Frankenstein and Wikipedia

James Whale, famed director of Frankenstein, is the subject of Bill Condon’s fictionalized 1998 film, Gods and Monsters. Whale, at the end his life, has suffered a stroke, and now finds his memories of the past “flood[ing] all over,” with randomly sparking flashbacks like a short-circuiting appliance.

Jimmy Wales, meanwhile, is one of the co-creators (with Larry Sanger) of a more contemporary monster: the collaborative on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia, a five year old patchwork assemblage which, by borrowing bits and pieces from untold numbers of contributors, has come to assume a life of its own. At its best, Wikipedia represents a sort of Borgesian ideal: a figurative “aleph,” the tiny iridescent sphere which contains within itself all worldly knowledge:

The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained within it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spiderweb at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), saw in a rear courtyard on Calle Soler the same tiles I'd seen twenty years before in the entryway of a house on Fray Bentos, saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand....

At its worst, though, the on-line encyclopedia can be perhaps better compared to the fictional James Whale’s late-life dementia: a random aggregate of memories and images, of otherwise unrelated facts and details coming together to form a monstrous new life.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, moreover, Wikipedia is regarded with viewed with dismay and even, occasionally, horror by the communities of humans which it encounters. In academia, for instance, Wikipedia has often been criticized for its inaccuracies, its biases, its structural privileging of trivia over systematic analysis, its anonymity, and its inherent mutability.

Some of these concerns are certainly not without foundation—particularly given that, with Wikipedia’s growing influence, it is quickly becoming one of the first sites to which students and others go for information. However, many criticisms seem to reflect a misunderstanding of the nature of the project.

First of all, some students fail to recognize that Wikipedia is, in the end, merely an encyclopedia. Wales himself makes this point in a discussion cited recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which notes that Wales

gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain
that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic hot water. They say,
“please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia and
the information turned out to be wrong,” he says.  But he said he has
no sympathy for their plight, noting that he thinks to himself:  'For
God's sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia.'  Mr.
Wales said that leaders of Wikipedia have considered putting together
a fact sheet that professors could give out to students explaining
what Wikipedia is and that it is not always a definitive source.  “It
is pretty good, but you have to be careful with it,” he said.  “It's
good enough knowledge, depending on what your purpose is.”

Academics, too, can fall into the trap for criticizing Wikipedia for what it does not pretend to be. For instance, Joanna Kirkpatrick asked on the H-Asia listserve whether “authors are allowed to sign their articles and or edits, or are obliged to use ‘user names’ instead.” The very notion that it might be possible to “sign” an article which may be constantly revised, perhaps transforming it into something the original author would barely recognize, reflects, I think, I fundamental misunderstanding of how the wiki medium differs from traditional print publications. (and, for the record, “user names” are linked to a personal bio page which may, but does not necessarily, include the author’s real name).

One of the most eloquent testimonials to Wikipedia’s potential, meanwhile, is a negative one: the fact that, until recently, Wikipedia (both the English and Chinese versions, and presumably all other language versions as well) has been blocked behind the so-called Great Firewall of China: the Chinese government’s wide-scale blocking of certain sites or domains deemed to be potentially pernicious.

Although the first time Wikipedia was blocked in China back in 2004 (on the eve of the anniversary of the June 4th) the original concern appears to have been that it would present unfavorable accounts of the events surrounding the Tiananmen Square crackdown, more recent blockages apparently stem from a concern, not over the content of specific entries, but rather from the kinds of community and debate which the forum has helped to foster. As Philip Pan discussed in the Washington Post back in February,
To many educated in China, these governing principles of Wikipedia -- objectivity in content, equality among users, the importance of consensus -- were relatively new concepts. Yuan said he consulted the work of philosopher John Rawls and economist Friedrich Hayek to better understand how a free community could organize itself and "produce order from chaos

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