Wikipedia is threatened: will the site survive, asks an alarmist piece in the New York Times. The problem is technological obsolescence: Wikipedia is getting nearly as old-fashioned as email.
The number of people who edit Wikipedia has been declining steadily since 2005, even as the site has become more established, richer, and indispensable to almost everyone online. There are well-known social reasons for this: editing Wikipedia requires you to learn a simple markup language, while defending edits requires an almost unlimited tolerance for argument and friction, and progress through a largely self-appointed bureaucracy.
But there is now a technological reason, too. The rise of smartphones and of tablets means that most visitors to Wikipedia sites are now coming from devices that are difficult to write on. Phones are useful for short messages, but the screens are just too small to keep two windows open usefully, even on the minority of gadgets where you can do that. The editing interface for mobile Wikipedia is just about impossible to use.
People still use the internet to communicate and share information – it hasn’t turned entirely into the kind of Balkanised television that some pessimists feared. But more and more of what is shared is smaller: nuggets that take almost as little time to pick and send as they do to ignore on arrival. The Facebook “like” is only a single mouse click and needs no typing at all.
The effect of this is that Wikipedia editing requires even greater motivation than before. Most people will only do it when it is to their advantage to do so. And the people who gain most advantage from editing Wikipedia are almost always the charlatans and liars.
Despite the rules set out to make this impossible, there is bias within articles as well as in the selection. So much for the original dream of a co-operative growth of knowledge. What we’re left with is a volunteer-driven organisation with $60m in the bank and the background radiation from a huge explosion of idealism. It’s a bit like some of the relics of 19th century religious enthusiasms — Christian Science, or the Christ Apostolic Church.
No human institution is perfect, of course, and the dream of a universal and reliable store of commonly agreed knowledge was noble and intoxicating. Wikipedia won’t ever go away, even though it won’t ever become what it was supposed to be. What’s worrying, however, is that in its rise, it flattened all its rivals. There is no money to be made from selling encyclopedias now, and the only way that academic publishers make their profits is by gouging a captive market.
What’s melancholy in all this is the speed of change. The technology that now makes Wikipedia editing a niche sport was hardly dreamed of when the site got off the ground. But then I have a suspicion that my own mobile phone has more computing power than the minicomputers which ran the Atex typesetting systems that allowed Rupert Murdoch to break the power of the print unions in 1986, and on which the Independent launched in the same year. I tried to check this suspicion on Wikipedia, but the page for Atex is almost wholly uninformative. Oh well, I could always ask Google, that well-known friend of freedom.