2006.09 维基百科作为一个文章主题感兴趣的？

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Common Knowledge
Marshall Poe on the marvels and pitfalls of Wikipedia, the fastest-growing encyclopedia in human history.

By Jennie Rothenberg Gritz
SEPTEMBER 2006 ISSUE
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Once upon a time, the term “encyclopedia” implied a heavy set of bound volumes sitting on a bookshelf. It was an invaluable resource for fathers who wanted to discuss the French Revolution at the dinner table, or sixth graders who needed to write a report on snails. Unlike so many other sources of information, the encyclopedia appeared to be incontestable. Every entry was written in the same authoritative voice, as though a single all-knowing being had expounded on all subjects from a cappella music to Zywiec, Poland.

This venerable notion began to crumble in 2001 when two men named Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched a project that shook the foundations of the traditional encyclopedia. They created a Web site called Wikipedia, an online knowledge base that could be edited or expanded by anyone who came along. This free-for-all approach had obvious drawbacks: know-it-all teenagers could undo the careful work of university professors, and pranksters could insert fictional details into an entry on John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But to an astonishing extent, Wikipedia worked. Serious scholars and armchair academics have written more than 4.5 million entries in over 200 languages, encompassing not only the well-worn territory of Encyclopedia Britannica but all sorts of eclectic subjects never before covered in any encyclopedia.


For historian Marshall Poe, the Wikipedia phenomenon raises all sorts of questions about the changing definition of knowledge and the evolving means of human inquiry. Before the Internet emerged, as he points out in his piece in the September Atlantic, there was no way for far-flung groups of people to collaborate on any one project. Software developers were the first to recognize that the collective knowledge of the masses could be an asset. During the late 1990s, adventurous code writers began opening their work to the general public. Instead of meeting in small, exclusive groups—writing, refining, and publishing software programs in the conventional way—they released their still-emerging code on the Internet and invited users to improve upon it.

As Poe points out, Wikipedia essentially borrowed this idea from the software field and applied it to epistemology. Unlike its printed predecessors, Wikipedia is a communal encyclopedia, based on the notion that the many can gather knowledge as well as, or better than, the select few. To illustrate this philosophy, Poe cites a seminal 1997 essay by Eric S. Raymond called “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” The “cathedral” model, like the medieval church—and the old-fashioned encyclopedia—relied upon the authority of an elite committee. The “bazaar” model, in contrast, draws input from anywhere and everywhere. At an open market, there is no central authority assigning value to an object. Prices rise and fall as visitors move from stall to stall, comparing items and quibbling over costs. Wikipedia works in much the same way. As Poe extrapolates,

The power of the community to decide, of course, asks us to reexamine what we mean when we say that something is “true.” We tend to think of truth as something that resides in the world. The fact that two plus two equals four is written in the stars—we merely discovered it. But Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth…. The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isn’t likely to do such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability.
In the open spirit of the Internet, Poe recently created a Web site that mimics both the appearance and approach of Wikipedia. Launched in 2005, MemoryArchive.org is a searchable “encyclopedia of memories” posted by users around the globe. Poe has written extensively on academic models old and new; he has also penned several works on early modern Russia and is a former editor of the academic journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan and is a writer and analyst for The Atlantic.


We spoke by telephone on July 20.

—Jennie Rothenberg
How did you first become interested in Wikipedia as an article subject?

About two years ago, I was doing research on what are called read-write Web sites—that is, Web sites you could read and write to. I’d seen Wikipedia before—it comes up on Google searches, it comes up on Yahoo! searches, it comes up all the time—but I didn’t really know what it was.

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I didn't mention this in the article, but I found some work I had done as an academic cited in Wikipedia, about something very obscure. And I was just like, “Man, that’s deep!”

What was that citation about?

It was in an entry on Sigismund Freiherr von Herberstein. He was an Austrian diplomat in the sixteenth century, and he was one of the first Western Europeans to travel to what is now Russia. He wrote a book about it, and I wrote a book about him, as well as about other people who went to Russia at that time. The entry popped up on my computer screen, and when I saw my work cited there, I wondered, “Good God, who did this? What kind of a lunatic would actually spend time creating an entry on Sigismund Freiherr von Herberstein, the most obscure dude on earth?” I know about him, and about ten other people do. I was just fascinated by that. I’m drawn to weird things like that.

And then I started to read more and more about it. As a historian, I was fascinated that the whole history of the article—all of the various changes and edits—had been recorded. I realized that if I actually spent some time on the weekends, I could go back and reconstruct pretty accurately, using Wikipedia's own sources, what was going on.

So what was going on? Who are these people who spend so much time editing and writing articles without any financial incentive?

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It’s one of these things that is fairly typical on the Internet among a certain group of “techies.” They become very enthused about something, and once it starts to take off, it takes over their lives. I’ve been in touch with a couple of them. One goes by the user name “the Cunctator,” and I mention him in my article. Another is Eric Moeller, who I’m in contact with still. There are probably fifteen or twenty of them, most of them programmers. These are people who are über-Wikipedians. I don’t know how they keep day jobs, basically.

