Digital Ethical Conundrum

I've been ever so tempted to make a little teensy change in a Wikipedia article about Cows, just to helpfully change:

On February 18, 1930 Elm Farm Ollie became the first cow to fly in an airplane and also the first cow to be milked in an airplane.

to

On February 18, 1930 Elm Farm Ollie became the first cow to fly an airplane and also the first cow to be milked in an airplane.

Mostly because that's what I thought it said at first and had to go back and look again. But I've had more feelings of guilt come up before hitting the submit button than should reasonably be associated with 'just a website'. I've had less-than-zero guilt about downloading music off of the Internet, but this is stopping me dead in my tracks.

I guess I don't want to be numbered with those who spend their days trolling and causing trouble and blogging-about-blogging, and generally not contributing anything positive. You might say that parasites and viruses are part of any ecosystem, and to not be resistant to them is a weakness that will bring down any entity if not dealt with effectively.

In the open source world we rely on benevolent dictators like Linus Torvalds to decide what goes in and what doesn't, with an implicit trust system that grows after you submit a few good patches. But Wikipedia, and Wikis in general, just allow you to hit that old submit button no matter who you are and have your changes pop up immediately.

Who is it for?

There's been a lot written about Wikipedia, such as the attitude of anti-elitism. There's a current of people who want Wikipedia to be accepted as an respected source in the academic world, and others who see its purpose as a way of bringing knowledge down to the people and thus view entrenched institutions of knowledge with some suspicion.

Depending on my mood I fall into both camps. But there's a similarity between this natural split and what we see in open source software. The nice thing about open systems is that both sides, while working toward their own purposes, will help improve it for everyone. When IBM improves some aspect of Linux's scalability or stability so they can use it in business, that change goes back into the community to be used by everyone. Similarly, when a Debian volunteer writes a driver for an ancient piece of hardware found on old computers so someone who can't afford to upgrade can still find the system useful, that sense of universality helps their image and creates goodwill that you don't find with more narrowly-focused systems.

So in the end, those who want to improve the trustworthiness of Wikipedia's information may implement a system of proof-reading and revision-tagging, but it won't stop everyone from growing the body of articles organically as they were. And if Wikipedia really will help bring about a flattening of the ivory towers, there's nothing wrong with some residents of those towers helping it along, either knowingly or not.