Wikipedia Made Me Look Stupid!
One month ago, I created a page on Wikipedia for a Colombian politician. I was just about sure that I had done an excellent job. Soon after that, when I looked that name into Wikipedia official site and Google, I realized it didn´t show up. A bit concerned, I asked one of my most remarkable collages for that situation and he told me that I should patiently wait at least 10 days. What I didn´t know was that someone will go over and approve my work before posting it definitely. I surely skipped that part while reading the Wikipedia tutorial.
Ten days after, I looked for that name again and came across with a warning which said I should modify my page because according to Wikipedia rules there were some irregularities. I got astonished. Vanity and self-promotion were the main reasons to reject my request. I immediately got upset and turned my computer off.
A day after that, I asked myself who I was upset with. With no answer, I came back to Wikipedia. I thought I was going to argue with an institution or a scholar but what I found was a herd of people commenting on my page my foolish mistakes. To make matters worse, they were right; I had exaggerated the information somewhat. I understood that to being accepted on Wikipedia, one does not need a famous person, just sincere and a bit prominent.
In addition to learning how to create a page on Wikipedia, I quickly learned to respect the universal knowledge expressed by millions of people through it. I wrote myself on this blog few years ago: “in reading the Wisdom of Crowds I got to believe that groups were substantially more intelligent than the smartest people within them; that crowd allegedly was a force capable of accumulating a great deal of experiences and knowledge, becoming them a reliable source of information.” I have no idea why I played a foolish knowing that.
The English historian Thomas Carlyle put it succinctly: ¨I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance”. He is right; just crowd is a reliable force. People are engendering an intelligent force capable of building and protecting their wisely universal encyclopedia from naives like me. Anyway, after my final report, I will try to create a Wikipedia page again.
