Somehow I stumbled across Wikipedia today and spent most of the afternoon and evening exploring and contributing to it. For those of you who don't know about it, Wikipedia is basically an online encyclopedia except that there is no single authoritative organizing body to determine what gets put into the encyclopedia or how things are discussed. The idea is to allow anyone (literally) to contribute, whether in the form of new entries, edits to existing entries, or discussion of entries. It is designed to be a collaborative project wherein the "final" versions of entries are the representative expression of as many people as are interested in the given topic.

Obviously, the first thing I did was look up "Metallica" to see what was there. A few minutes later I was hurriedly looking up instructions on how to edit the main Metallica entry. While I wasn't interested in completely rewriting the entry, there were some pretty glaring factual errors as well as some very awkward prose, and I at least wanted to make things a little clearer. Still, I had reservations when I found that I needed to delete completely a few sentences rather than just edit them for factual correctness. What makes participating in the Wikipedia interesting is the fact that there are no authors credited in any of the entries, so they appear at once authoritative and anonymous, or somehow unwatched by other people. In other words, you come across the Metallica entry (for instance) and you see it just sitting there, with this link above it that says "Edit this page," and you think to yourself, "Really?" Basically the web isn't supposed to operate that way, right? People just can't change the content of a web page without hacking, can they? The Metallica entry was also tricky because much of the entry had clearly been written by someone/people who were primarily fans, folks who certainly had opinions about Metallica. Opinions are fine, but I couldn't help but notice how obviously informed they were by the statutes of rock authenticity. As I was figuring out how I would contribute to the entry I kept running into the idea that the entry was supposed to be a collaborative project, and thus reflect the viewpoints of many different participants. Simply deleting entire sentences seemed to go against that premise in a pretty harsh manner. Yet, I couldn't escape the fact that some of the information in that sentence was simply wrong (i.e, Metallica's 1987 album was not called The $9.98 CD: Garage Days Re-Visited - it wasn't released on CD until several years later, and its title is Garage Days Re-Revisited), or influenced by myth, rumor, and hearsay. So my contributions reflect a delicate balancing act: in some cases I deleted away while I let others stand because they didn't really say anything that was factually incorrect even though they might have an embarrassing (to me?) sentiment to them.

No names appear on any of the edits in the entry itself, but you can view a list of "editors" and the versions of the entry which existed before each "editor" got involved. In a sense, then, even though I removed some portions of the entry, the earlier versions still exist in the Wikipedia database, a nice touch I think. Somewhat paranoid-edly-iously, I'm waiting for some random email from one of the previous contributors who will write angrily to me, saying "don't fuck with my entry, dude. mine was totally cool and totally right." I suppose if that happens I'll have to respond and correct their misconceptions, but in reality I have no idea how, or even if, people will respond to the changes I made. It's certainly possible that someone will simply replace my corrections with the previous information. And then I'll replace their's, and they'll replace mine, etc. Of course, there are supposed to be little message boards to work this kind of thing out, but we'll see.

Anyway, after editing the Metallica entry I inspected the entries for all of the albums and made a few more corrections and clarifications. Mostly just formatting stuff though.

Anyway anyway, do check out Wikipedia. It's fun and you get to feel smart. :)