Wikipedia:A hybrid of political doctrine and encyclopedic collaboration
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 | This page in a nutshell: Keep your eyes on the encyclopedia prize. |
Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is a truly remarkable project. Comprising over 6,928,854 articles as of December 23, 2024, it is forged by the efforts of unpaid volunteers, and has the goal of disseminating the sum of human knowledge to every person on Earth.
As is inevitable in a project of this size, a community of participants, some with strongly held and divergent views has formed. This community, which in many ways is flourishing, works co-operatively to regulate, discuss, and nurture the encyclopedia content. Its functionality is underpinned by a small number of core principles, like the ideas of deriving consensus in discussion, of weighing comments rather than counting votes in a debate, and of ignoring the rules when necessary. From these come the policies that govern user conduct and the way the encyclopedia is built, and the various philosophies about content and the Wikipedia model. Wikipedia has thus become a hybrid of political doctrine and encyclopedic collaboration.
The political, bureaucratic, and communal side of Wikipedia has grown to become the central focus of activity for some editors, and Wikipedia has transformed into something more than an encyclopedia, which is good in some ways and problematic in other ways. While the communal side of Wikipedia ensures the prospering and continuance of the encyclopedia, it can also be source of distraction from the realisation of the core vision: building a great encyclopedia. An increasingly bureaucratic and procedurally and process-oriented community has arcane debates over trivial matters that have sometimes have little relation to the encyclopedia-building goals. There is a risk this may lead to disillusionment.
Perhaps these bureaucratic and political issues are not a regrettable inevitability of mass participation, and that a "wake up call" is all that's needed. Most of us joined the project with the goal of writing a free online encyclopedia, so let's get back to it. What we do for the content is all that has sustained meaning. Why else are we here?