The amorality of Web 2.0

If you think about it, those who would infuse some designed progress toward perfection in Web 2.0 of TCP/IP have something in common with the Dover, PA school board who want to legislate positive design and purpose in the much older web of DNA/RNA. I agree that the web is amoral. And I believe that is its virtue.

"They can employ editors and proofreaders and other unsung protectors of quality work."

This is one of the main problems with software today, free or proprietary. A lot of it gets slapped together and rushed to release, ridden with bugs, quality issues, and don't even get me started on usability issues.

Where's the fire?

"I agree that the web is amoral. And I believe that is its virtue."

Here. Here.

This process will claim some of the "unsung protectors" as it were, some of whom deserve better. When, really, has it ever been different?

But in its amorality, this medium will also uncover that person who, BUT FOR the right credentials, might have contributed mightily with his or her ideas to the betterment of us all. It's as close to color blind as society gets.

The point is not found in all the drek. It's finding the jewel in the trash.

A superb post by Nick!

'Echolalia' -- there's a lookup word. I used Dictionary.com.

Moral or otherwise, the Web 1 or 2 or whathaveyou is nice. I learn from it. I add to it. But I agree that it's as dangerous, stupid, sad or coherent as one wants it to be.

Kelly is a fuzz-brain. Tim is not.

Open Source and Wikipedia are not the same. And faith in open source does not mean shunning the professional for the ameture. How does Nick explain the high quality of Apache Web Server and the robustness of PHP ? Wikipedia is a mess, I agree, that is due to its own model.

Let me talk something else here. Skill and professions are not something that existed just because the Web (1.0, 2.0 or X.X) was not there. Skills and professions were not something that will cease to exist when Web is ubiquitous. The Human Race found that there are a class of people that can do a set of jobs better than the rest, or, are choosen to specialize on a job. That is the reason why some people became the carpenter, some soldier and some priests. If the job performed by specialists becomes too easy, that specialization goes away. Economics is exactly proportional to the need of specialization.

Web does not make people expert content creator. This specialization will be there and people will get paid for it. People will not go for a Fairy Tale Wikipedia and will always go for Harry Potter.

Layoffs in the media houses may be explained as shrinking necessesity for average content creators. Quality will always be rewarded economically.

Shouvik, I didn't mean to imply (and I'm sorry if I did) that open source software is of poor quality. (I've written often of the critical importance of open source to the future of IT.) I was simply saying that the veneration of open source efforts, often at the expense of traditional for-pay software development, is one manifestation of the cult of the amateur.

As for your claim that "quality will always be rewarded economically," I think you're being much too complacent.

It is always interesting to read exceptionally well-crafted content -- especially when you don't totally agree (or disagree) with the point of view of the author.

I am on a team of graduate students at MIT that are looking at the "business side of Web 2.0". As such, we are trying to determine if there really is a "there there". Jury is still out...but at some level, its starting to feel like the 1990s again...

Everything you've written here is a valid opinion, and commercial encyclopedias are doomed anyway because (as Microsoft is finding out with Linux) it's hard to compete with free. (I eagerly await EB putting out TCO studies on Wikipedia.)

Speaking as someone who's highly involved in it (I write stuff, I'm an administrator, I'm on the Arbitration Committee, I'm a mailing list moderator, I do media interviews), Wikipedia is of mediocre quality with some really good bits. If you hit the "Random page" link twenty times, you'll end up mostly with sketchy three-paragraph stub articles.

That said, the good bits are fantastic. Although articles good enough to make "Featured Article" status (which are indeed excellent) tend to be hideously esoteric; somehow getting more general articles up to that sort of quality is not facilitated at present.

Encyclopedia Britannica is an amazing work. It's of consistent high quality, it's one of the great books in the English language and it's doomed. Brilliant but pricey has difficulty competing economically with free and apparently adequate (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better - this story plays out over and over again in the computing field and is the essence of "disruptive technology"). They could release the entire EB under an open content license, but they have shareholders who might want a word about that.

So if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have to be a good Wikipedia. So those who care about getting a good encyclopedia are going to have to work out how to make Wikipedia better, or there won't be anything.

