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March 11, 2008, 01:16 PM ET
Vandalism on Wikipedia Is Good, Says the Novelist Nicholson Baker
Why do so many people — some of them in academe — volunteer their time to write Wikipedia entries? The motivation can’t be fame, since most of the writing is submitted anonymously. And many paragraphs in the online encyclopedia don’t even endure to be passed down for the ages, since anyone can come along and just erase any given entry. Yet hundreds of thousands of people do donate their time to the project. Curious.
Part of the draw might actually be the lawless atmosphere, writes Nicholson Baker, the novelist, in a long piece in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. Anyone can knock your words off of the Wikipedia game board. Or you can knock someone else’s off. Or someone can mix nonsense and insults into the middle of your well-crafted paragraph of text.
“Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made,” wrote Mr. Baker. “Instead it’s a fast-paced game of paintball.” It’s good, that is, as long as it can be kept under control, which is the challenge for Wikipedia as it grows in popularity.
The Wikipedia entry on Mr. Baker, by the way, says he is “a contemporary American novelist, whose writings focus on minute inspection of his characters’ and narrators’ stream of thought.”
Mr. Baker says he’s written some Wikipedia entries, under the pseudonym Wageless. In fact, it seems that the best-selling writer ended up getting hooked, making it his “mission” to save his articles from deletion.
“All big Internet successes — e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft — have a more or less addictive component,” he wrote, noting that Wikipedia, too, is addictive. “They hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep.” —Jeffrey R. Young
Categories: Libraries
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