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1. This past summer was the summer of Wikipedia. In August, I was reading The
New Yorker, and I came across a lengthy article about Wikipedia with the clever
title, “Know It All” (subtitled, “Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?”). Within days, the
September issue of The Atlantic Monthly contained a featured article on Wikipedia,
which was entitled “The Hive” (and subtitled, “Can thousands of Wikipedians be
wrong?”). While all this was going on, a small storm was brewing on Wikipedia
itself over a segment on the U.S. cable TV show, “The Colbert Report”. Host
Stephen Colbert introduced the world to a new word: ‘wikiality’, which means
reality as defined by a consensus (it’s a blend of Wikipedia and reality). He told his
viewers to “apply [Wikipedia] principles to all information. All we need to do is
convince a majority of people that some factoid is true”. He then urged everyone to
modify Wikipedia’s entry on elephants to include the decidedly untrue assertion
that the population of African elephants had tripled in the past six months.

2. Colbert has some expertise in coining new words and getting them to stick in the
culture. On 17 October 2005, Colbert reinvented the long-lost word – ‘truthiness’ –
maintaining something as fact without regard to evidence or logic – and by
January 2006, the American Dialect Society had crowned ‘truthiness’ as its Word
of the Year. ‘Wikiality’ may not ascend to such lexical heights, but it may have a
longer shelf life than many people think. Its cause was helped by the members of
the International Astronomical Union, who on 24 August 2006 took a vote on a
new definition of planet, which to many observers seemed to be a wikiality-like
truth-by-consensus decision.

3.The wiki- prefix comes from the Hawaiian word wiki, which means quick or fast.
Programmer Ward Cunningham first used the term in a software context back in
the mid-’90s, when he created a collaborative site called WikiWikiWeb. Since then,
we use the word wiki to refer either to a collaborative Web site that allows users to
add to, edit, and delete from the site’s content or to the software that enables such
collaboration.

4. Wikipedia is by far the most famous wiki. LyricWiki is a wiki for song lyrics; Chainki
is a wiki of Web site links; and CookBookWiki is a recipe wiki. There’s even a site
called WikiIndex that’s a wiki that tracks wikis. In big wikis, this socially produced
knowledge works well, but smaller attempts at collaboration often go awry. The
Los Angeles Times launched the Wikitorial reader-generated edits to the day’s
editorials on 19 June 2005 but shut it down just three days later because the site
was flooded with profane language, so creating great unnecessary offence.

5. Wikis are a subset of a larger phenomenon called crowdsourcing, a play on
outsourcing. Crowdsourcing means obtaining labor, products, or content from
people outside the company, particularly from a large group of customers or
amateurs who work for little or no pay. With YouTube and its user-made videos,
MySpace and its user-built pages, and iStockPhoto with its user-shot photos,
we’re seeing the beginnings of what some are calling the age of the crowd. This
crowd comes from all walks of life, but for some, crowdsourcing is a way of life.
And by some, I’m speaking, of course, of teenagers. In November 2005, the Pew
Internet & American Life Project released a report saying that 57 percent of online
teenagers – some 12 million in all – create something on the Web. The reports
called them teen content creators. On a more serious level, some companies
crowdsource research and development tasks – usually small jobs called
microtasks – to amateur hobbyists, who are called solvers.
(612 wds)

An adaptation of an article by Paul McFedries from:
IEEE Spectrum, December 2006

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Read the article quickly and decide which of the titles below captures the essence of the article

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1. RAUL YZAGUIRRE, president of the National Council of La Raza, minces no
words: “U.S. English is to Hispanics as the Ku Klux Klan is to blacks”. However
harsh that analysis may seem, it is the consensus among Latino leaders. ‘English
Only’ has united them like nothing else in recent memory. They perceive it to be a
campaign of intolerance, aimed in particular at Spanish and its speakers. To their
ears “the legal protection of English” sounds a lot like “equal rights for whites”: a
backlash against Hispanic advances in civil rights, education, and political
empowerment; to put it succinctly, ‘racism’.

2. Listening to the anti-Hispanic ravings of some ‘English Only’ proponents, the word
seems apt. Yet it remains a blunt instrument – imprecise, confusing, and of
course, crushing when it scores a direct hit. U.S. English was concerned enough
about the allegation that by 1985 it was holding internal workshops on “Answering
the Charge”. On the other hand, the word can have a boomerang effect against
those who hurl it too freely. To casual observers of the Official English debate –
that is, to most monolingual Americans – the label appears irresponsible. What
does race have to do with language, after all? Is it racist to suggest that
immigrants need to learn English to prosper in this country? What's wrong with
encouraging them to enter the mainstream rather than remain apart?

3. In 1987 U.S. English hired Linda Chávez, a former high-ranking official in the
Reagan administration, as president of the organization. She was an ideal choice
for the job. A seasoned Washington operative, well-connected on Capitol Hill and
among “movement” conservatives, Chávez was an experienced television
performer, attractive and articulate, with a knack for arguing extreme positions
without sounding shrill. And naturally, her ethnicity was no handicap in rebutting
charges of racism. “Hispanics who learn English will be able to avail themselves of
opportunities”, she liked to say. “Those who do not, will be relegated to secondclass
citizenship. I don't want to see that happen to my people”. Official English
implied no animus toward immigrants, she insisted.

4. Emotional attacks on Official English have had the opposite effect. Debating the
issue on a 1986 edition of the Donahue show, Arnold Torents berated an
opponent: “You don't agree with what we are saying because you're a bigot”. This
type of name-calling aided leaders of U.S. English in portraying themselves as
victims of unprincipled, ad hominem attacks. It also reinforced their claim that
“professional Hispanics, as distinguished from Hispanic professionals”, oppose the
English Language Amendment not on its merits, but because it threatens their
status as ethnic brokers.

5. S. I. Hayakawa looked at the issue in another way, suggesting there was
something racist about bilingual services: “All of us who are naturalized immigrants
are deeply offended when government assumes we don't understand English”. As
a ‘minority’ himself, the former senator could get away with ethnic generalizations
that whites could not. “Why is it”, he once asked that no Filipinos, no Koreans
object to making English the official language? No Japanese have done so, and
certainly not the Vietnamese, who are so damn happy to be here. They're learning
English as fast as they can and winning spelling bees all across the country. But
the Hispanics alone have maintained there is a problem. There has been
considerable movement to make Spanish the second official language. The
Hispanic lobby said we're going to teach the kids in Spanish and we'll call that
bilingual education.
(575 wds)

Adapted from an excerpt of CHAPTER SIX, ‘Hispanophobia’,
in Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of English Only,
by James Crawford, Addison-Wesley, 1992.

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The most suitable sub-title for this particular extract is: