Colm O'Regan: 'Browsing Wikipedia is like taking a bus, missing your stop, and waking up in a strange town'

Colm O'Regan: 'For me, Wikipedia is still a rather pleasing throwback to a simpler time on the internet.'

It's 25 years old this year. Old enough to know better. And if you give it a second, it will know better because some other know-it-all will update it. 

It’s Wikipedia. Once seen as a lazy way out, now with the enshittification of the rest of the internet, its reliability has increased. 

Not quite the horse’s mouth. A bit like during covid lockdown, when bus station toilets became the best in the city because all the others had closed.

It must be good because Elon Musk wanted to buy it because he didn’t like its answers. When he couldn’t do that, he made his own yellow-pack copy of it, Grokipedia. But obviously without all the "woke stuff". Whatever that means.

The pattern is familiar. A story appears on my Twitter or Facebook feed about a topic I haven’t heard before. Yesterday, I looked up the origin of stocks and shares but some minutes later found myself in the middle of an article about the Reptilian conspiracy theory.

Along the way, I learned the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus was the first in his family to be born with a surname, the element rhodium has one electron in its outer shell, and some people believe that the world is secretly ruled by giant lizards. Browsing Wikipedia is like taking a bus, falling asleep, missing your stop, and waking up in a strange town. Albeit without the drool on your lapel.

Occasionally, two roads appear in the forest — the disambiguation road. This is where Wikipedia has two articles about the same or similar name or word or phrase. There’s even a disambiguation page for the word disambiguation.

For me, Wikipedia is still a rather pleasing throwback to a simpler time on the internet when there were no clickbait links to articles that promised “37 Mongooses that look like Hollywood stars” or advertorials masquerading as articles about why THIS COMPANY IS WHAT WARREN BUFFETT IS INVESTING IN NOW.

Compared to the egotrip of social media, the massive editing edifice of Wikipedia still has some integrity. Or at least enough to keep me out. 

I tried to create my own Wikipedia page about myself a few years ago, but it was rejected by the editors there as the content was not original and its objectivity was dubious. That’s a harsh but fair assessment of my life’s work in general.

I didn’t hold it against them. I’ve even given them money. A euro and a few coppers every month to Jimmy Wales, who appealed to me from the top of the page of whatever wiki-hole I was in. It twanged at my heartstrings. He said: “Hey! You there! It costs money to enable you to waste your time on finding out the depth of a Bolivian lake when you should be working.”

It felt good to donate. I felt I was contributing to the sum of human knowledge.

It has its challenges. It has to get money from punters in order to avoid having ads. AI scrapes it before it has a chance to correct errors. It relies on quite a small number of admins to supervise the quality. There are rows about editing.

Most editors are men, so women are underserved. The entire Ulster-Scots Wiki was once found to be created by a young lad in North Carolina who couldn’t speak Ulster Scots. Ah…little quibbles.

For the time being, though, as long as I can keep getting lost down Wiki-holes or stop at the junction of disambiguation, I am happy. Now, do I mean happy the emotion, Happy the 1933 British film, the Pharrell Williams song, or the Serbian TV station? Let’s try all of them. See you in an hour.