Then there’s a much larger group of people—I’d estimate it at several thousand—who spend a lot of time on Wikipedia. We would call them editors. They add content and also shape content as it comes in. They monitor the site and attempt to make sure that the standards of Wikipedia are upheld. That means both standards of content and standards of discourse, because they’re related. These are people who serve on arbitration committees and things like this. It’s not a closed circle, but it’s a self-referential circle. They all know one another, and they nominate one another to become administrators. They support one another.


Can anyone come forward to be part of this group?

Well, you can. But generally speaking of Wikipedia—and this is true of many sites that rely on user-generated content—you kind of have to go on credit. You do that by making edits and adding articles. Slashdot is really the site that pioneered this. I believe they have something called “karma.” The computer can tally the number of times you’ve contributed. Then people can look at your user profile and say, “This is an active contributor.” If the program is sophisticated enough, they can look back and see the tenor of your contributions, and they can adjudge them in various ways.

This is how you develop credit in the economy of user-generated content. I say it was pioneered by Slashdot, but on a massive scale, it was really introduced by eBay.

When you want to buy from someone on eBay, you can see whether that person has been an active seller and gotten good ratings.

Exactly. It’s your online reputation, and the computer is very good at keeping records of what you’ve done. So on Wikipedia, these are people who have good cred.

So there is a sort of hierarchy on Wikipedia?

Hierarchy might be too strong a word. But it’s a hierarchy of reputation. It’s like any context in which a lot of people know one another. If you come in and you’re a stranger, they’re going to ask you some questions about who you are and what you intend. They’re going to say to you, “Maybe it’s best if you sit and listen for a while and watch what we do.” That generally is what they say in the kinder user-generated sites on the Internet. There are some that are ruthless and cruel. But Wikipedia isn’t one of them.

You might call these the “worker bees” of Wikipedia. They’re people who really care a lot about the project. They devote time to it and they think it’s fun to edit. They’re proud of their accomplishments. And they have a whole economy of reputation—they get positive reinforcement from each other. They give each other awards. On people’s user pages, you can see that they’ll get the “Barnstar Award,” which is an award you get for shoring up the entire project in various ways. You’re nominated by other users and you’re elected by other users. And people will discuss you.

Do you have any sense of who these people are? Are most of them academics, or do they come from all walks of life?

I honestly don’t know in most cases. It skews male, probably. And it skews young. I’d say that most Wikipedians are more educated than not. But beyond that, I’d say the group is so large that it regresses to the mean. It’s really everybody.

What about the people who let Wikipedia take over their entire lives? Do we know anything about the user who calls himself “the Cunctator,” for instance?

Well, we do know quite a bit about him. He’s famous in the Wikipedia community. He’s an anarchist. I mean, he’s an actual anarchist. He’s part of a group called Anarchists for a Past, Present, and Future World of Goodness. I think he’s in his 20s, if I recall correctly. He was going to college at one time. I don’t know what he was studying. He’s a good example of someone who gets enthralled with Wikipedia as a project. They can hear their voices making a difference. They can see the tangible impact of what they do. They can interact with other smart people. And they can argue—Wikipedians love to argue.

Because people interact using names like “the Cunctator” or “Splash47,” it’s possible to have a 25-year-old anarchist arguing with a 60-year-old department head from an Ivy League university. Are these adopted names one of the ways Wikipedians level the playing field?

Definitely. In fact, that was Sanger’s chief problem with the entire thing: your credentials didn’t matter. When the Cunctator talked to Splash47, it didn’t matter who they were. The arguments were all that mattered. Sanger thought this wasn’t really right. And in terms of building an encyclopedia, it doesn’t seem like it is right. Clearly, the person who is a Yale professor in classics should have more community regard than the kid from Nebraska who just read a translation of The Iliad. But on Wikipedia, that’s not part of the economy of respectability. It all has to do with what you’ve done on the site.

So it really does level the playing field to a degree that makes most people very uncomfortable. You have to be able to suffer a lot of foolishness to work on Wikipedia. You really do. And for most people who were brought up in academic discourse, the way people behave just isn’t acceptable. But you have to balance that against the efficiency of producing the largest encyclopedia in human history over the course of five years.

The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, subscribes to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism. Do you see the impact of Rand’s ideas—for instance, rational self-interest—in the way Wikipedia operates?

Jimmy Wales is a person who puts his ethical and philosophical beliefs front and center, and objectivism is certainly one of them. But when it comes to Wikipedia, I wouldn’t call his approach objectivist. I’d call it libertarian. As it is, the consequences for bad behavior are very low online—basically zero. He realizes that there’s really no way to punish somebody.

So he quite reasonably says, and many people do, that whether you like it or not, you have a kind of anarchic, stateless, authority-less universe. There’s nothing anybody can really do. One way to approach this is to simply say, “Well, we are going to try to use moral suasion to get people to behave correctly, because we can’t penalize people the way we would in the real world.”

I thought it was interesting that your article included a discussion of role-playing games, particularly Dungeons and Dragons. Could you say more about how the whole gaming craze of the 1970s fed into the Wikipedia phenomenon?

