But on a site with millions of them, why are so few articles considered merely good? It’s a question, says GlassCobra, that answers itself. “There are literally millions of articles on Wikipedia. Because we struggle to get so many to even a readable quality, there’s often not enough manpower to improve an article further. Our criteria for good articles are relatively strict: it took me the better part of a day to write the one that I’ve done.” For featured articles, scrutinized by site editors for clarity, flow, structure, and sources, the strictures are even more rigorous.
At Wikipedia, the old adage holds true: write what you know. Dereck Blackburn (username: Lostwars), 27, who splits his time between Cambridge and Denver, started contributing to Wikipedia a couple years ago. “At the time I started, there were only 750,000 articles. And a lot of them were in total disarray.” So he set about to change that.
An aviation buff, Blackburn thinks the first article he wrote for the site was about the Greater Kankakee Airport in Illinois. Since then, he’s started or contributed to almost 7000 entries.
“Keep thinking about your world,” he says. “What is it in your world that you know more about than anyone else does?” And while the site has become so exhaustive that it’s getting ever harder to find topics that haven’t already been covered, Blackburn says one can always telescope in. “Wikipedia has grown to the point now that it’s okay to write about Walden Pond. And it’s okay to write about the road that goes by Walden. And it’s okay to write about a particular intersection of that road. The smallest, minute thing can be a Wikipedia entry.”
Which raises a question: does the site’s exhaustiveness risk diluting what’s really important? Sure, as was noted in a New Yorker article this past year, the site’s millionth article was about a Glaswegian train station. Such a mundane locale would certainly never have merited mention in the august Encyclopedia Britannica. But consider that, in the 24 hours after the stub was created, “the entry was edited more than four hundred times, by dozens of people.” People do care about this stuff.
Yes, there’s always the risk the Joe Sixpack will log on to write an article about himself. But as soon as it’s noticed, it will be deleted. There are notability criteria for who’s deserving of an entry. (If you’re an author, for instance, “your book must have sold at least 5000 copies,” says Klein.)
And isn’t that risk a small price to pay for a resource that — rather than a pricey set of bound volumes that are updated only every decade or so — is free, easily accessible, sprawling, and constantly (often instantaneously) updated? To say nothing of one of Wikipedia’s greatest features: the ability to learn as you teach.
Alexander Glazkov (username: Solarapex), 33, came to Boston from Ukraine eight years ago. His raison de wiki is not so much to write what he knows as to teach himself about his adopted home as he writes. He’s written short entries on the Kharkiv River in Ukraine, which he knows well, but also about the Quabbin Aqueduct in West Boylston and the Winsor Dam in Belchertown.
