Wikipedia and the “Arrow of Time”
When Jimmy Wales launched Wikipedia in January of 2001, nearly thirteen years ago, its highly doubtful that he knew what a giant the company would become. Wales is quoted saying, “”Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing” in 2004.[1] Eventually the website would go on to become one of the largest search engines on the World Wide Web.
Many people have heard of the “random article game”, which is outlined in Jarret Bellini’s article from August of 2012. Let us explain this “game”. You are giving a random topic to start with, say electromagnetic radiation, and another random that you are hoping to end with, say Culinary Institute of America. You start on the first article, and continue to click hyper-links that link to other Wikipedia pages, until eventually you wind up at your goal, the given end topic. One might think that this would take a while. Interestingly enough, it doesn’t. We hear about how the “6 degrees of separation” is becoming smaller and smaller. So too does this have an affect on the “random article game” for Wikipedia, as more pages are created, which contain more content and thus more links to other pages.
Several key points are outlined from our Networks class. First, think about the concept of the “arrow of time”. With respect to books, a hypothetical book #1 can be quoted by another hypothetical book #2. In most cases, there will not be a reverse effect (book #2 being cited by book #1). That said, whereas this is the case with books (in the past), articles on the web are frequently updated, changed, and thus can cite each other. A webpage rarely ever will not change from the first day it is put on the internet, to the present day that one might be looking at it. If a website were to stay the same, the chances are that the information became obsolete, or the webpage owner no longer had an interest in the topic. More often than not, a webpage is changed many times. This is outlined very clearly on any Wikipedia page. One can see each time that a change is made if the “view history” tab is clicked, which is located directly next to the search bar. A detailed outline of every change that has been made, and the date of such a change, exists on the view history screen.
The “random article game” also touches on the development of hyperlinks. Like the progression seen in figure 13.2 in the text book (teaching a class on Networks –> Networks Course has a Class Blog –> Class blog posts about Microsoft –> Which leads us to Microsoft’s homepage), the game leads us through a variety of different hyperlinks, to ultimately end up at a generally different topic/field.
Finally, although we can use hyperlinks within the article to get to new pages of data, we also can use the links provided in the References:notes section. In a print copy of a book, one would not be able to jump seamlessly from one article to the next. Rather, the tedious process of finding a given citation in a library needs to take place. This demonstrates the effectiveness of Wikipedia with respect to saving time.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/17/tech/web/bellini-wikipedia/index.html
[1] Miller, Rob “Roblimo” (July 28, 2004). “Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds”. Slashdot. Retrieved October 31, 2008.