I think gaming had a huge impact, and Dungeons and Dragons specifically. D & D kind of made it cool to be a geek. I’m of that vintage—I’m forty-four. I wasn’t much of a geek, actually. I was more of a jock. But nonetheless, I recognized that Dungeons and Dragons was cool, and that creative, smart kids played it. It had characteristics that allowed players to articulate kinds of intelligence that went well beyond any board game. You really could let your fantasies run wild on it. And it was extensible, as they say in computers. You could have a world, and it could just continue. You could keep adding people to it.

And then once they figured out how to put this online, the scale of these universes expanded exponentially. The line between Dungeons and Dragons—that musty basement in suburbia—and the kinds of massive multiplayer games they have now is direct. There’s no question. The people who design these games, these multi-user dungeons, they’re the same folks. And they’re about my age. Wales and all of these guys were involved in that stuff. They loved playing those games.

It also ties into what we were talking about before. People could assume an identity and start interacting with each other in a way they never would in real life. With Dungeons and Dragons, you could be a skinny, pimply little guy, but as soon as you sat down to play, you were a Half-Elf.

I wanted to be Warrior-Priest. I always liked that. But, yeah, you took on a new identity, you inhabited a different world, you could act in ways you’d never acted before, ways that weren’t consistent with your real-life community but were consistent with that new world. It was really very liberating, a vessel for your imagination and also for your intelligence. Because a “world” had to be consistent. That was one of the rules. You couldn’t just do anything. So it could become very Byzantine, very complex.

Wales and these other guys saw that once a bazillion people could talk to one another, you could actually do quite interesting things, in terms of creating resources. That is also a pretty direct line. There were a lot of people in the ’90s who had the idea to create something like Wikipedia. He wasn’t alone.

What about casual Wikipedia users, the ones who just tweak an article or two from time to time?

Yes, that’s people like you and me and just everybody who has a computer and an Internet connection. Most people don’t contribute to Wikipedia at all. If you tried to estimate the ratio of Wikipedia users to Wikipedia contributors, it would be tens of thousands to one. Most people are not moved to participate in the actual content. But many are. A couple of hundred thousand people have actually made an edit, which is a high bar if you think about it. Making an edit on the site means they’re going to change it tangibly. That’s kind of scary!

It is. In fact, I have friends who go around making subtle changes to obscure entries as an in-joke with each other. For instance, they went into an entry about the actor Tim Robbins and wrote that his crowning achievement was the 1985 B-movie Fraternity Vacation. I’m sure there are plenty of people doing that. The more controversial entries may be more carefully monitored, but isn’t there a danger that someone could look up Tim Robbins and find something wrong or misleading?

That happens. There’s no question it happens. To their credit, the community at Wikipedia is taking measures to make sure that what are called low-traffic entries—something like “Finnish cuisine,” or “Marshall Poe” for that matter—can be monitored. I don’t know what all these methods are. They’re not heavy-handed by any means. For example, there could be a simple rule: if a page has not been viewed for ten days and you want to edit it, you have to be a registered user. That’s all.

It kind of reminds me of an insurance copay. The point of the copay is to keep people from going to the doctor every few days. No one makes any money off that copay. It’s just a little hurdle to keep most people out. But vandalism is a constant problem on Wikipedia, and if you think about it, it’s a constant problem in life. Some people just aren’t playing by the same rules as everyone else.

Vandalism aside, there’s also the question of what the Wikipedians call neutral point of view—a consensus that’s reached when many different users put aside their prejudices and reach an agreement about a set of facts. But what about cases where different users just really have different ideas of truth? There’s not going to be any consensus between someone who believes in Darwin’s theory of evolution and someone who believes the world was created in six days.

The neutral point of view, as has been pointed out to me repeatedly, doesn’t require that consensus be reached on a position. If you look at the entry on evolution, I’m sure there will be a section on creationism: “Many people believe that the world was created in six days.” But you won’t find a section that says, “Marshall Poe created the world in six days.” It would be kicked off. It’s not as if they arrive at the same opinion about truth. They arrive at the same opinion about what should be in the article. That’s a very different thing.

As for the issues themselves, I think the point is that they don’t ever get resolved. One way to think of Wikipedia is not as a static entity but as a continual dialogue.

In your piece, you never quote Sanger and Wales as primary sources. In fact, it’s not immediately obvious that you interviewed them for this piece at all. Most profile writers these days go out of their way to emphasize the fact that they scored an interview with the person: “On a September afternoon, I sat down with the Prime Minister of France at a sidewalk café.” Why did you do things differently?

I do know that New Yorker-style profile, and we do that, too, a lot of the time, in The Atlantic. But I don’t find it very satisfying. As a historian you would never do that. You would go back and try to find documentary evidence instead. Because people lie about their pasts. They do it unknowingly. When I tell stories about what I was doing five or ten years ago, I don’t have any confidence that they were accurate. I really don’t.

With Wales and Sanger, I was very fortunate because I could actually go back and look at everything they’d done. I used my interviews mainly to make sure that the arc of my story was correct and that my interpretation of the facts was correct. There were a couple of little facts that made it into the article that they provided—for instance, the fact that they both played Dungeons and Dragons.

