The Information - James Gleick [185]
Lewis Carroll, near the end of the nineteenth century, described in fiction the ultimate map, representing the world on a unitary scale, a mile to a mile: “It has never been spread out, yet. The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight.”♦ The point is not lost on Wikipedians. Some are familiar with a debate carried out by the German branch about the screw on the left rear brake pad of Ulrich Fuchs’s bicycle. Fuchs, as a Wikipedia editor, proposed the question, Does this item in the universe of objects merit its own Wikipedia entry? The screw was agreed to be small but real and specifiable. “This is an object in space, and I’ve seen it,”♦ said Jimmy Wales. Indeed, an article appeared in the German Meta-Wiki (that is, the Wikipedia about Wikipedia) titled “Die Schraube an der hinteren linken Bremsbacke am Fahrrad von Ulrich Fuchs.”♦ As Wales noted, the very existence of this article was “a meta-irony.” It was written by the very people who were arguing against its suitability. The article was not really about the screw, however. It is about a controversy: whether Wikipedia should strive, in theory or in practice, to describe the whole world in all its detail.
Opposing factions coalesced around the labels “deletionism” and “inclusionism.” Inclusionists take the broadest view of what belongs in Wikipedia. Deletionists argue for, and often perform, the removal of trivia: articles too short or poorly written or unreliable, on topics lacking notability. All these criteria are understood to be variable and subjective. Deletionists want to raise the bar of quality. In 2008 they succeeded in removing an entry on the Port Macquarie Presbyterian Church, New South Wales, Australia, on grounds of non-notability. Jimmy Wales himself leaned toward inclusionism. In the late summer of 2007, he visited Cape Town, South Africa, ate lunch at a place called Mzoli’s, and created a “stub” with a single sentence: “Mzoli’s Meats is a butcher shop and restuarant located in Guguletu township near Cape Town, South Africa.” It survived for twenty-two minutes before a nineteen-year-old administrator called ^demon deleted it on grounds of insignificance. An hour later, another user re-created the article and expanded it based on information from a local Cape Town blog and a radio interview transcribed online. Two minutes passed, and yet another user objected on grounds that “this article or section is written like an advertisement.” And so on. The word “famous” was inserted and deleted several times. The user ^demon weighed in again, saying, “We are not the white pages and we are not a travel guide.” The user EVula retorted, “I think if we give this article a bit more than a couple of hours of existence, we might have something worthwhile.” Soon the dispute attracted newspaper coverage in Australia and England. By the next year, the article had not only survived but had grown to include a photograph, an exact latitude and longitude, a list of fourteen references, and separate sections for History, Business, and Tourism. Some hard feelings evidently remained, for in March 2008 an anonymous user replaced the entire article with one sentence: “Mzoli’s is an insignificant little restaurant whose article only exists here because Jimmy Wales is a bumbling egomaniac.” That lasted less than a minute.
Wikipedia evolves dendritically, sending off new shoots in many directions. (In this it resembles the universe.) So deletionism and inclusionism spawn mergism and incrementalism. They lead to factionalism, and the factions fission into Associations of Deletionist Wikipedians and Inclusionist Wikipedians side by side with the Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn’t Mean They Are Deletionists.