Recently over at Wikipedia, Esquire magazine writer AJ Jacobs tried an experiment. He posted his 709 word story about Wikipedia into Wikipedia itself, and asked the community to help edit it.

“The idea I had — which Jimmy [Wales] loved — is that I’d write a rough draft of the article and then Jimmy would put it on a site for the Wikipedia community to rewrite and edit. [The magazine] would print the before and after versions of the article. I interviewed Jimmy, and he read the article and was supposed to put it online, but he ran out of time and had to go to Brazil. [snip] I just need the article put up on a site and the Wikipedia community told about its existence.”
1) I put in a bunch of intentional mistakes (along with a couple of unintentional ones, I’m sure) so that the before/after would be a little more interesting.
2) The community should feel free to make as many changes as they want. The more, the better in my opinion. Changes in wording, in tone, in ideas, in structure — whatever they want.

Over the course of three days, Wikipedians took their hacks at it. After 532 edits from 75 unique editors, the article changed substantially and the word count went up to 767 words. You can see the original versus the final, or see the diffs between them.

Did the article turn out better in the end? My feelings are mixed.

No doubt there is more information in the article, but the punchy narrative of the original was quickly diluted. Let’s just say it can be hard to get “neutral point of view” encyclopaedists to liven up their writing style. But in the end, there were interesting insider examples that would escape a “parachute journalist”. And some decent aliteration could still be found:

So how does one find experts on the Holy Prepuce, or punishment by pachyderm? Simple: let them come to you.

Jacobs’ final comments showed he was rather impressed with the output:

I just wanted to thank you all so much for participating in this experiment. It was absolutely fascinating. I was riveted to my
computer, pressing refresh every 45 seconds to see the next iteration.
And the next and the next. For the last few days, my wife has been what
you might call a Wikipedia Widow. I feel like I should submit all my articles to the community to get
them Wikipedia-ized. I can’t wait to print this in Esquire magazine.

Watch the newsstands for the final print version.