Julie Steinberg | Wikipedia's war

Perhaps the two most important pieces of advice freshmen receive are to avoid dating people in their hall and to avoid citing Wikipedia in a paper for class.

While the first is questionable, the second makes sense most of the time. After all, when the Benjamin Franklin statue in front of College Hall was renamed the "Liora Pollick Statue" on Penn's Wikipedia page, no one noticed for two months. You begin to wonder who really edits these things.

It's this question that has spawned a fascinating debate on Wikipedia between two groups of editors: the Inclusionists and the Deletionists. The Deletionists want to erase poorly written or unreferenced articles from Wikipedia. The Inclusionists, naturally, contend that more content can only be a good thing, as "Wiki is not paper."

If Wiki is not paper, and there are no limits to how much text can be printed, then no topic is too obscure to merit its own page. Why should the etymology of tomatoes be explored but that of yams be forgotten? And why does the platypus deserve its own hyperlink, while its extinct cousin retains a mere stub?

The problem, of course, lies within the democratic platitudes Wikipedia tries to uphold. More people submitting articles means less concern with responsible referencing, grammar and overall jurisdiction as to what warrants its own page.

But the conflict between democracy and accuracy may be self-correcting.

"Given my own use of Wikipedia, I feel like overall there is a healthy balance," Computer Science professor Michael Kearns said. "Total garbage doesn't tend to last too long these days. I would feel very differently if we were talking about The New Yorker, because it provides something different and always has."

As online encyclopedias render space constraints obsolete, the number of factions fighting over what constitutes quality articles has increased. In addition to the original two groups, their progeny now includes the "Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn't Mean They are Deletionists."

I add myself to that last group. There's something comforting about being able to read about anything that strikes my fancy. A recent search turned up information about black holes, which led me to an article on the Voyager Golden Record, which in turn produced a list of artists whose CDs went platinum in 1998. Even if some of the articles aren't as methodically researched as JSTOR prefers, isn't there something to be said for stimulating curiosity, intellectual or otherwise?

While the debate may seem as absurd as the musings in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Wikipedia can gauge how new media and public participation intersect. More importantly, it shows how online communities facilitate - or limit - discussion on energy politics or whether Blake Lively and Penn Badgley are as obnoxious in person as they are on TV.

"A community is as much about determining who gets to speak and who does not," fifth-year Annenberg School of Communication graduate student Lokman Tsui said. "Who decides these rules, how they are decided and [how] consensus is reached are important questions Wikipedia is trying to solve. Its struggle represents the larger challenge that is facing the Internet as a culture of openness."

Even when users threaten that open culture by deleting articles, the articles themselves don't disappear. A new program called "Deletionpedia" serves as the lexicographical purgatory for articles that simply don't cut it. Over 50,000 have been stockpiled, and Kearns argues that the "ubiquity of technology" means people won't have to choose between inclusionism and deletionism.

Even if you can't find the articles on Wikipedia, they're on the Web somewhere, so the debate between the two groups might one day prove irrelevant.

"Wikipedia is much more like paper dictionaries than encyclopedias given the near infinite number of virtual pages," said Joseph Reagle, an adjunct NYU communications professor. "Even a deletionist's scope is far more permissive than even the largest print encyclopedia."

Julie Steinberg is a College senior from Boca Raton, Fla. Her e-mail is steinberg@dailypennsylvanian.com. That's What She Said appears alternating Tuesdays.

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