BERKELEY — While studying geology, undergrad Kevin Gorman heard about a horizontal tunnel near the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, dug to serve as a hands-on training ground for early campus mining and metallurgy students.
Curious to learn more, he went hunting on the web — only to discover there was “no comprehensive mention” online of the obscure mining tunnel near the Hayward Fault. “Now there is,” he says.
That’s because Gorman — an evangelist for collaborative online encyclopedia-making — took matters in his own hands, creating a “useful compendium” on the Lawson Adit for all to read on Wikipedia, which calls itself “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”
A slender, 6-foot-5 redhead who describes himself as “vaguely nerdy,” Gorman got involved with Wikipedia, and the related Wikimedia Foundation, as part of a classroom assignment: In the DeCal course “The Politics of Piracy,” students were required to make substantial edits on course-relevant Wikipedia articles.
“I took to it fairly well,” he says.
Call that an understatement. After fulfilling the editing assignment (he focused on Perfect 10, Inc. v. Google, Inc., a court case involving the fair-use doctrine), Gorman became an active Wikipedia editor, revising and creating (under his own name) entries on eclectic subjects that catch his interest, from mushrooms to cyberlaw to men’s rights.
(The latter proved surprisingly controversial. “Let’s show hippy boy what the real world is like,” one men’s-rights blogger inveighed, after Gorman edited a Wikipedia entry that failed to “follow our encyclopedic policies,” as he tactfully puts it. “Perhaps we should tell everyone at UC Berkeley what a rotten person Kevin Gorman is,” the writer went on. “Let’s hound him until he has no space to escape.” A commenter on a feminist site had a different take on Gorman: “From reading what you’ve said so far, I’m not sure he’s even a feminist. He’s just really obsessed with encyclopedias.”)
Wikignome at work
She had a point, as Gorman had also taken to monitoring new Wikipedia entries for quality, and to acting as what is known, in his chosen subculture, as a “wikignome” — someone who makes incremental edits without clamoring for credit.
He landed an internship at the San Francisco-based nonprofit Wikimedia and volunteers as a campus ambassador for the foundation’s education program. In that role, Gorman encourages instructors to create Wikipedia-based class assignments, and visits classes to offer technical assistance and “mitigate tensions” between Wikipedian and academic mores.
“Students are used to looking at sources, synthesizing and trying to form something new,” he explains. On Wikipedia, original research is verboten; the goal instead is to create a summation, replete with hyperlinked citations, of what’s already been written on a given subject.
– Kevin Gorman