Nicholson Baker, the brilliantly unconventional American essayist and novelist, recently turned his literary attention to the Internet’s most addictive online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. In his new essay published in the March 20 issue of The New York Review of Books–The Charms of Wikipedia–Baker offers a quirky overview of Wikipedia’s rapid growth before concentrating on how to become one of “Wikipedia’s upper crust–one of the several thousand whose words will live on for a little while, before later verbal fumarolings erode what you wrote?”
“It’s not easy,” writes Baker. Indeed, to learn how to write and edit articles on Wikipedia, Baker recommends O’Reilly’s “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” by John Broughton.
You have to have a cool head, so that you don’t get drawn into soul-destroying disputes, and you need some practical writing ability, and a quick eye, and a knack for synthesis. And you need lots of free time—time to master the odd conventions and the unfamiliar vocabulary (words like “smerge,” “POV warrior,” “forum shopping,” “hatnote,” “meat puppet,” “fancruft,” and “transclusion”), and time to read through guidelines and policy pages and essays and the endless records of old skirmishes—and time to have been gently but firmly, or perhaps rather sharply, reminded by other editors how you should behave. There’s a long apprenticeship of trial and error.”
“At least, that’s how it used to be,” Baker writes. “Now there’s a quicker path to proficiency: John Broughton’s Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, part of the Missing Manual series, overseen by The New York Times’s cheery electronics expert, David Pogue. “This Missing Manual helps you avoid beginners’ blunders and gets you sounding like a pro from your first edit,” the book says on the back. In his introduction, Broughton, who has himself made more than 15,000 Wikipedia edits, putting him in the elite top 1,200 of all editors—promises ‘the information you absolutely need to avoid running afoul of the rules.’ And it’s true: this manual is enlightening, well organized, and full of good sense. Its arrival may mark a new, middle-aged phase in Wikipedia’s history; some who read it will probably have wistful longings for the crazy do-it-yourself days when the whole proj-ect was just getting going.”
Armed with Broughton’s experienced advice and guidance, Baker decided to give creating and editing on Wikipedia a whirl.
The first thing I did on Wikipedia (under the username Wageless) was to make some not-very-good edits to the page on bovine somatotropin. I clicked the “edit this page” tab, and immediately had an odd, almost lightheaded feeling, as if I had passed through the looking glass and was being allowed to fiddle with some huge engine or delicate piece of biomedical equipment. It seemed much too easy to do damage; you ask, Why don’t the words resist me more? Soon, though, you get used to it. You recall the central Wikipedian directive: “Be Bold.” You start to like life on the inside.
After bovine hormones, I tinkered a little with the plot summary of the article on Sleepless in Seattle, while watching the movie. A little later I made some adjustments to the intro in the article on hydraulic fluid—later still someone pleasingly improved my fixes. After dessert one night my wife and I looked up recipes for cobbler, and then I worked for a while on the cobbler article, though it still wasn’t right. I did a few things to the article on periodization. About this time I began standing with my computer open on the kitchen counter, staring at my growing watchlist, checking, peeking. I was, after about a week, well on my way to a first-stage Wikipedia dependency.
As he continued his tour of Wikipedia, Baker got involved in saving an article about Richard Denner, a post-Beat poet and small-press editor, from deletion. But the more he engaged in such tussles, the less involved he became in his family until he “all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient.”
Baker’s essay about Wikipedia is like the place itself: an addictively good read. Read his essay here. And please let us know if you agree with Baker’s conclusion:
My advice to anyone who is curious about becoming a contributor—and who is better than I am at keeping his or her contributional compulsions under control—is to get Broughton’s Missing Manual and start adding, creating, rescuing.
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