Customer Reviews

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia

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`The Wikipedia Revolution` (2009) is probably the first serious attempt at a book-length history of Wikipedia. Unfortunately Andrew Lih is not a trained historian, it is a journalistic account with more reporting and synthesis than original interpretation. However it is still a quick and interesting read, even if Lih is a devout Wikipedian. Certain sections stand out: the history of Ward Cunningham who invented the Wiki software; the history of Larry Sanger and his role as "co-founder" (or not, depending, but it is not resolved here). The role of Usenet, Hypercard, Slashdot and MeatballWiki in the formation of early Wikipedia. A glimpse into the vastly different cultures of Japanese, Chinese, German and other foreign language Wikipedias. An overview of some (in)famous incidents such as Seigenthaler and Essjay. Lih appears to have researched the book mostly using archival sources - I was disappointed not to find new interviews with Wales, Sanger or any number of others - it takes away from the books value in the long term as a primary source, a missed opportunity to add to the historical record.

There is a short Introduction by Jimmy Wales which is a standard stump speech heard many times before. The Afterword contains a crowd-sourced essay on the future of Wikipedia and it does contain a meaty examination of the difficult issues facing Wikipedia now and in the future. I found it to be surprisingly good. The Afterword is released under a Creative Commons BY license so it's freely available to copy - it's odd Lih did not point to where it can be found online. [UPDATE: see "Comments" below for a URL]

I would recommend this book for anyone who has been a long time member of Wikipedia and wants to learn more about 'a history experienced' over the past 8 years or so. There is so much that could be said about Wikipedia this book just grazes the surface but it's a good entry into what will certainly becoming a growing library of books about Wikipedia in the future.

This is the fascinating history of of a most useful website. Historians may consider Wikipedia as significant as Guttenberg printing press. Both contributed immensely to the spread of knowledge. Lih does an excellent job of conveying the history of Wikipedia and drilling down in the technicalities of this phenomenon from a cultural, software, and governance standpoints.

Wikipedia was developed over numerous years through the interactions of maverick programmers. It started with Tim Berners-Lee's creation of the World Wide Web in 1990. Then in 1995 Ward Cunningham creates the WikiWikiWeb software that supports Wikipedia capabilities. This software allows to create, write, and edit webpages and saves every version of a page. Ben Kovitz introduces this wiki software to Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, the cocreators of an earlier online encyclopedia: Nupedia. In 2001, Jimmy Wales implements Cunningham's wiki software to create Wikipedia. Within less than a month, Wikipedia achieves more than Nupedia did in a year in terms of number of articles published. Soon after, a German programmer Magnus Manske far improves the wiki software by allowing Wikipedians to maintain a clean page of an article while debating issues freely on a discussion page.

In 2002, Derek Ramsey finds a way to automate the creation of 33,832 articles about small towns in the U.S. by automating the extraction of data from the U.S. Census. Seth Anthony and others add actual maps to those cities. Sunir Shah creates MeatballWiki to discuss online community. It will prove instrumental for Wikipedia's future policies. Ultimately, Sanger adopts three dominant editing principle: neutral point of view (NPOV), verifiability (V), and no original research (NOR).

Larry Sanger, the chief editor of Wikipedia will struggle with his wish to facilitate Wikipedia explosive growth based on its free wheeling nature where anyone can publish article. But, Sanger seeks quality in Wikipedia's articles through formal editorial control. He created a burdensome seven step editing process for Nupedia. This caused the average article to take more than two weeks to get published vs Wikipedia where an author can publish an original article immediately.

At Wikipedia, the editing comes after the fact. But, it has no finish line. Thus even if an article is mediocre at first, it improves rapidly. After a couple of years, Larry Sanger leaves Wikipedia in 2002 as he feels it lacks credibility. In 2006, he develops a competing encyclopedia, Citizendium where a hierarchy of experts dominates the article publishing process. Within its first year it will publish 4,000 articles vs 20,000 for Wikipedia. Also, when comparing a few articles somehow Wikipedia's wild wisdom of crowds approach seems very competitive in terms of quality with the hierarchy of experts at Citizendium. Thus, Citizendium outlook is not that encouraging (as Wikipedia appears to beat it on both productivity and quality).

