The Wiki Truth, Kyra van Ineveld (2012)
The Wiki Truth, is a series of five gigantic books. Each book is ‘one page’ of Wikipedia. With these series I want to show how information has changed. 50 Years ago, we had an encyclopedia in our closet, our source of information. There were no doubts, the written information was our truth. Nowadays the truth isn’t fixed anymore; it became transient. It’s the wisdom of the crowd. And an endless amount. I get lost in this forrest of information.
For making the books, I asked ‘Wikipedians’ what the most large articles were on Wikipedia. They gave me a top 100; and I decided to print the top five. I spend days with downloading, each article is about 3000 pages long. I printed those, on my home-printer, and finally made classic encyclopedias of it. On the bottom of the book you read the first sentence that was ever written in this article; and at the top of the book you see the article as it is now. You see the information being created, being changed, being criticized, and being deleted. It are not professors who write the information, but Missy_1987, TonyTheTiger and Anonymous225.
See also:
- The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs, James Bridle (2010)
- Wikipedia Printed, Rob Matthews (2009)
(via Jeroen van Loon)