When I started working on this article, the early Wikipedia listserves were a great resource. That’s one of the beauties of the Web. You can’t really hide. Once it’s out there, it never disappears. Similarly with the page records of Wikipedia entries. I was able to go back and find what was, from a historian’s point of view, a remarkably complete record of what had been done. I don’t think they really thought about this when they were doing it. When I went back to Sanger and Wales and said, “Did you know you wrote this then?” they would kind of cock their heads and say, “No way. I did that?”

You begin and end the story by discussing the “Marshall Poe” Wikipedia entry. What inspired you to create an entry on yourself?

When I first added the entry, it was one line: “Marshall Poe is a historian,” blah blah blah. I added it because I’m part of a project called Memory Archive. It’s a wiki on which people can go and record their memories of everything. I wanted to create a Wikipedia entry for the project, and I wanted to create a Wikipedia entry for myself, as the head of the project. And, honestly, I just wanted to see what would happen, because I was curious about it.

There’s a function on Wikipedia where you can watch for new entries, and there’s a whole group of people who just watch. For example, if you go in and put in an entry for “Snoopy,” they’ll delete it, because there’s already an entry for “Snoopy.” Or if you put one in there for “The Rug In My Bedroom,” they’ll say, “That obviously isn’t encyclopedic. Let’s delete that.” But they obviously didn’t know who I was, so they had to do some research. The back and forth I mention at the beginning of the article is that research that they did. They Googled me and they looked around and saw that I wasn’t anything very special but I had written some books. I was amazed at how what they call Wiki magic does work. A bunch of people, without getting paid, did all that research and managed to put new stuff on there. That is a testament to the power of the thing.

Even with all of those people monitoring the site so carefully, isn’t it dangerous to use Wikipedia as one's sole source of information on a given subject? A two-paragraph entry on Marshall Poe is one thing, but what about a more complicated subject like stem cell research?   

It’s a little bit like what Ronald Reagan said about Soviet missiles when he was about to sign the treaty: “Trust, but verify.” Is it an encyclopedia? Yeah, it’s an encyclopedia. Is it very accurate? I wouldn’t bet my bottom dollar on anything in there. Do I use it? I use it all the time. I use it constantly, and sometimes I find stuff on there that’s very funny. But I try to check it. I’m not making any investments on the basis of what I find on Wikipedia. No way, man. I’m calling my broker! I pay that guy.

Do you think kids who are growing up in the Wikipedia era might end up with a skewed idea of knowledge and accuracy? It might just be too tempting to take what they see there as fact without double-checking it against a more reliable source.

It’s up to the schools to explain to kids what Wikipedia actually is. It’s a useful resource that can give you a general impression of the objects of our experience. When I was growing up, people said to me, “You shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV.” Twenty years before I was born, I think people kind of did believe everything they saw on TV. But I was taught not to. So if the schools teach things properly and the Wikipedians do their work, then people will know what it is—and they’ll know what it isn’t.

Wikipedia is an unvetted secondary source. That’s what it is. It’s just like testimony from somebody. I would think of Wikipedia as something that’s closer to common knowledge. These are things we all kind of know. If you think about it, where does all knowledge lie? It’s in our heads, really. Sure, it’s out there in books somewhere, but that knowledge is dead. What we know is in our heads. Someone is talking about it somewhere. In the case of Wikipedia, it just happens to be on the page. So it’s common knowledge distilled.

I guess the real question is, in the end, is Wikipedia ever going to fill the same role as the encyclopedia volumes my father used to take down off the shelf whenever I had a question at the dinner table?

My gut says the answer is, No, of course it isn’t! But it’s much larger, and that’s good, too. On any particular detail, the experts are probably better at answering specific questions. But it would have been impossible economically to put together a group of experts to assemble an encyclopedia that has 4.5 million entries and exists in 200 languages. There was no way to do that except this way.

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, a former senior editor at The Atlantic, is now a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine.



常识
马歇尔-坡谈维基百科的奇迹和陷阱，这是人类历史上增长最快的百科全书。

作者：詹妮-罗森伯格-格里茨
2006年9月号
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很久以前，"百科全书 "这个词意味着一套放在书架上的沉重的装订本。对于想在餐桌上讨论法国大革命的父亲，或者需要写一份关于蜗牛的报告的六年级学生来说，它是一种宝贵的资源。与其他许多信息来源不同，百科全书似乎是无可争议的。每个条目都是以同样的权威声音写成的，就像一个无所不知的人对从无伴奏音乐到波兰Zywiec的所有主题进行了阐述。

2001年，当两个名叫吉米-威尔士和拉里-桑格的人发起一个项目，动摇了传统百科全书的基础时，这种可敬的观念开始崩溃。他们创建了一个名为维基百科的网站，这是一个在线知识库，任何人都可以对其进行编辑或扩展。这种自由竞争的方式有明显的缺点：无所不知的青少年可以破坏大学教授的精心工作，恶作剧者可以在约翰-肯尼迪遇刺的条目中插入虚构的细节。但在一个令人惊讶的程度上，维基百科发挥了作用。严肃的学者和坐在椅子上的学者已经用200多种语言编写了450多万个条目，不仅包括《大英百科全书》的老领域，还包括任何百科全书中从未涉及过的各种折衷主义主题。


