16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Revolution, March 22, 2009
`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.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent history about an extraordinary website, April 22, 2009
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.
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Oddly, he should have used Wikipedia for fact checking, July 14, 2009
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.
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