The miraculous Wikipedia

There are at least three miracles on the Internet that I know about. The first is the Internet itself. It seems fairly miraculous that the Internet works at all. It sends text, pictures, video, whatever to me wherever just on the regular, low-key all the time. That's pretty cool, and probably a miracle from a technical standpoint.

The other miracle is Wikipedia.

Why is Wikipedia a miracle? For the same reason that the Internet is a miracle: the simple fact it exists at all.

Wikipedia, according to itself, is a multi-lingual free encyclopedia hosted on the Internet. It is based on the wiki, a model of openly edited free content. Free as in beer, not free as in speech, more on this in a bit. Translated for the masses: anyone can edit this encyclopedia, and it's available online.

Anyone online.

If you're reading this online, that's you. Since I'm writing this, that's me too. And probably most people we know, and to be honest a majority of people we don't know.

Most things available to anyone online have not turned out well. Prime examples include a government boat naming contest in the UK (winning name: Boaty McBoatface), a Microsoft Twitter bot trained on its own interactions with Twitter (ended up somewhere between racist and just a regular internet user), and the more harmless but much more common video game griefer.

The trend seems to be: if there's a sand castle on the Internet, someone will come by and kick it over.

Wikipedia is a veritable sand mansion, complete with grounds and hedge mazes and greenhouses. At 40 million articles and 18 billion pageviews per month, it seems like a prime playground for Internet shenanigans.

It remains, however, exactly the opposite: organized, relatively well policed, and consistently above average in accuracy (Here's what they have to say about it themselves).

How is this possible?

The constant gardening of thousands of dedicated pendants worldwide aided by a tireless robot army.

Wikipedia is "free and open", but guarded by its own citizens. Wikipedians, the faceless monikered order of internet archivists, are the castle guards. They are mostly male, mostly single [pdf link], and verbose in their defense of the house (there's an entire article devoted to Lamest Edit Wars, so if you didn't know that edit wars were a thing, here's the D-list group). The Wikipedian community actively tends to the site, protecting most of it's pages and certainly it's most controversial (18 MB of text debate over Intelligent Design).

How did it get that way?

Therein lies the miracle.

(if you actually know, email me and I'll keep writing, but I really need to go back to work on ICML papers now)

Hello World!

Hello world!

This is a blog about CS/Stats/``Data Science''/Math culture. It will update it hopefully weekly, and is meant to share fun facts/divisive opinions/cultural self-aware recognitions about our community.

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