Visit wikipedia.com thoroughly. Look up numerous articles. Look at the article histories. Contribute to an article in a subject area you have some knowledge in. Look at entries you might expect to find in a traditional encyclopedia (e.g., "Germany") as well as those you might not (e.g. "emoticon"). Wikipedia clearly affords a level of participation very different from that of the traditional encyclopedia. How does this participation change the notion of "human knowledge"? Does it improve or undermine the encyclopedia as a concept? Why or why not? Be specific, using particular examples.
The defining characteristic of the Wikipedia as a unique encyclopedia is its accessibility. Traditionally, encyclopedias have been written by a relatively small group of specialists and have carried price tags high enough to dissuade many people from investing in a set. However, as Wikipedia allows anybody to not only access the material free of charge but also to contribute to the creation process, the entirety of the encyclopedic process has been opened up to any person with an internet connection. For various reasons, some articles cannot be edited by the general public, however. Mostly these are articles that carry a lot of emotional importance to people while also being socially divisive which leads to “edit wars” or a small handful of people that continually edit each others posts in an attempt to make their own opinions heard while silencing any dissent. Wikipedia maintains a list of these “Protected Pages” as well as the reasons why the ability to edit them has been locked.
Implicit in the Wikipedia model is the rejection of the traditional notion of human knowledge as a commodity. To date, encyclopedias have been produced by relatively small teams of experts. This naturally limits the scope of the encyclopedia to what this group of people believes to be important, both in terms of the kinds of articles that are present as well as the level of detail each individual article goes into. Under the Wikipedia model, anybody may add any article they feel needs adding as well as contribute to any existing article. In this manner, human knowledge, as it is recorded and viewed, has been wrested from that small group of experts and given to humanity. But just as anybody can potentially contribute to the well of knowledge, anybody can potentially damage it as well. Whether it be deliberate or not, anybody can falsify any article, a phenomenon clearly not present in older encyclopedias. Wikipedia addresses this problem in several different ways. As previously mentioned, articles may be locked under extenuating circumstances. Additionally, each article may be viewed as it has existed at any period in time and any two versions may be compared, showing the exact additions and subtractions that have taken place. In this manner, a person viewing any particular article may actively accept or reject assertions made in conflicting versions (although in practice this is probably relatively rare). As a further safeguard, a list of recently changed articles is provided so that changes are subject to community scrutiny. In this sense Wikipedia democratizes knowledge by replacing the editors of the encyclopedia companies with the common citizenry.
Wikipedia’s unique approach to the encyclopedia sets itself apart from other encyclopedias further by the way in which it changes over time. By the very nature of the medium of print, encyclopedias have traditionally been static objects. Newer, computer-based encyclopedias such as Microsoft’s Encarta feign at dynamism by allowing the user to update their encyclopedia but as this process is not continuous it could hardly be considered to be truly dynamic. The Wikipedia is updated as changes arrive, making it a truly dynamic system. While this is practically useful for the end user as they may see the newest version of any article at any time, it also serves to change our perception about the nature of knowledge. Static encyclopedias portray truth as a constant whereas dynamic encyclopedias portray truth as a process. In this manner, Wikipedia undermines the idea of Newtonian determinism by rejecting the notion of truth as unchanging.