I've made some efforts in this direction - pushing toward a page-rating feature, a "Rate this page" tab at the top, which, unlike an editorial committee, will actually scale with the contributor base and will highlight areas in need of attention. (See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_feature and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/En_validation_topics - the feature is currently waiting on an implementati, on the lead developer thinks won't kill the database.) Recent discussion on the WikiEN-L mailing list has also included proposals for a scaleable article rating system.

Wikipedia is likely to be it by first-mover advantage and network effect. Think about what you can do to ensure there is a good encyclopedia in ten years.

This is a very interesting piece. I think that your main point -- that the Internet is not what it has been hailed or condemned as -- is very true.

I only wonder where the Web is headed. Perhaps it can only be as perfect as its creators.

When you subscribe to any blog you know what you are getting into. Generally blogs are opinionated and spilled with facts here and there. You do your own DD before coming to any conclusion. Only when professionals start misrepresenting infomation it becames unethical. The case in point is fox news article on opendocument file formats where it raps Massachusetts official. During the initial release of the article it conveniently failed to disclose it was sponsored by microsoft. Cases like this lead people to cheer for Opensource at the expense of Proprietary systems. I guess people prefer being amoral compared to unethical

The problem I have with your examples on Wikipedia is that you haven't picked the best examples. If you review the featured articles, would you reach the same conclusion?

I chose the two entries I used (Gates and Fonda) at random, and they were the first two I looked at - I didn't try to find the worst examples possible, in other words; I simply took the first two I went to. (I wanted to choose subjects that most people would have some familiarity with.) I have looked at a lot of other entries previously and since, and many are every bit as bad as the two I featured. You're right, though, that there are very good entries, and I suppose I could have searched for a couple of those and featured them. But an encyclopedia can't just have a small percentage of good entries and be considered a success. I would argue, in fact, that the overall quality of an encyclopedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best. What's the worth of an unreliable reference work?

"I would argue, in fact, that the overall quality of an encyclopedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best. What's the worth of an unreliable reference work?"

Those are really two separate things. Given that Wikipedia lets you see inside the sausage factory, judge it by the results of "Random link" and articles about things you do know (as you did). On the second point, that too many articles are unreferenced is a problem we're at work on - that's actually a different problem than quality of writing and coverage, IMO.

Its strange... you write a blog, to criticize web 2.0, when blogs- a web 2.0 application is the reason you are heard and read over the Internet!

"In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing."


In theory? I thought that in theory it wouldn't work at all...

I don't know about this theory that Wikipedia is a heap of junk; by comparing it with the EB.

I mean, does anyone *have* a copy of the 5th year of the EB? Who says that that was better than the Wikipedia?

I mean, aren't we comparing a very new and very ambitious encyclopedia with a two hundred year old encyclopedia, and expecting *rather* too much? As in what gives?

When Kevin Kelly turned up again, I knew that the resurgence of tech was real. Enough real value was being created to allow hucksters and frauds to make a living again.

The question is, are we empowering the esoteric at the expensive of the authoritative? Maybe the answer to that is yes, so far. Maybe, that dream of authority was always a myth anyway. The Britannica was a status purchase for the middle class, unread and displayed on the shelves. Why should it be our yardstick?

The web is a dreadfully imperfect tool. But let's ask whether our technology serves human needs better, not whether it matches a previous dream of human knowledge.

Nice piece! I don't disagree with most of it. Except for the very last paragraph, which is really the only paragraph dealing with the point of your story. That the web, machines, and maybe even technology are not moral.

I've changed my mind on this. I used to think technology was neutral -- just a tool -- you could use it for good or evil. Pretty standard belief for us nerds. But in spending the last three years trying to figure out what the greater meaning of technology is I've reluctantly concluded that technology is a moral force (for the good). I'll need a whole book to make that argument (if I can) and that is what I am working on.

But you have to agree it is an important and vital question. I hope you continue your investigation of it.

Does the EB even have entries for Bill Gates and Jane Fonda? Not that I think it should, but why are these metrics for comparing encyclopedic performance?

And I'd answer my own question but the town's library has been shut down and I don't feel like spending $49.95 to find out. Seeing how the on-line edition only has 73,000 articles in it, I'm doubtfull.

I think everyone in the wikipedia community is trying very hard to make the quality "good" as you say; and wikipedia certainly responds to input such as this. You might be happy to know that both articles you have mentioned have been since added to cleanup projects, in addition to broader discussions about ways to improve writing quality.

