How the Community Can Work, Fast

Dan Gillmor blogged This Wikipedia article about the new pope did not exist 24 hours ago.

As noted in the comments below, there was already page about Cardinal Ratzinger. But the speed with which the Wikipedia crowd raced to update and augment the page tells us something about how the distributed community can respond to something big.

The page has already suffered vandalism, another Wikipedia trait. But over time it will settle down to something all sides can agree on.

Is the process perfect? Of course not. But it does achieve something important, and teaches us much -- positive and negative -- about communities.

Michael commented Technically speaking, it did exist, under the title [[Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger]]. But of course, you're right on the larger point -- the article's had more than 1,000 edits since being "moved" to its new title.

Dennis G. Jerz commented Shortly after Benedict XVI was announced, I googled the name... Google News turned up meaningful results, but the main search results weren't returning anything meaningful. I googled again a few hours later, and while the main search results hadn't changed, there were many more Google ads down the right side of the page.

I've posted screen caps, if you're curious. I just tried again -- Google is still pointing to pages that are purely speculative. I'll echo what Michael said -- Ratzinger was a well-known church figure, and a front-runner for the papacy, so his biography would have already been fairly extensive.

Stephen Downes commented For the few seconds between the announcement that Ratzinger was named pope, and the announcement of his choice of name, the Wikipedia entry was titled Pope Joseph... I just happened to catch it on the fly (it was changed before I could update it)...

Brian Slesinsky commented I'm sure it will be fixed (I didn't bother), but why do we have to see the vandalism while it's happening? Edits should be proposed and rejected behind the scenes.

blogged Dan Gillmor pointed out that Wikipedia has a thorough, scholarly article on the new Pope. I can improve on that: I happened to have the Sistine-chapel webcam in a corner of the screen when the white smoke came out, and observed the Wikipedia article when it was only minutes old. At which point I noticed that a defacer with a sense of humor had inserted something about the former Cardinal Ratzinger dreaming of retiring to “a small Nazi village”, but it had been fixed by the time I got there. Just now, I decided that the phrase “Benedict XVI is the 8th German pope in history;” would be improved by losing the words “in history” so I nuked ’em. Which is to say, Dan’s got a point. I see a future in which, when you want to talk about anything worth talking about, you link either to its URI, or its Wikipedia entry, or both.

This is a good example of Wikipedia, the free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Today it's top news item has links to seven Wikipedia articles: German   Cardinal   Joseph Ratzinger is elected   pope   on the second day of voting in the papal conclave   , and takes the regnal name   Benedict XVI   .