg, Slashdot, Tim Berners-Lee, Wikipedia
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