Today, I watched the founder of wikipedia, Jimmy wales speak at my college. I couldn’t watch the entire speech for reasons that don’t merit mentioning, but it gave me a chance to reflect on wikipedia and human knowledge in general.
I believe in wikipedia like charity. In charity, only those who have excess give, and here it’s about knowledge. While I may still be learning time dependent pertubation I’m far from being able to write anything for it, and as I found, subjects I already have mastery over, I’m unable to write on primarily because it’s just a lot harder to write about things than to do them. Thus I question wikipedia the same way I question every other author, “how can you transmit knowledge”. How does one know which author to trust when learning a particular subject? I know enough course material to write a book on particular topics but I can’t because I don’t know enough about how people learn and how to write so the best learning takes place.
That’s where, I guess experience kicks in. Most authors on wikipedia are regulars, who have written lot of articles, a kind of passion and hobby that they find strangely and thankfully rewarding. Particular topics are so much easier to learn online rather than from a textbook, (though I’ve learnt, that learning from a teacher has no parallel).
But most of the physics articles are written by a few people, who have great qualifications, and the articles are top notch, and quite accurate. I personally haven’t found a single mistake in wikipedia till date. (I think i found a tiny one and edited it, and a strange warm feeling flooded my heart). I love wikipedia, and while it’s the sum of human knowledge, I’d love to see niches develop and the knowledge gets organized to make the world a better place. Wikipedia’s one step ahead of vandals now. With bots checking for edits, and making edits too, along with that, so many policies, guidelines and a great community to help out newcomers, and the strange, patent-worthy warmth in your heart, whenever you make an edit and click the submit button.
Btw, I met Anirudh Bhati online, and the chap’s an *employee* of wikimedia, which I find super-cool. He’s more of an admin, and thankfully not the ban-happy evil dictator type
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