At this point, it seems fair to ask exactly when the intelligence in "collective intelligence" will begin to manifest itself. Or is "good" an old-fashioned concept that doesn't apply to emergent phenomena like communal on-line encyclopedias?

I certainly am not of the opinion that wikipedia is some transcendent work beyond the descriptions of good or bad, but I think this point might be looked at more closely. A work, of whatever size, that is edited and written by a collection of people over a period of time that, in all probability, have varying masteries of english will inevitably appear to be bad writing. It takes another person to come in and combine all the probably factually correct information into sentence structures that are pleasing to read, wiki's call this re-factoring sometimes. It is a difficult and time consuming process as you can imagine, but one wikipedia is trying to make more appealing for editors.

Why Wikipedia is not Web 2.0 and salvation might come even if it is amoral

The argument, however nicely put, seems to twist things in order to give room to some ideas of yours, not to rebuff the apostles of an electronic collective consciousness.

Your argument seems to go like this: People believe in an eventual transformation of the current information networks (by new organization principles) into something like a collective mind, which works by making individual (amateurish) contribution part of a greater mental structure (unlike classical culture, which apparently is about singular performances). The believers in that electronic transcendence have to subscribe to a view which makes the bits and pieces of the new system into a moral, normative agglomerate, and thus good. The epithome of that vision is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not good, because it is unprofessional. Thus, the transcendence does not work and the believers are rebutted. (Forgive me my inaccuracies.)

What is wrong with this argument of yours?

1. People speculating about collective consciousness are a small minority among the web visionaries, and they are not generally identical with wikipedians.

2. A collective mind vision does not necessarily entail a moral view. Even if it did, it would not mean that the individual aspects would have to embody "goodness". The individual aspects have to realize suitability.

3. Good in the sense of moral things is different from good in the sense of "professional quality". In the case of Wikipedia, your claim should not be mixed with moral goodness, but specifically apply to suitability for Wikipadias purpose (which is being an authoritative reference).

4. You state that Wikipedia is not professional enough, and what you really mean is that it does not implement the proper principles to serve its purpose (good quality reference). The conclusion from this, however, is not that collaborative intelligence does not work, but that Wikipedia's constraints do not result in the required qualities.

5. The question stemming from the argument does not apply to an antagonism between professional and amateurish contribution, but whether the principles that pertain to professional work might be implemented "outside" the experts within a distributed, self-organizing information structure. This is indeed an interesting question, which might lead us even into a Strong AI debate.

I wholeheartedly share Nicholas's scepticism on Wikipedia in particular. The ability of anyone to insert factoids that survive for long enough to be read by the unwary, and the replacement of the traditional 'getting it right' principle with 'not getting it too obviously wrong' add up to an abandonment of intellectual rigour for the sake of ease: fast food taking over in the intellectual as well as physical realm. For more discussion see http://forum.atimes.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=4083

I'm not convinced by the critique of Wikipedia. I don't go to an encyclopedia for fine writing, and I don't think that fixing bad writing should be a high priority for a venture that's still only five years old. At this point, the main priority ought still to be adding more information and ensuring the accuracy of what's there. It's my impression that Wikipedia compares pretty well with the competition on both scores.

A more convincing test would be to pick a sample and show that there were significant errors or omissions (relative to the competition). Of course, these would be fixed quickly but the lesson would stand.

Fantastic post! Some of the brains nehind the "Web 2.0" are really into whole celebrity/rock star mentality, deperately seeking 15 seconds of fame, usually for "re-creating the wheel" (RSS vs. XHTML). If the internet & computers are supposed to be making my life easier, how come I worship "the glittering pixels of an LCD screen" for endless hours a day?

Hi,

Your argument doesn't hold because your premises are contradictory.

Premise 1) Peer communities produce low 'quality' (aka value) goods.

Premise 2) These goods are substitutes for traditional goods in the same market.

Conclusion) Demand shifts inwards ("scary economics").

If peer communites produce only low 'quality' (aka value) goods, demand will not shift inwards, because these goods are not substitutes for (high value) traditionally produced goods -
unless we invoke some kind of unrealistic deus ex machina, like huge elasticity.

