<?xml encoding="utf-8"?>
<A HREF="Content071#b" NOPUSH><</A>
Internet Service Providers and do other good works through technology. 

Zuckerman, a Harvard Berkman Center Fellow, is concerned with the \"systemic bias\" in a collaborative encyclopedia whose contributors must be conversant with technology and in possession of same in order to improve on the work there. Zuckerman reasonably observes that Internet users skew towards wealth, residence in the world\'s richest countries, and a technological bent. This means that the Wikipedia, too, is skewed to subjects of interest to that group -- subjects where that group already has expertise and interest.

The result is tragicomical. The entry on the Congo Civil War, the largest military conflict the world has seen since WWII, which has claimed over three million lives, has only a fraction of the verbiage devoted to the War of the Ents, a fictional war fought between sentient trees in JRR Tolkien\'s *Lord of the Rings*.

Zuckerman issued a public call to arms to rectify this, challenging Wikipedia contributors to seek out information on subjects like Africa\'s military conflicts, nursing and agriculture and write these subjects up in the same loving detail given over to science fiction novels and contemporary youth culture. His call has been answered well. What remains is to infiltrate the Wikipedia into the academe so that term papers, Masters and Doctoral theses on these subjects find themselves in whole or in part on the Wikipedia. [fn See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xed/CROSSBOW for more on this]

But if Wikipedia is authoritative, how does it get there? What alchemy turns the maunderings of \"mouth-breathers with modems\" into valid, useful encyclopedia entries?

It all comes down to the way that disputes are deliberated over and resolved. Take the entry on Israel. At one point, it characterized Israel as a beleaguered state set upon by terrorists who would drive its citizens into the sea. Not long after, the entry was deleted holus-bolus and replaced with one that described Israel as an illegal state practicing Apartheid on an oppressed ethnic minority. 

Back and forth the editors went, each overwriting the other\'s with his or her own doctrine. But eventually, one of them blinked. An editor moderated the doctrine just a little, conceding a single point to the other. And the other responded in kind. In this way, turn by turn, all those with a strong opinion on the matter negotiated a kind of Truth, a collection of statements that everyone could agree represented as neutral a depiction of Israel as was likely to emerge. Whereupon, the joint authors of this marvelous document joined forces and fought back to back to resist the revisions of other doctrinaires who came later, preserving their hard-won peace. [fn: This process was just repeated in microcosm in the Wikipedia entry on the author of this paper, which was replaced by a rather disparaging and untrue entry that characterized his books as critical and commercial failures -- there ensued several editorial volleys, culminating in an uneasy peace that couches the anonymous detractor\'s skepticism in context and qualifiers that make it clear what the facts are and what is speculation]

What\'s most fascinating about these entries isn\'t their \"final\" text as currently present on Wikipedia. It is the history page for each, blow-by-blow revision lists that make it utterly transparent where the bodies were buried on the way to arriving at whatever Truth has emerged. This is a neat solution to the problem of authority -- if you want to know what the fully rounded view of opinions on any controversial subject look like, you need only consult its entry\'s history page for a blistering eyeful of thorough debate on the subject.

And here, finally, is the answer to the \"Mostly harmless\" problem. Ford\'s editor can trim his verbiage to two words, but they need not stay there -- Arthur, or any other user of the Guide as we know it today [fn: that
<A HREF="Content073" NOPUSH>></A>