对于历史学家马歇尔-坡来说，维基百科现象提出了关于知识定义的变化和人类探索手段的演变的各种问题。正如他在9月的《大西洋》杂志中指出的那样，在互联网出现之前，没有办法让远方的人们在任何一个项目上进行合作。软件开发人员是第一个认识到大众的集体知识可以成为一种资产的人。在20世纪90年代末，具有冒险精神的代码编写者开始向公众开放他们的工作。他们不再以传统的方式在小型的、排他性的团体中开会--编写、完善和发布软件程序--而是在互联网上发布他们尚在萌芽的代码，并邀请用户对其进行改进。

正如波尔所指出的，维基百科基本上是借用了软件领域的这一想法，并将其应用于认识论。与其印刷品的前身不同，维基百科是一个公共的百科全书，基于这样的理念：许多人可以像少数人一样收集知识，甚至比少数人更好。为了说明这一理念，波尔引用了埃里克-S-雷蒙德（Eric S. Raymond）1997年的一篇开创性文章，名为 "大教堂和集市"。大教堂 "模式，就像中世纪的教堂和老式的百科全书一样，依赖于一个精英委员会的权威。相比之下，"集市 "模式则从任何地方和任何地方吸取意见。在一个开放的市场上，没有一个中央权威机构对一个物品进行价值分配。当游客从一个摊位到另一个摊位，比较物品和争论成本时，价格会上升和下降。维基百科的运作方式与此大致相同。正如波尔所推断的那样。

当然，社区的决定权要求我们重新审视当我们说某个东西是 "真实的 "时我们的意思。我们倾向于认为真理是存在于世界上的东西。二加二等于四的事实写在星星上，我们只是发现了它。但维基百科提出了一个不同的真理理论.... 社区决定二加二等于四的方式与决定苹果是什么的方式一样：通过共识。是的，这意味着，如果社区改变主意，决定二加二等于五，那么二加二确实等于五。社区不可能做这种荒唐或无用的事情，但它有这个能力。
本着互联网的开放精神，波尔最近创建了一个网站，模仿维基百科的外观和方法。2005年推出的MemoryArchive.org是一个可搜索的 "记忆的百科全书"，由全球用户发布。波尔在新旧学术模式方面著述颇丰；他还撰写了几部关于早期现代俄罗斯的作品，并曾担任学术期刊《Kritika》的编辑。Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History》的前任编辑。他住在密歇根州的安阿伯，是《大西洋》杂志的作家和分析员。


我们于7月20日通过电话进行了交谈。

詹妮-罗滕伯格
你最初是如何对维基百科作为一个文章主题感兴趣的？

大约两年前，我正在研究所谓的读写网站，也就是你可以读写的网站。我以前见过维基百科--它出现在谷歌的搜索中，出现在雅虎的搜索中，它经常出现，但我并不真正知道它是什么。

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我在文章中没有提到这一点，但我发现维基百科中引用了我作为学者所做的一些工作，关于一些非常晦涩的东西。我当时就想，"伙计，这很深奥！"

那个引用是关于什么的？

它是在一个关于西吉斯蒙德-弗莱赫尔-冯-赫伯斯坦的条目中。他是十六世纪的一名奥地利外交官，他是第一批到现在的俄罗斯旅行的西欧人之一。他为此写了一本书，我也写了一本关于他的书，以及关于当时去俄罗斯的其他人的书。这个条目在我的电脑屏幕上弹出，当我看到我的作品被引用到那里时，我想，"好家伙，这是谁干的？什么样的疯子会花时间创建一个关于西吉斯蒙德-弗莱厄尔-冯-赫伯斯坦的条目，这个地球上最不起眼的家伙？" 我知道他，还有大约十个人知道。我只是被这一点迷住了。我被这样的怪事所吸引。

然后我开始越来越多地阅读关于它的资料。作为一个历史学家，我对这篇文章的整个历史--所有不同的变化和编辑--都被记录下来感到着迷。我意识到，如果我真的花一些时间在周末，我可以回去，用维基百科自己的资料来源，很准确地重建发生了什么。

那么，到底发生了什么？这些人是谁，在没有任何经济激励的情况下花这么多时间编辑和撰写文章？

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这是互联网上某个 "技术员 "群体中相当典型的事情之一。他们对某件事情非常着迷，而一旦它开始起飞，它就会占据他们的生活。我和他们中的几个人有过接触。其中一个人的用户名是 "Cunctator"，我在文章中提到了他。另一个是埃里克-莫勒，我还在和他联系。他们大概有十五到二十个人，其中大部分是程序员。这些人都是超级维基百科专家。我不知道他们是如何保持日常工作的，基本上。

然后还有一个更大的群体，我估计有几千人，他们在维基百科上花费了大量的时间。我们称他们为编辑。他们添加内容，并在内容进来时对其进行修改。他们监控网站并试图确保维基百科的标准得到维护。这意味着内容的标准和话语的标准，因为它们是相关的。这些人都是在仲裁委员会和类似的事情上服务的。这不是一个封闭的圈子，但这是一个自我参照的圈子。他们都互相认识，他们互相提名成为行政人员。他们互相支持。


