User:Ragesoss/Raul's Wikipedia Revolution review

Full disclosure - I was interviewed for this book, and am mentioned by name in it. I also made a few small contributions to the afterword.

Andrew Lih's book 'The Wikipedia Revolution' is probably the single most comprehensive discussion of Wikipedia's history that has been written. Lih's insider understanding of Wikipedia, along with his cogent explanation of technical aspects of the site (in which his background in computer science is apparent) make this book unique among the many thousands of pages that have been written about Wikipedia.

The book is organized as follows:
 * Chapters 1 through 3 are about the early days (Ward Cunningham, Bomis, and Nupedia).
 * Chapter 4 is part history and part technical primer (the early slashdotting, server load, etc). * * Chapter 5 describe aspects of editing Wikipedia (dot maps, gdansk, bots).
 * Chapter 6 describes how each of the language versions have their own culture and technical issues
 * Chapter 7 is about governance
 * Chapter 8 is about controversies
 * Chapter 9 is about Wikipedia "making waves" - the world's response to us.

As someone who participates only in the english language community, I found chapter 6 (describing the cultural and technical issues facing non-english Wikipedias) particularly interesting. The end of the book includes a novel feature -- an afterword collaboratively written by several high profile users. Although the afterword does, to some extent, repeat some of the things said earlier in the book, it also provides a heretofore unexplored perspective of the community - the community's view of itself.

I don't agree with all aspects of this book. Just to give one example, based on personal observations, I think Lih overstates the influence Sunir Shah's Meatball wiki had on Wikipedia (Meatball was marginally important when I started editing Wikipedia back in 2003. I doubt most of the people reading this in the signpost today have even heard of Meatball.) For the issues Wikipedia is facing today, while the book gives a good overview, it is not comprehensive. It mentions one arbcom case, Wikiprojects exactly once, and featured content of any kind exactly twice (two passing mentions of featured articles, the second of which was in the context of saying that they degrade over time - an effect that, like the Yeti, is talked about much but for which relatively few concrete examples have ever been shown.) In short, Lih has left himself plenty of material to cover should he ever decide to do a sequel. And, in fairness, nobody else has written that book yet either.

'The Wikipedia Revolution' is an excellent retrospective - invaluable documentation of where Wikipedia came from. It's hard not to appreciate the sheer amount of work that Lih put in to sifting through the vast (vast, vast) archives to pull out the nuggets he quotes so liberally throughout the book. For anyone who wants to know where Wikipedia came from, this book is for you. Raul654 (talk) 08:19, 28 March 2009 (UTC)