All The News That’s Fit To Print Out

When news broke on May 8 about the arrest of a half-dozen young Muslim men for supposedly planning to attack Fort Dix, alongside the usual range of reactions — disbelief, paranoia, outrage, indifference, prurience — a newer one was added: the desire to consecrate the events significance by creating a Wikipedia page about it. The first one to the punch was a longtime Wikipedia contributor known as CltFn, who at about 7 that morning created whats called a stub — little more than a placeholder, often just one sentence in length, which other contributors may then build upon — under the heading Fort Dix Terror Plot. A while later, another Wikipedia user named Gracenotes took an interest as well. Over the next several hours, in constant cyberconversation with an ever-growing pack of other self-appointed editors, Gracenotes — whose real name is Matthew Gruen — expanded and corrected this stub 59 times, ultimately shaping it into a respectable, balanced and even footnoted 50-line account of that days major development in the war on terror. By the time he was done, 2007 Fort Dix Attack Plot was featured on Wikipedias front page. Finally, around midnight, Gruen left a note on the site saying, Off to bed, and the next morning he went back to his junior year of high school.

Net Neutral Matthew Gruen, 16, is one of thousands of Wikipedians devoted to policing Wikipedias neutrality.

Wikipedia, as nearly everyone knows by now, is a six-year-old global online encyclopedia in 250 languages that can be added to or edited by anyone. (Wiki, a programming term long in use both as noun and adjective, derives from the Hawaiian word meaning quick.) Wikipedias goal is to make the sum of human knowledge available to everyone on the planet at no cost. Depending on your lights, it is either one of the noblest experiments of the Internet age or a nightmare embodiment of relativism and the withering of intellectual standards.

Love it or hate it, though, its success is past denying — 6.8 million registered users worldwide, at last count, and 1.8 million separate articles in the English-language Wikipedia alone — and that success has borne an interesting side effect. Just as the Internet has accelerated most incarnations of what we mean by the word information, so it has sped up what we mean when we employ the very term encyclopedia. For centuries, an encyclopedia was synonymous with a fixed, archival idea about the retrievability of information from the past. But Wikipedias notion of the past has enlarged to include things that havent even stopped happening yet. Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news — to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information.

So indistinct has the line between past and present become that Wikipedia has inadvertently all but strangled one of its sister projects, the three-year-old Wikinews — one of several Wikimedia Foundation offshoots (Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wiktionary) founded on the principle of collaboratively produced content available free. Wikinews, though nominally covering not just major stories but news of all sorts, has sunk into a kind of torpor; lately it generates just 8 to 10 articles a day on a grab bag of topics that happen to capture the interest of its fewer than 26,000 users worldwide, from bird flu to the Miss Universe pageant to Vanuatus ban on cookie imports from neighboring Fiji. On bigger stories theres just no point in competing with the ruthless purview of the encyclopedia, which now accounts for a staggering one out of every 200 page views on the entire Internet.

The tricky thing is, the process by which Wikipedia usually, eventually gets things right — the notion that mistakes in a given entry, whether intentional or unintentional, will ultimately be caught and repaired as a function of the projects massive, egalitarian oversight — doesnt seem as if it would work when people are looking for information about events unfolding in real time. How on earth can anyone be trusted to get the story right when any version of the story is only as accurate, or even as serious, as the last anonymous person to log on and rewrite it?

Nothing is easier than taking shots at Wikipedia, and its many mistakes (most often instances of deliberate vandalism) are schadenfreudes most renewable resource. But given the chaotic way in which it works, the truly remarkable thing about Wikipedia as a news site is that it works as well as it does. And what makes it work is a relatively small group of hard-core devotees who will, the moment big news breaks, drop whatever theyre doing to take custody of the project and ensure its, for lack of a better term, quality control. Though Wikiculture cringes at the word authority, in a system where a small group of people has the ability to lock out the input of a much larger one, its pure semantics to call that small groups authority by any other name. Still, the only way to install yourself in that position of authority on Wikipedia is to care about it enough. So who are the members of this all-volunteer cadre, and why should it matter so much to them whether Wikipedia is any good at all?

Jonathan Dee is a novelist and a contributing writer for the magazine. His last article was about sitcoms for tweens.

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