任何人都可以出面成为这个团体的一部分吗？

嗯，你可以。但一般说来，维基百科--许多依靠用户生成内容的网站都是如此--你必须要有信用。你通过编辑和添加文章来做到这一点。Slashdot确实是开创了这种做法的网站。我相信他们有一个叫做 "因果报应 "的东西。计算机可以统计出你的贡献次数。然后人们就可以看到你的用户资料，并说："这是一个活跃的贡献者。" 如果程序足够复杂，他们可以回顾并看到你的贡献的主旨，他们可以以各种方式对其进行裁决。

这就是你如何在用户生成的内容的经济中发展信用。我说这是由Slashdot开创的，但在大规模的情况下，它实际上是由eBay引入的。

当你想从eBay上的某个人那里买东西时，你可以看到这个人是否一直是一个活跃的卖家，并得到了良好的评价。

正是如此。这是你的在线声誉，计算机非常善于保存你所做的记录。所以在维基百科上，这些是有良好信誉的人。

所以维基百科上有一种等级制度？

层次结构这个词可能太强烈了。但它是一种声誉的等级制度。这就像任何有很多人互相认识的环境。如果你是一个陌生人，他们会问你一些关于你是谁和你打算做什么的问题。他们会对你说，"也许你最好坐下来听一会儿，看看我们在做什么。" 这一般是他们在互联网上比较善良的用户生成的网站上所说的。有一些是无情的、残酷的。但维基百科并不是其中之一。

你可以称这些人为维基百科的 "工蜂"。他们是那些真正关心这个项目的人。他们把时间投入其中，他们认为编辑工作很有趣。他们为自己的成就感到骄傲。他们有一个完整的声誉经济--他们从对方那里得到积极的支持。他们会给对方颁奖。在人们的用户页面上，你可以看到他们会得到 "Barnstar奖"，这是你以各种方式支持整个项目而得到的一个奖项。你被其他用户提名，你被其他用户选举。而且人们会讨论你。

你对这些人是谁有什么感觉吗？他们中的大多数是学者，还是来自各行各业的人？

老实说，我不知道在大多数情况下。它可能偏向于男性。而且他们都很年轻。我想说的是，大多数维基人都是受过教育的。但除此之外，我认为这个群体是如此之大，以至于它倒退到了平均值。这真的是所有人。

那些让维基百科占据了他们整个生活的人呢？比如说，我们对那个自称 "Cunctator "的用户有了解吗？

好吧，我们确实知道他的一些情况。他在维基百科社区里很有名。他是一个无政府主义者。我的意思是，他是一个真正的无政府主义者。他是一个叫做无政府主义者为过去、现在和未来的美好世界的团体的一部分。如果我没记错的话，我想他有20多岁了。他曾一度上过大学。我不知道他在学习什么。他是一个很好的例子，说明有人对维基百科这个项目感到着迷。他们可以听到自己的声音产生了变化。他们可以看到他们所做的事情的实际影响。他们可以与其他聪明人互动。他们还可以争论--维基百科人喜欢争论。

因为人们使用 "the Cunctator "或 "Splash47 "这样的名字进行互动，所以有可能出现一个25岁的无政府主义者与一个来自常春藤大学的60岁的系主任进行争论。这些采用的名字是维基人公平竞争的方式之一吗？

当然是。事实上，这是桑格对整个事情的主要问题：你的证书并不重要。当Cunctator与Splash47交谈时，他们是谁并不重要。争论才是最重要的。桑格认为这并不正确。而就建立百科全书而言，这似乎也不对。显然，身为耶鲁大学古典文学教授的人应该比来自内布拉斯加、刚读过《伊利亚特》译本的孩子更受社会重视。但在维基百科上，这并不是受尊重程度的一部分。这一切都与你在网站上所做的事情有关。

因此，它确实在一定程度上拉平了竞争环境，使大多数人感到非常不舒服。你必须能够忍受很多愚蠢的事情才能在维基百科上工作。你真的需要。而对于大多数在学术讨论中长大的人来说，人们的行为方式是不能接受的。但你必须平衡这一点与在五年内制作人类历史上最大的百科全书的效率。

维基百科的创始人吉米-威尔士赞同艾恩-兰德的客观主义哲学。你是否看到兰德的思想的影响--例如，理性的自我利益在维基百科的运作方式中？

吉米-威尔士是一个把自己的道德和哲学信仰放在前面和中心的人，客观主义当然是其中之一。但是，当涉及到维基百科时，我不会称他的方法为客观主义。我称它为自由主义。因为在网上，不良行为的后果是非常低的，基本上是零。他意识到，真的没有办法惩罚某人。

因此，他很有理由说，许多人也这样说，不管你是否喜欢，你有一种无政府、无国家、无权威的宇宙。任何人都无法真正做到这一点。处理这个问题的一种方法是简单地说，"好吧，我们将尝试使用道德劝说来让人们表现得正确，因为我们不能像在现实世界中那样惩罚人们。"

