Infinite Path

The English version of Wikipedia this morning reached yet another milestone after an article about a Norwegian soap actress was published. The publication of this short article discussing Beate Eriksen meant that Wikipedia had, after more than eight years and much controversy along the way, amassed three million articles.

This most recent milestone was a significant one for the project which originally aimed to collate and present human knowledge, whilst allowing users to edit each article after its publication with the intention that the knowledge collected would constantly evolve and adapt. The English Wikipedia is the largest by some distance, although other versions continue to grow at an impressive rate, particularly the German and French.

This said, Wikipedia has been plagued with issues since it was founded in 2001; many of these problems have exposed the inherent difficulties in setting up a project which actively encourages editing, interaction, and adaptation. Finding an effective balance between the desire of the founders, a talented group which included a philsopher, to open the project up to as large a group of people as possible and the need to place restrictions upon the process of editing articles has not been easy.

Several steps have been taken over the years to achieve this delicate balance, most notably in 2005 following the Wikipedia biography controversy. This series of events started with a hoax article appearing on Wikipedia in which it was claimed that John Seigenthaler, a famous writer and journalist, was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This article stayed on the site for approximately four months before it was discovered and altered. Following this incident, one of Wikipedia’s co-founders decided to prevent unregistered users from creating new articles in an attempt to combat the potential problems caused by the relative lack of accountability of online publishing.

The issue of accountability in the online world has hit the headlines during recent months as social media platforms such as Twitter grow in popularity. The manner in which one person’s words can now be blown out of proportion, even on occasion resulting in legal action, is something which many people now bear in mind. Indeed, it would be interesting to see how a project with the same ambitions of Wikipedia would fare if it started today.