From A to B

There is an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart, who has been forced to wear glasses and orthopaedic shoes, opens his locker and a book falls into his hands. The school bullies spot him with the book and the ringleader, Nelson, shouts ’Hey, he’s learning on his own!’ Bart then receives some physical education about what constitutes acceptable behaviour in the school corridor.

For those who have experienced Bart’s beating because they dared to discover, Wikipedia must be the ideal cyber-club as it has tons of information, it is great for extra curricular learning and the egg-headed bouncers are pumped up on fish oil.

Since 2001, the site has amassed 2.3m articles in English and has 75,000 active contributors. These people, who create or amend the articles, are called ‘Editors’, and they have to adhere to the ‘Five Pillars of Wikipedia’(it’s an encyclopaedia, it’s free, it has a code, it’s neutral and does not have firm rules.)

Having passed the pillars, readers may want to try an edit. There is a tutorial for contributors which has a feature called the ‘sandbox’ where would be Editors can try out their skills on a text. At the moment, it is an intriguing excerpt from ‘The Chronology of the Irish Annals’ which features a father treacherously slaying his nephew.

However, perhaps the most interesting exhortation from the guidelines is ‘Be Bold’, advice, one suspects, Nelson from The Simpsons never needed in the school corridor. One new contributor, author Nicholson Baker, became an Editor last year and describes his first experience with the project: ‘[It was] as if I had passed through the looking glass and was being allowed to fiddle with some huge engine . It seemed much too easy to damage.’

After he overcomes his initial trepidation, he gradually becomes emboldened and is ’well on his way to developing a first-stage Wikipedia dependency’. He joins the Article Rescue Squadron, a wonderfully name group who oppose ‘extremist deletions’ and tactically deploy commas. He describes his biggest pleasure as ’whacking trolls’. These are Wikipedia’s vandals who can amend articles to lines of abuse.

The troll-whackers police the project, eject the unruly typists and protect the interests of the wise and orderly - all so their free database of human knowledge can spread by word of mouse and people can learn on their own. A cyber swagger can start to creep into their actions: they begin to scoff at inexperienced editors, jeer the uniformed and flame the hapless illiterates who don’t know what constitutes acceptable behaviour in the online corridors of knowledge.