The chapter describing the different culture of the various language-Wikipedias is very interesting. The Spanish one is the most idealistic. When Larry Sanger mentioned Wikipedia may consider selling ads to generate revenues, the Spanish Wikipedia revolts and copies their entire Wikipedia into a new online encyclopedia: Enciclopedia Libre. The Spanish Wikipedia's growth will never fully recover from this bifurcation. The Japanese Wikipedia culture is unique. It is by far the most polite. Edit wars are unknown. And, all Wikipedians remain anonymous. They don't register usernames. This makes it harder to get mad at "no one" and makes it easier to reach consensus. The German Wikipedia is more rigorous. Articles don't get readily published until they are "Sighted" by senior editors who check spelling, absence of vandalism, and some of the basic facts. As a result, Wikipedia has more credibility in Germany. And, they have formed a close cooperation with several government agencies related to education. Their culture resembles what Larry Sanger had in mind with Citizendium. The Chinese Wikipedia is interesting due to its challenges of having to deal with different icon styles. Zhen Zhu designed a software that translates Chinese articles in six different icon styles. This software will be leveraged by the Serbian and the Kazakh Wikipedias to generate translations in their respective Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic versions.

The international coverage of Wikipedia is incredible. There are Wikipedias in 255 different languages. And, many are surprisingly prolific. As of March 2008, the Esperanto Wikipedia has over 95,000 articles; the Catalan one over 106,000; Sanskrit over 4,000. But, English dominates with over 2.2 million articles which is three times larger than the German one in second place.

In 2004, Wales creates an arbitration committee. Over a 2 year period, it will handle more than 200 cases. Nevertheless, over the years many editors tired of fighting trolls leave Wikipedia suffering from burn out as Sanger did much earlier.

Near the end, the author raises the issue: is the English Wikipedia actually finished? With over 2 million articles, there is little need for new ones. Now, the mission of the Wikipedians is changing from creation to maintenance. Lih suggests the creative types may find interesting outlets in Wikibooks, Wikiuniversity, and other derivatives of the English Wikipedia.

If you want to study further the implications of online free collaboration you may want to read Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. If you want to study further the mechanical workings of Wikipedia, read How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It or Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.

While engaging and enthusiastic, I was somewhat dismayed by some erroneous things in the book -- like claiming Linux is based on Minix(i.e. uses Minix code), or Excite (the search engine) started in 1993 (before the Web even took off). I just checked these on Wikipedia and Linux is not based on Minix, and Excite started in 1994 under a different name.

When describing the rise of the first WikiWikiWeb, he asserts that it had a full revision history of each article. This is also untrue; only the last version of an article was kept, and in the early days of wiki-building, keeping the complete audit trail of every page was somewhat controversial -- some people didn't want their mistakes to live forever! I don't mean to sound like I'm nitpicking on some arcane point of software history, but he claims that this full history of every page is what gave people the confidence to edit the original wiki. But it just wasn't so.

Oh well. If you enjoy a breezy gossipy history of the Wikipedia phenomenon, this is a light read. I wouldn't cite this as a reliable source though.

This is a fairly decent book about an important topic: Wikipedia. As an academic, I'm almost finished with my Ph.D. in history, I'm supposed to shun the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." But, I find that attitude supremely elitist. Wikipedia is no different, to me, than skimming through Britannica or World Book to confirm a fact, or just plain have fun. In fact, it is better. You can't find information about the Black Crowes in Britannica, or something as arcane as "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords." (Go ahead, put it in the Wikipedia search box.)

Anyway, Lih has written a fairly good, and even-handed, history of Wikipedia. The history is good, though I feel he falls a bit flat towards the end. For instance, I would have thrown in some examples from the Nature article; I would have had a chapter on its usefulness in academe; etc. But, it is a good first start. Telling Wikipedia's story through the various lenses of other technological innovations was brilliant.

Lastly, I wish Lih would have taken a bit more time to describe "flagged revisions" or "sighted revisions," and explained how it is an abomination to the whole Wikipedia concept; or tried to reconcile Jimmy Wales's glowing description of the wiki ethos in his intro and his seeming love affair with the idea of a stable "sighted" flagged Wikipedia. A flagged, sighted "stable" Wikipedia is not what Wikipedia is about. Historians know that there is no such thing as stable knowledge, otherwise there wouldn't be a new biography of Lincoln every two years. Right?

