The World

I have a guilty confession to make. I love Wikipedia. I had not realised this was a particular source of shame until I went to a recent conference on the new media. Speaker after speaker said that, of course, no responsible journalist would take facts off Wikipedia, which is notoriously full of errors. I said nothing. I’m sure I’ve done this lots of times – usually uncontroversial little, fact-checky things. But data all the same.

In fact, I was at it again this afternoon – as I was researching my newspaper column for next week (small trailer) on sex scandals (out on Tuesday!!!!). Put in almost any name into Google – Bill Clinton, Jeremy Thorpe, Tony Blair – and it is likely that the Wikipedia entry will be the thing that comes up first. It’s really useful.

But is it also full of errors? Well, possibly. Over the summer somebody has seen fit to put up a very short Wikipedia entry about me. It’s only three sentences. But it does contain a mistake – the claim that my last job at The Economist was as the Charlemagne columnist. (Bizarrely, it was business editor.) It’s not a very serious error. And I’m too lazy and technically incompetent to correct it. But it’s hardly an encouraging precedent.

The backlash against Wikipedia – and the whole idea of user-generated content on the internet (sometimes called Web 2.0) – is now in full swing. There was an interesting Q&A with Andrew Keen, one of the anti brigade, on the FT web-site recently.

But I intend to persist. I thought my experiement with soliciting ideas for my column a few weeks ago was quite successful. I think I’ll drop the crowd-sourcing label since it strikes me a bit pretentious. Let’s just say I’d like to start a discussion. This is not so very different, from the way I’ve often written columns. Upto now, I’ve tended to wander around the corridors discussing my ideas with colleagues. I’ve even occasionally talked to real experts. By starting an online discussion of possible column topics, I’m simply broadening the range of participants in the discussion. (I think)

And what should the first topic be? Well, at the risk of making this post so circular that it disappears downs the plug-hole, I think I would like to look at Web 2.0.

At the conference I referred to at the beginning of this post (a Nokia-sponsored job in Finland), there seemed to me to be a big division of opinion between people from the rich world and from the developing world. Broadly, most of the people from poorer and less free places were very optimistic about the power of the internet. They saw it as empowering. There was talk of demonstrations organised over the internet and by text message in China; and of Kenyan farmers whose lives had been transformed by the use of mobile phones for the collection of market data and payments.

But people from Europe and the States were often more inclined to Keenian gloom. They talked about the spread of pornography, gambling, cults – and the destruction of the business models of the traditional media and with that the collapse of vital sources of authoritative information.

It seemed to me that this contrast between developing world optimism about the net, and the growing backlash in the west would serve as the opening point for a newspaper column. But I haven’t really pursued the idea much further. So if anyone can point me in the direction of new and interesting arguments and data, I would be very grateful.