我认为很有趣的是，你的文章包括对角色扮演游戏的讨论，特别是《龙与地下城》。你能不能多说说20世纪70年代的整个游戏热是如何融入维基百科现象的？

我认为游戏有巨大的影响，特别是《龙与地下城》。龙与地下城使做一个怪胎变得很酷。我是那个年代的人，我已经四十四岁了。实际上，我并不是什么怪胎。我更像是一个运动员。但尽管如此，我认识到《龙与地下城》很酷，而且有创造力的、聪明的孩子都在玩它。它的特点是允许玩家表达各种智慧，远远超过任何棋盘游戏。你真的可以让你的幻想在它上面肆意驰骋。而且它是可扩展的，正如他们在计算机中所说的那样。你可以有一个世界，而且它可以继续下去。你可以不断地在其中添加人。

然后一旦他们想出了如何把这个放在网上，这些宇宙的规模就会成倍地扩大。龙与地下城（Dungeons and Dragons）--郊区那间发霉的地下室--和他们现在拥有的各种大型多人游戏之间的界限是直接的。这一点毋庸置疑。设计这些游戏的人，这些多用户地下城的人，他们是同一批人。而且他们和我的年龄差不多。威尔士和所有这些人都参与了这些东西。他们喜欢玩这些游戏。

这也与我们之前谈论的内容有关。人们可以假设一个身份，并开始以他们在现实生活中永远不会的方式相互交流。在《龙与地下城》中，你可以是一个瘦弱的小家伙，但只要你坐下来玩，你就是一个半精灵。

我想成为战士-牧师。我一直喜欢这样。但是，是的，你有了一个新的身份，你居住在一个不同的世界里，你可以以你以前从未做过的方式行事，这些方式与你现实生活中的社区不一致，但与这个新的世界一致。这确实是非常自由的，是你的想象力和智慧的容器。因为一个 "世界 "必须是一致的。这是规则之一。你不能只是做任何事情。因此，它可以变得非常拜占庭式，非常复杂。

威尔士和其他这些人看到，一旦一百万人可以相互交谈，你实际上可以做相当有趣的事情，在创造资源方面。这也是一个相当直接的路线。在90年代，有很多人都有创建类似维基百科的想法。他并不孤单。

那么维基百科的休闲用户，那些只是时不时地调整一两篇文章的人呢？

是的，那就是像你和我这样的人，以及所有拥有电脑和互联网连接的人。大多数人根本就没有为维基百科做出贡献。如果你试图估计维基百科用户和维基百科贡献者的比例，那将是数万比一。大多数人并不为参与实际内容而感动。但很多人是。有几十万人真正进行了编辑，如果你想一想，这是个很高的标准。在网站上进行编辑意味着他们将有形地改变它。这有点吓人!

确实如此。事实上，我有一些朋友到处对不知名的作品进行微妙的修改，作为彼此之间的玩笑。例如，他们在一个关于演员蒂姆-罗宾斯的条目中写道，他的最高成就是1985年的B级电影《兄弟会假期》。我相信有很多人都在这样做。更有争议的条目可能会受到更仔细的监控，但是否存在这样一种危险，即有人在查找蒂姆-罗宾斯时发现一些错误或误导？

这是有可能的。毫无疑问，这种情况会发生。值得称赞的是，维基百科的社区正在采取措施，确保所谓的低流量词条--比如 "芬兰菜 "或 "马歇尔-坡"--可以被监控。我不知道这些方法都是什么。它们绝不是重口味的。例如，可以有一个简单的规则：如果一个页面已经有十天没有被浏览，而你想编辑它，你必须是一个注册用户。就这么简单。

这有点让我想起了保险的共付费。共付额的意义在于让人们不要每隔几天就去看医生。没有人从共付额中赚到任何钱。它只是一个小小的障碍，让大多数人无法进入。但是，破坏行为是维基百科上的一个持续问题，如果你想一想，它是生活中的一个持续问题。有些人就是不遵守和其他人一样的规则。

撇开破坏行为不谈，还有一个问题，就是维基人所说的中立观点--当许多不同的用户抛开他们的偏见，对一组事实达成一致时，就会达成共识。但是，如果不同的用户真的对真理有不同的想法，那该怎么办？相信达尔文的进化论的人和相信世界是在六天内创造的人之间不会有任何共识。

正如人们一再向我指出的那样，中立的观点并不要求在某个立场上达成共识。如果你看一下关于进化论的条目，我肯定会有一个关于创造论的章节："许多人相信世界是在六天内创造的"。但你不会找到一个章节说："马歇尔-波尔在六天内创造了世界"。它将被踢掉。这并不是说他们对真理达成了相同的意见。他们对文章中的内容达成了相同的意见。这是一个非常不同的事情。

至于这些问题本身，我认为关键是它们永远不会得到解决。认为维基百科的一种方式不是作为一个静态实体，而是作为一个持续的对话。

在你的文章中，你从未引用桑格和威尔士作为主要来源。事实上，你根本看不出你为这篇文章采访了他们。如今，大多数简介作者都会不遗余力地强调他们对当事人进行了采访的事实。"在一个九月的下午，我和法国总理在一家路边咖啡馆坐下来。你为什么要以不同的方式行事？

