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Freezing Wikipedia
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
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Default expectations aside, some preliterate bards actually dig up texts only so they can then perform nontextually. Others actually hold a blank sheet of paper before their eyes only so they can watch the story they’re singing onto it themselves. The oAgora houses idiosyncratic and sometimes surprising performance arenas (Arena of Oral Tradition). L Freezing Wikipedia An experiment in media In July 2008 the German publisher Bertelsmann announced what has been called a first in print publishing history: a one-volume encyclopedia with 90,000 authors45 made up of the 25,000 most popular articles from the German Wikipedia (Wikipedia: Die freie Enzyklopädie).46 Published in September 2008 and planned as an annual series, it offers the inimitable riches of the online networked resource between the covers of a conventional book. Or does it? Lost in translation Conversion from web to book—a case study in the perils of agoraphobia (Agoraphobia )—has crippling implications for Wikipedia as a dynamic entity (that is, as it was meant to be). Translation to the brick-and-mortar medium may seem an attractive option, but substantial sacrifices are necessarily involved. We can identify at least five major discrepancies between the eAgora and tAgora forms of the project, five ways in which the textual artifact falls far short and markedly compromises the value and usability of Wikipedia. Here they are, arranged from most to least obvious: 1. Limited number of entries. The one-volume tAgora artifact reduces the presentation to about 3 percent of the German Wikipedia’s current contents, already a very modest percentage that will only diminish further as more entries appear in the online resource. Issuing annual Wikipedia volumes will expand and update coverage somewhat, but the overall contents will still be curtailed severely. 2. Limited number of authors. Ninety thousand people sounds like a large collective of authors, and it certainly is—for a book. But how many authors involved in creating the other 97 percent of the entries have been denied publication in that thin slice of an ever-enlarging whole? And how many authors who will revise and augment existing entries as well as contribute future entries have been or will be excluded? In an environment of not only multiple but distributed authorship (Distributed Authorship), the game changes. Freezing Wikipedia . 103 3. Fossilized entries. The lifeblood of the international Wikipedia project is an active, participatory community involved in continuous updating and ongoing improvement of online contents. The core advantage of eEntries, in other words, lies precisely in their nonstatic, nonfossilized character. They respond to change, they counter the foreshortening imposed through print fixation by keeping the discussion open. They morph along with discovery and maintain currency (as well as the promise of ongoing, future currency), a process that annual “snapshots” of a process always in motion cannot support. To mount once-living entries as exhibits in the tAgora museum (Museum of Verbal Art) is an exercise in taxidermy. 4. No linked network. There is text-reading and there is web-surfing, and they are categorically different. tEntries in the Bertelsmann volume are crossreferenced in conventional tAgora fashion, but the medium prohibits the kind of network one finds in the online Wikipedia. I emphasize two issues here: page-bound cross-referencing can’t ever simulate electronic hyperlinking , and the field of possible references to other entries is shrunk by 97 percent, not to mention links to external sites. Though it goes against the grain of our cherished textual ideology (Ideology of the Text), networks of potentials are far more powerful investigative tools than fixed rows of print, no matter how authoritatively edited (and even that supposed authority must always be an illusion from the perspective of evolving knowledge ). tAgora entries are and will remain freestanding islands of data with very short half-lives of usability because they simply can’t morph. They can’t evolve along with the ever-changing world of information and insights , the world where their creators and users actually live and learn. 5. Dramatically diminished and markedly narrower audience. The “other end” of any communication—fully as crucial as the creator/sender—is the user/ receiver. No matter how effective the advertising, or how assiduous the acquisitions librarian, the real-world audience for a tAgora, brick-andmortar Wikipedia will inevitably be restricted to a very small and parochial segment of the eAudience for the online resource. Most basically, the book is strictly a pay-to-play option, whether the financial enabler is an individual...