One peeve: Lih uses the amorphous phrase "hacker ethos" at least eight times in the book, and it irked me every damn time. One, because it just sounds pretentiously silly, a high-brow, low-brow affect; second, because it is never really defined; and lastly because he seems to equate hacker with good, when hacker to me conjures up images of DOS attacks, bank theft, and the like. So what is a "hacker ethos"?

I had to read and review this book as part of a class at USC, where Andrew Lih teaches. (He wasn't teaching this particular class.)

I found it pretty easy to read, especially for someone who does not have a technical background. It was also helpful to place Wikipedia's development in the context of the Internet's evolution. But those looking for a glimpse of the personalities involved - a la "The Social Network" - might be disappointed. This book is more about the culture and technical developments that led to Wikipedia.

When I worked as a journalist, we could not use Wikipedia as a reference source, because our supervisors were skeptical of its accuracy and reliability. But I read Wikipedia all the time, and I found that its information matched what I had learned from other sources, particularly in subjects I was familiar with.

I'll be interested in observing whether the Wikipedia culture - where everyone contributes and shares information freely as equals, and where the community polices or regulates itself - will influence other parts of our society and economy in the future.

I thought I knew everything worth knowing about Wikipedia already. Of course, I was wrong.

More importantly, I learned things about the rest of the internet:
* Slashdot pioneered meta-moderation, a powerful tool for self-policing a comment-driven community (pg 68)
* Japanese internet culture is much more anonymous; the canonical example is a site called 2channel. (pg 145)
* Chinese writing was simplified after WWII, but not in Taiwan and Hong Kong. A Wikipedia user built a system to automatically translate Wikipedia pages back and forth between the simplified and traditional systems, which was not trivial (pg 153).
* Spanish wikipedia broke off and started their own non-wikipedia wiki encyclopedia after Larry Sanger suggested that wikipedia might carry advertising.
* Larry Sanger strongly regrets that Wikipedia did not give experts a greater role in the system. His attempt to build such a system is called Citizendium. As of June 23, 2011 they have ~16,000 articles, ~160 of which are expert-approved.

Bottom line: if you're interested in understanding how the wikipedia miracle happened, this will give you some insight.

This book was a really enjoyable read. I found myself transfixed by the story of Wikipedia and came away from the book with a much appreciated understanding of how this cultural institution rose to such prominence.

The impact of Wikipedia is closely related to the impact of the Internet itself. It is very much part of the Web 2.0 stage of the Internet. Wikipedia is an application which permits a community of highly organized-- or loosely organized users, depending on your perspective--to create content. The advantages and disadvantages of the massive on-line encyclopedia, with its unattributed and community-edited articles, are largely those of the Internet itself. It is the first recourse when searching for information for more people, myself included, than any other site. But, at the same time, its articles are unattributed, and there are abundant examples of its misuse by those deliberately planting inaccurate or misleading, not to say defamatory and deliberately false information.

Andrew Lih's work is an excellent introduction to this cultural phenomenon. Lih had good access to key figures in its founding and in its continuing development. The book includes a not-very-informative forward by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's animating spirit, who has usually preferred to stay very much behind the scenes at the site, having largely turned it over to the community of users.

For a full review see: [...]

Wikipedia's history is a fascinating story, and this book is an insightful and non-technical narrative that's easy and fun to read. I've used Wikipedia for a long time, and known Andrew longer. Despite having been around for the "Wikipedia Revolution" I learned a tremendous amount about the people, community, culture, and peculiarities involved in providing "access to the sum of all human knowledge" (Jimmy Wales). The book covers: how it started, why it works (and doesn't), how it grew in size and popularity, how Wikipedia is different in different countries, how it fits with Internet and opensource culture, how it's overcome it's problems, and what the future problems look like.

It's valuable read for anyone interested in online communities, Wikipedia (of course), or the future of knowledge. It's on my bookshelf next to "Linked", "The Tipping Point", "The Dip", and "Better".

I listened to this as an audio book from the library. It was entertaining and, for the most part, easy listening. This book describes the Internet projects that led up to the founding of Wikipedia and then the history of Wikipedia from its founding through (I believe) 2007 or 2008.

The author seems quite objective in his presentation -- this is not a puff piece nor a hatchet job. He goes into depth regarding the software innovations that make Wikipedia possible and also the nature of social interactions in the Wikipedia community. I found both interesting. In one spot, there was a little more description of the software than I could follow, but generally it was well-explained.

My interest was in learning about the principles that allow a large group of volunteers to work together on-line. This book goes a long way towards describing them.