#sapling

Wikipedia §

Wikipedia is a big, magical website full of lots of information about everything. Writing things on Wikipedia was where I acquired my enjoyment of digital gardening back in 2022.

As of January 2024, I still edit Wikipedia from time to time. Aside from the obvious (that all of human knowledge can fit into your pocket a hundred times over), I think there are two ways that Wikipedia is a marvel:

1. Being editable by anyone and yet nevertheless managing to maintain order in the face of “anyone” including the most persistent of ideologues, vandals, laymen, and paid government mooks.
2. In the simplicity with which information is recorded while nevertheless encoding not just all kinds of information, but also two orders of change procedure - the procedures for changing content and the procedures for changing the change procedures - in a way that can reasonably be argued by the layman without resorting to bureaucracy.

Above all else, I think Wikipedia’s survival has come not necessarily as a result of the nobility of its mission or a force multiplier that backs it up, but through careful incentive alignment that makes disruption unproductive, unfun, and easily correctible.

That resilience is underpinned by nerds motivated not by gamification or the hope of legacy, but I believe through the simple nerdish desire to improve the amount of correct information in the world.