Well, not just me, but the gazillions of other bloggers, podcasters, Wikipedians, MySpace and Facebook inhabitants, shutter bugs on Flickr, Youtube videographers, Amazon reviewers, etc around the world who are making their own small mark on the Web (see Time’s article). It’s quite a shift to go from paying homage to Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates (last year’s Time persons of the year) to people like Simon Pulsifer, an unemployed 25-year-old Canadian who is the top writer/editor in Wikipedia (read this for profiles of other people like Simon).
It’s fascinating to watch millions of ordinary people make a small piece of the Web their own. It’s even more interesting to see how the traditional “owners” of the media, not used to competing with their own consumers in generating and even selling content, are reacting to this seismic shift. I think the proverbial ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ is the way to go.
It’s surprising to me how quickly Wikipedia has become authoritative, too. A couple years ago, I remember reading a journalist’s blog, and he said he’d never take facts off Wikipedia again, because he did once, they turned out to be wrong, and he got burned.
But last week, when I was writing a pop science article for a well known magazine, a scientist I was talking to and my editor both told me to look Wikipedia pages to use the information for the article and to settle a point we weren’t sure about.
Now it seems even nitpicky scientists and careful journalists are saying that Wikipedia is the go-to place for info. I’m still hesitant to use something on there without double-checking it, but it’s where I often go to get an initial understanding of a subject or concept, like, say, the fine structure constant.