Big Nasty Wikipédia

When you first heard about Wikipédia, remember how fantastic you thaught it was.
A free, universal encylopedia in the shape of a wiki, that could be translated in any language. You no longer needed to go the schoool library and borrow a Universalis that weighed about two tons, the information was now just a clik away.

Time passed, and the concept was so pleasant to all the internauts all around the world that Wikipédia ended up being the internaut-leviathan, a unavoidable website like Google, Doctissimo.fr or so. In a search engine, the first answer given to your request will probably be a wikipedia page. Millions of articles are now categorized in one the biggest online wiki.

That's what wikipedia would look like if it was an actual encylopedia.

So what is wrong about that ?
Well, some people may forget that,but as a wiki, it has amateurs writers, whose subjective point of view can be very visible in some articles. An Hadopi article for instance, dedicated to the french law that aimed at limiting illegal downloading, has been the subject of a violent debate, since two writers but a lot of their political subjectivity on the article.

The "pro-hadopi" writer was later identified as a member of the French department of Culture and Communication. Does his function won't make him a little...partisan over this subject ? Other debates have been provoked on wikipedia, Hadopi is just a recent example. Some people who had a wikipedia page at their name even found themselves being declared dead by an anonymous little clown. For example, the french-maroccan comedian Gad Elmaleh had to face this situation.

Moreover, wikipedia's shareware policy seems paradoxical : wikipedia's site governance can tolerate such articles that are very subjectiveor malicious, but can be extremely severe regarding some other articles.

For instance, I have writen an article on wikipedia. First, I discovered it was as easy as I thaught it will be. The interface is quite complicated actually. So it took me about two hours to do it correctly. And I'm not a newbie. I wrote very easily on the web thanks to my internship where I had to cope with many CMS tools, in addition to blogger and typepad that are also platforms of online writing.

But coping with the interface was just the emerged part of the iceberg.

I decided to write about ACT, the blog my brother has. As a young and dynamic teenager, he has chosen to create his own e-portfolio for this works. Specialized in collages and web art productions he has already exposed some of his productions in parisians cafés and sold almost all of his paintings for a high price at such a young age (my brother is seventeen).

His blog is certainly not wikipedia or techcrunch but still, it has its afficionados,its facebook fan page, its twitter account...

However, my article was deleted within 24 hours.

Why ?
Because the blog is not famous enough, and because an artist who has its own wikipedia page must have, at least, two written critics on it on the web, or to have a production in a museum.

So, no, Wikipedia is not exactly a wiki. You can't write about anything, and innovative things don't have their place on it.

We can wonder what will be the future of wikipedia. IThe site has to admitt it's narrow-mindness concerning new articles and its disturbing subjectivity. If Wikipedia wants to stay the reference it is for many Internauts, it has to end its wiki status and work as a professional, traditional website. When many american universities are already claiming on posters "just say no to wikipedia" you know you need to break your habits...and go to the library searching the Universalis.