It’s extremely newsworthy, but coverage of the kidnapping would have made Rhode a more valuable hostage. The higher profile the captive, the more attention the captors and their demands get – and the lower the chance of a happy ending.

In situations like this, news organisations often agree to hold off on reporting certain events. They lose a story in the short term, but a reporter gets a better chance at coming home.

In any case, for better or worse, everyone gets their story eventually.

This mutual cooperation used to be relatively straightforward to organise – journalists, especially war correspondents, are a pretty cliquey bunch – but it is one of the long list of things that have received a thorough shaking-up in the internet revolution.

Wikipedia, in particular, was a major problem.

Just three days after the kidnapping, despite a total blackout in the traditional media, the first Wikipedia user made reference to it on Rhode’s article – the first of a dozen attempts.

The NYT got in touch with Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, to arrange the removal of any trace of the story. Wales oversaw the effort himself, and spoke about it to the NYT.

We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source. I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.

But the general public were not the only ones who’d be looking at Wikipedia. The next concern was what Rhode’s captors would see when they began researching him online.

A colleague of his, Michael Moss, began altering Rhode’s entry. He highlighted that many pieces of Rhode’s work were sympathetic to Muslims, and removed all trace of his work with the Christian Science Monitor, fearing that the religious associations of the name wouldn’t sit well with the Taliban.

The idea was to convince them that Rhode was on-side, worth keeping around.

I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he’d done, what his value to them might be. I’d never edited a Wikipedia page before.

So, not only was the NYT suppressing information on a supposedly free, collaborative encyclopedia, but it was actively distorting it. An organisation devoted to shining a light on the facts was hiding them away, and even spinning them for Taliban approval.

Not so many years ago, newspaper editors decided what was and wasn’t worth column inches, and could hold off on stories to protect a group or an individual. It doesn’t happen that way anymore. A stray Facebook update, Tweet or blog post, and a story can explode whether mainstream media are involved or not.

The Iranian elections were covered extensively , despite strong efforts to stop any information leaks. Well, the door swings both ways.

In Rhode’s case the cat was kept mostly in the bag, but it required a massive and sustained effort. The help of Wikipedia’s founder, no less. That won’t happen every time.

Whether the NYT was right or wrong to do what they did is academic. If I was being held captive my idealist viewpoint on free information and open knowledge would be quickly distorted. In fact, it would be stretched to breaking point pretty much instantly.

PC Pro very rarely sends correspondents to war zones, but if it ever does I hope we’ll be dusting off those old Wikipedia accounts.

Since Wolfram Alpha launched at the weekend, I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read in which the author asks it inane questions and laughs when it falls flat. Even our own Darien Graham-Smith (along with several others in the office) seems almost delighted to prod and poke at it to find instances where Wolfram’s big pre-launch claims can be mocked – usually by comparison to Google or Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, this is something that was bound to happen given the publicity the site has received in recent weeks from the mainstream press. The big problem occurs because most people are attempting to hastily test the new engine without any real reason to be using it.

Without a specific scientific task in mind, most are instead racking their brains for the everyday queries they usually ask a search engine – or, worse, for deliberately obscure trivia facts – and are thus failing to use Alpha as it will surely be used once the first few months of fuss have passed: i.e. probably not by them.

The team have been quite open about the early stages of the project. The majority of critics would do well to note FAQ comments such as this: “We’ve first emphasized areas where computation or mathematics have traditionally had a more significant role, or where knowledge is more readily quantitative.”

Or this: “How much data does Wolfram Alpha have on popular culture? Basics, particularly about more computable issues, such as movie box-office grosses. More is being added.”

Of course, the winners of Eurovision are unlikely to have been high on the ‘computation or mathematics’ priority list, even less so as it’s an American team compiling the vast amount of data. To scoff and cite a Wikipedia page full of trivia as evidence of Wolfram Alpha’s failings is to miss the point of the tool completely.

It’s not meant to be Google. It’s not meant to be Wikipedia. If you can find out the biggest selling single of the nineties with a quick Wikipedia search, why on Earth wouldn’t you? On the other hand, if you search for the relationship between Microsoft and Apple on Wikipedia and Google your immediate result won’t look anything like this: (click to enlarge)

Be realistic about what Wolfram Alpha is. Instead of transplanting your day’s Google searches into it and mocking the lack of success, stick to those tasks for which, without all the media fuss, you would ever have even thought of using Wolfram Alpha. Google and Wikipedia will still be there for everything else.