我确实知道《纽约客》式的简介，我们在《大西洋》也经常这样做。但我不觉得这很令人满意。作为一个历史学家，你永远不会这么做。你会回到过去，试图找到文件证据。因为人们对他们的过去撒谎。他们在不知不觉中这样做。当我讲述我五年或十年前的故事时，我没有任何信心认为它们是准确的。我真的没有。

对于威尔士和桑格，我非常幸运，因为我可以真正回去看他们所做的一切。我主要利用我的采访来确保我的故事的弧度是正确的，我对事实的解释是正确的。他们提供的一些小事实进入了文章--例如，他们都玩龙与地下城的事实。

当我开始写这篇文章的时候，早期的维基百科名录库是一个很好的资源。这就是网络的好处之一。你无法真正隐藏。一旦它出现了，它就不会消失。同样，维基百科条目的页面记录也是如此。我能够回过头来，发现从历史学家的角度来看，这是一个非常完整的关于所做事情的记录。我不认为他们在做这件事时真的想过这个问题。当我回到桑格和威尔士并说，"你知道你当时写了这个吗？"他们会有点竖起他们的头并说，"不可能。是我写的？"

你在故事的开头和结尾都讨论了 "马歇尔-坡 "的维基百科条目。是什么启发你为自己创建一个条目？

当我第一次添加条目时，只有一句话。"马歇尔-坡是一位历史学家，"等等等等。我添加它是因为我是一个叫做记忆档案的项目的一部分。这是一个维基，人们可以在上面记录他们对一切的记忆。我想为这个项目创建一个维基百科条目，我想为自己创建一个维基百科条目，因为我是这个项目的负责人。而且，说实话，我只是想看看会发生什么，因为我对它很好奇。

维基百科上有一个功能，你可以观察新的条目，有一大群人只是观察。例如，如果你进去放一个 "史努比 "的条目，他们会删除它，因为已经有一个 "史努比 "的条目。或者如果你把 "我卧室里的地毯 "放进去，他们会说，"这显然不是百科全书式的。让我们删除它。" 但他们显然不知道我是谁，所以他们不得不做一些研究。我在文章开头提到的来来回回就是他们做的研究。他们在谷歌上搜索我，四处查看，发现我并没有什么特别之处，但我写过一些书。我很惊讶他们所说的维基魔法是如何运作的。一群人，没有得到报酬，做了所有的研究，并设法把新的东西放在那里。这证明了这个东西的力量。

即使所有这些人都如此仔细地监控该网站，将维基百科作为一个人在特定主题上的唯一信息来源不是很危险吗？关于马歇尔-坡的两段文字是一回事，但像干细胞研究这样更复杂的主题呢？  

这有点像罗纳德-里根在即将签署条约时对苏联导弹所说的话。"相信，但要核实。" 这是一部百科全书吗？是的，它是一本百科全书。它非常准确吗？我不会把我的底钱押在里面的任何东西上。我使用它吗？我一直在使用它。我经常使用它，有时我在上面发现一些非常有趣的东西。但我尽量去检查它。我不会根据我在维基百科上发现的东西来做任何投资。没门，伙计。我要给我的经纪人打电话！我付钱给那个人。

你认为在维基百科时代成长起来的孩子们最终可能会对知识和准确性产生歪曲的想法吗？这可能只是太诱人了，他们把那里看到的东西当作事实，而不去仔细检查它与更可靠的来源。

学校有责任向孩子们解释维基百科到底是什么。这是一个有用的资源，可以给你一个关于我们经验对象的总体印象。在我成长过程中，人们对我说："你不应该相信你在电视上看到的一切"。在我出生前的20年，我认为人们确实有点相信他们在电视上看到的一切。但我被教导不要这样做。因此，如果学校正确地教东西，维基百科的人做他们的工作，那么人们会知道它是什么--他们会知道它不是什么。

维基百科是一个未经审核的二级来源。这就是它的本质。它就像某人的证词。我认为维基百科是更接近于普通知识的东西。这些是我们都知道的事情。如果你仔细想想，所有的知识都在哪里？它就在我们的脑子里，真的。当然，它存在于书本的某个地方，但那些知识是死的。我们所知道的是在我们的头脑中。有人正在某个地方谈论它。在维基百科的案例中，它恰好在页面上。所以它是经过提炼的普通知识。

我想真正的问题是，最终，维基百科是否会像我父亲以前在餐桌上遇到问题时从书架上拿下来的百科全书一样，扮演同样的角色？

我的直觉告诉我，答案是：不，当然不是！但它的规模更大，而且它的内容更丰富。但它要大得多，这也是好事。在任何特定的细节上，专家可能更擅长回答具体问题。但是，从经济角度来说，要把一群专家召集起来，组装一本有450万个条目、以200种语言存在的百科全书，是不可能的。除了这种方式之外，没有任何方法可以做到。

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz，曾是《大西洋》杂志的高级编辑，现在是《史密森尼》杂志的高级编辑。