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From there, though, many volunteers are drawn deeper into the
site’s culture. They discuss their edits on Talk pages; they display
their interests and abilities on User pages; some vie to reach the
top of the edit-count leaderboard. An elect few become adminis-
trators; while around a quarter of a million people edit Wikipedia
daily, only around 1,100 accounts have admin privileges. The site
is deep and complex enough—by one count, its policy directives
and suggestions run to more than 150,000 words—that its most
committed adherents must become almost like lawyers, appeal-
ing to precedent and arguing their case. As with the law, there
are different schools of interpretation; the two largest of these
are deletionists and inclusionists. Deletionists favor quality over
quantity, and notability over utility. Inclusionists are the opposite.
Most dedicated editors, whether deletionist or inclusionist,
are that category of person who sits somewhere between expert
and amateur: the enthusiast. Think of a railfan or a trainspotter.
(Wikipedians disagree on which is the better term.) Their knowl-
edge of trains is quite different from an engineer’s or a railway
historian’s; you can’t major in trainspotting or become creden-
tialed as a railfan. But these people are a legitimate kind of expert
nonetheless. Previously, their folk knowledge was reposited in
online forums, radio shows, and specialist magazines. Wikipe-
dia harnessed it for the first time. The entry on the famous loco-
motive the Flying Scotsman is 4,000 words long and includes
eye-wateringly detailed information on its renumbering, series
of owners, smoke deflectors, and restoration, from contributors
who seem to have the most intimate, hard-won knowledge of the
train’s working. (“It was deemed that the A4 boiler had deteri-
orated into a worse state than the spare due to the higher oper-
ating pressures the locomotive had experienced following the
up-rating of the locomotive to 250 psi.”)
Pedantry this powerful is itself a kind of engine, and it is fueled
by an enthusiasm that verges on love. Many early critiques of
computer-assisted reference works feared a vital human qual-
ity would be stripped out in favor of bland fact-speak. That 1974
article in The Atlantic presaged this concern well: “Accuracy, of
course, can better be won by a committee armed with computersWikipediaisn’t raised upwholesale,like a barn;it’s assembled
grain by grain,like a termitemound.