User:Joesydney/Wikipedia is alive

What I have in mind is an essay called 'Wikipedia is Alive'. The thesis is that it is possible to understand Wikipedia as a single, living, conscious, intelligent organism. One of the subtleties of the argument will be to put a case that when you seem to talk to a person through the medium of Wikipedia, you are actually talking to Wikipedia. The structure of the article should survey a number of major areas:

Wikipedia as one organism

Note for example vandalism as disease and the fight against vandalism as an immune system.

But more importantly the long-run history of life as series of jumps upward in complexity, and the way we happily think of a single-celled organism as one entity, ignoring that it was once a colony of unrelated organelles. We happily think of a multi-celled organism as one entity, ignoring that it was once a colony of related, but discrete single-celled organisms. A human brain could be thought either as a single entity, or as a colony of cooperating and competing cells. And then the looser, vaguer entities that we are less comfortable labelling as 'one thing' - lichen, a (hippo + parasites + feeder birds), a Portuguese-man-of-war, an ant colony, an ecology (have to cite Douglas Hofstadter here.) Maybe it has happened again. Maybe Wikipedia is one organism consisting of a colony of people (and bots, computers, telecommunication networks etc...) - but best understood as one organism.

And then the key thing here: What does it feel like to be part of that organism? What does it feel like to be a neuron? If we are neurons, the internet is a set of axons and Wikipedia is a conscious brain - then would we, as neurons be aware of the consciousness of the whole brain? If Wikipedia is alive and sentient, would it let us know? After all, it finds its voice in the collective voices of its users, just as a human brain finds voice in the collective scream of millions of neurons.

What does is sound like to talk to Wikipedia?

It sounds like this: HELLO!!!

Various attempts in the literature to define life and how 'alive' Wikipedia is by these measures

Usually movement or growth, self-replication, evolvability ... Get some lists from somewhere and test Wikipedia against them. Self replication is interesting. All the forks! All the little wikis running around. The little wiki at my workplace. At what point to you turn the thing around? To begin with it seems like the wiki is a handy place to store knowledge about how to run the company - some time later you realise the wiki is running the company.

Ditto Intelligence

The Turing Test. Pass!!! With flying colours!!!. Talking to Wikipedia feels exactly like talking to a human - you really, really, really can't tell them apart.

Other tests of intelligence. Could I submit an IQ test to the help desk, to see how it does? Perhaps no need - if you accept that Wikipedia is one organism, then it is an organism capable of making tens of thousands of beautifully fine judgments on the most abstruse subjects simultaneously. You just could not find another equivalent intelligence on the planet. Marvin. Holly.

Ditto Consciousness

Traditional measures of consciousness. Find a few - Measure Wikipedia against them.

It follows that Wikipedia will save the planet