“Whereas science and learning pursue truth, Wikipedia prizes consensus. Wikipedia has no means of arbitrating between different claims, other than how many people side with one position rather than another. That ethos is fatal to the advancement of learning. Ideas are refined by being tested; scientific method presupposes scrutiny, experiment and conflict.”

The problem is that this argument, while beautifully stated, has all the substance of a passing cloud. Of course “ideas are refined by being tested,” but when has this ever been the job of an encyclopaedia?

An encyclopaedia is a compedium of current learning, not a rigourous assesment of it. When the Encyclopaedia Britannica first printed an explanation of Special Relativity it did not challenge Einstein’s math. It reported the theory held at that time. When physicists tweaked the theory, such changes where reflected in the next edition. Britannica did not spur the debate, or hold it back. This stage happens long before the theory appears in print. Contrary to Kamm’s argument, an Encyclopaedia is not a forum for competing theories – that happens in scientific journals, labs, law courts and universities.

The idea of “arbitrating between different claims” and theories places on the humble encyclopaedia a task it is singularly ill-equipped for. Arbitration supposes that the arbitrator has a deeper understanding of the issues under debate than the parties presenting the case. This does not hold for encyclopaedias. How can the editors have a deeper understanding than the contributors?

Evidence of this point – something Kamm completely fails to provide throughout his piece – can be found in the fact that Britannica ignored the early teachings of Sigmund Freud. Who could it possibly have called on to assess his theories? In this case, Britannica was forced to wait for exactly the thing Kamm rails against Wikipedia for: “consensus”. Britannica waited to see if Freud’s teachings would attain social traction and then included them.

Encyclopaedias, Wikipedia included, are mirrors of current thought – nothing more. The development of ideas and the job of an encyclopaedia in presenting those ideas are apples and oranges. You can stick the two in the same basket, but don’t criticise one for not being the other. And, if you’re muddled enough to do so, as Kamm does, then at least have the consistency of thought to rail against all encyclopaedias instead of picking on the one with the biggest name.

Lacking intelligence

My problems with this article don’t stop there, though. Take the following line.

“It is also, by design, an anti-intellectual project. Wikipedia recognises no intrinsic value in competence or knowledge; its guiding principle is agreement rather than truth.”

I can only assume, that by “anti-intellectual project”, Kamm is arguing that there’s no specialist academic, or professional figures writing the peices. For a man so enamoured by scientific method to pre-suppose that “much of its content is a pile of dross” without reference to any study or evidence is hypocrisy of the highest order. Especially when the only remotely comprehensive investigation into the matter was conducted by the respected journal Nature, which found that both Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica were about as accurate as each other on their science articles.

Even supposing his original argument wasn’t made of fog, the argument that Wikipedia’s “guiding principle is agreement rather than truth” is nonsense. Wikipedia’s greatest problem is that its guiding principles are unknown. Power rests with a select group of editors who have the power to alter, criticise or take down articles with impunity.  Who governs them? What guides them? We don’t know. Their decisions aren’t based on agreement but whim. As for truth – there are scores of pyschologists who refute Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, does that make it false? Again, Kamm misrepresents the point of an encyclopaedia. Its duty is not to find the truth, but to report current theory as best it can, often in terms the layman can understand.

Given the fact that Wikipedia can be updated every minute, rather than every 25 years, I would suggest on this point, at least, the online encyclopaedia has the advantage. Which brings me nicely to his point that “Intellectual inquiry involves testing ideas against the canons of evidence. Wikipedia’s ‘community’ offers members a different route to recognition – one shorn of the burden of earning it.”

It’s a lovely turn of phrase, but one which again betrays a lack of understanding of the subject it addresses. Contributors to Wikipedia earn nothing. There’s no recognition to be had. Indeed it is this anonymity which has become the focal point for Encyclopaedia Britannica’s far more lucid attacks on the site. Accuracy, it argues, is a matter of professional pride. A name bestows prestige, but also accountability. If you’re a professional contributing to Britannica and an inaccuracy is found it’s on your head. Not so with Wikipedia.

This point alone doesn’t mean Wikipedia’s articles are worth less than Britannica’s. For all we know they’re being created by the same people. It just means there’s no obvious recourse if an inaccuracy is found.

Missing the point

What strikes me as strange about Kamm’s piece is that there are plenty of valid criticisms he could have aimed at Wikipedia – some of which we have touched on – and yet he ignored them all. Instead he seems determined to swing his sword at a phantom hydra, cutting off heads that don’t exist. I’ll finish with the paragraph that left me smiling and shaking my head all at once.

“In a culture that prizes discovery and education, respect is never an entitlement. It is earned, and then still contingent, to the extent that ideas prove their resilience against attacks. Wikipedia does not adhere to those standards of intellectual inquiry.”

What Kamm seems to have missed here is that Wikipedia is the idea and that every day it demonstrates its resilience against attacks. Whatever the worth of Wikipedia’s articles, perhaps its greatest value is that it has demonstrated the viability of accumulating information and distributing it freely.

In that sense, Wikipedia has much in common with the printing press. Whereas the printing press managed to rip apart the clergy’s monopoly on learning, Wikipedia has ripped apart the belief that knowledge is a commodity. In this way its social impact may be just as great as that of the printing press – surely that is worthy of respect?

No, I haven’t heard of him, either.

Although, after reading about him, he seems like one of the most brilliant minds of the past 100 years – and one of the nuttiest.

In short, he proposed the Internet as we know it – and Wikipedia – and begun to develop his ideas into a feasible system. Except he started work in 1934 – a damn site earlier than Tim Berners-Lee and his pals started putting together the modern Internet.

His system – that ran on an interlinked version of early computers called ‘Electric Telescopes – revolved around people having the ability to browse documents, images, audio files and more all without leaving their armchair. If I stop today and think for a few minutes, it’s an odd enough concept now, even though the Internet has become entirely ubiquitous. Someone inventing it in the mid-thirties must have been viewed as an absolute madman.

He even named it as a ‘réseau’ – a network – and visualised how everybody would be linked together, initially, by telegraph machines.

That wasn’t the end of his ambition, either. In his infinite wisdom – almost literally – Otlet decided that he should collect every morsel of written information known to man, in one place. He started work with Henri La Fontaine, a future Nobel Prize winner, to gather all the knowledge in the world.

It’s a concept that belongs in a dodgy steampunk Science Fiction movie rather than in the real world but, remarkably, they pushed ahead and begun to collect books. They eventually managed to harvest about 12 million individual entries. By way of contrast, Wikipedia now has just under 2.5 million articles, and that’s put together by thousands of people with the help of the internet, and the National Library of Wales, which has just celebrated its centenary, only has about 6 million books. Even with the brilliant ‘Electric Telescope’ system to help him out, Otlet’s effort was a colossal undertaking.

He even developed a precursor to the modern search engine, by accepting queries from people all over the world and then finding them the answers. It was a hell of a lot slower than Google, for sure, but it’s still mightily impressive.

Otlet also wrote about or begun to develop a host of other concepts that we consider mundane today. Electronic storage – both using local resources and a global collective – was his idea, and he eventually planned to do away with using paper altogether. He also came up with social networking. Eat that, MySpace. And then there’s the semantic web, too.

Unfortunately, there’s no happy ending to this story. Funding for the project dried up, he had to move to a smaller space and the Nazis destroyed much of his work.

However, a small team are now working on a catalogue of the mammoth archive that Otlet put together, with the aim of publishing it online. It’ll be a fascinating glimpse into a true forerunner to the world wide web and an insight into one of the most innovative and creative minds that the world – and not just the world of technology – seems to have left behind.

It caught my eye thanks to the odd, yet fantastic concept – a visual representation of Wikipedia. The result is an truly gigantic image which has to be divided into 64 squares, each of them at a size of 2781 x 2781 pixels. These are very large images.

Select one of the pictures, and wait for it to load – I suggest making a cup of tea while you’re hanging around – and then have a look. Thousands of articles all linked together by vertices and edges, joined together depending on how they’re connected on the real Wikipedia site. It’s one of those things that I can just look at for ages, exploring and finding new stuff, a bit like Google Earth.

Except, I can’t help feel that they’ve missed an opportunity. I’d like the whole thing to be zoomable and interactive, rather than it being an image. I can fly around the visual version of Wikipedia and then click links when I want to read the article. It should be in 3D, with full control.

Perhaps I’m asking too much. It’s a brilliant demonstration of visualisation, as it is, but after seeing how cool this is, I’m clamouring for more.

What do you think – genuinely interesting exercise, or diverting – but ultimately pointless – distraction?