In fact, the only way your conclusion holds is to *invert* your first premise: if peer communities, in fact, produce high value goods.

These are then substitutes for traditional goods, and demand shifts inwards without us having to resort to anything else.

You can't have it both ways... :)

First, thanks to everyone who has taken the time to comment on my post. Here are some brief comments on your comments:

John Gauntt and Wayne: I, too, prefer my technology to be amoral, and the web's "color-blindness" is indeed a great strength.

Venkat: I'm not defending the shortcomings of traditional media, which are many and growing. My question is whether the economic pressures caused by the web will in the end make those shortcomings even worse.

David Gerard, JS, Ian Woollard, John Quiggin, Judson Dunn: Wikipedia can choose to judge itself by whatever criteria it chooses, but it promotes itself as "the free encyclopedia." Therefore, it's only fair that others judge it by the standards of reliability we would expect from other encyclopedias. Do you really think that most of the millions of people who consult Wikipedia (including many young students) make the effort to look inside "the sausage factory" to see how it works and what its inherent flaws are? Of course they don't. They use it like they's use any other encyclopedia, unaware that at any given moment any given entry can include factual errors, omissions and distortions. What the Wikipedia community should do is put a warning notice on the top of every page: "WARNING: This page may include factual errors." Why don't you include such a warning where real users would see it?

Neil K.: Yes, that's a good question. I wish we could (in your terms) empower the esoteric without destroying the authoritative. My fear is that we can't.

Kevin Kelly: Thanks. I look forward to your book.

Anonymous: You write: "the town's library has been shut down and I don't feel like spending $49.95 [on on-line Encyclopedia Britannica] to find out [if it even has entries on Bill Gates and Jane Fonda]. Seeing how the on-line edition only has 73,000 articles in it, I'm doubtful." The fact that the on-line edition of EB is of poorer quality than the print edition - and that your local library has closed down - underscores my fear about how the economics of the Web may weaken the general culture rather than strengthen it.

Gruber: Good points. I do think that collective effort can produce excellent results in some circumstances and mediocre results in others, and that the difference can often be traced to constraints on collectivism. More precisely, collectivism works best when there's some form of hierarchical control over the end product (as in Linux) and works less well in the absence of such control (as in Wikipedia). "Collective intelligence" is a misnomer, in other words; much of the intelligence ultimately depends not on collectivism but on having smart people at the center. Pure democracies produce crappy results.

umair: Thanks for raising these issues. But you're starting from a faulty assumption when you posit "quality" and "value" as being synonymous. They're not.

frankly, when you peel away the senstive "gee i'm just concerned about our future" strokes, all you've got here is one more apologist for the status quo and his job in particular.

particularly grating is the dishonesty of the piece which introduces a quote from the Wikipedia: "Here's Wikipedia on Jane Fonda's life, again excerpted verbatim: . . ." well i went to the Wikipedia and it turns out the quote is from a section entitled "early years" not Jane Fonda's Life. the actual Wikipedia entry on Fonda is quite extensive far outstripping the pathetic Brittanica entry which i quote in full:

"Jane Seymour Fonda American motion-picture actress who was also noted for her political activism. The daughter of actor Henry Fonda, she left Vassar College after two years and lived in New York City. She studied acting under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio there in 1958 and worked as a model. Her acting career began with appearances in the Broadway play There Was a Little Girl (1960) and the motion picture Tall Story (1960), and she went on to appear in comic roles in numerous films in the 1960s, including Cat Ballou (1965) and Barefoot In the Park (1967). Her subsequent, more substantial roles were in such socially conscious films as They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), Klute (1971), Coming Home (1978), and The China Syndrome (1979). She received Academy Awards for best actress for her performances in Klute and Coming Home. She costarred with her father in the film On Golden Pond (1981). In the 1970s and '80s Fonda was active on behalf of left-wing political causes. She was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War who journeyed to Hanoi in 1972 to denounce the U.S. bombing campaigns there. In the 1980s she devised a popular exercise program for women while continuing to appear in motion pictures. She was married three times, to the French film director Roger Vadim, to the American politician Tom Hayden, and to the American broadcasting entrepreneur Ted Turner."

be honest, in this case, which would you rather have, "the amateur" or "the professional" version. i don't mean to mindlessly promote the wonders of collaborative effort but i don't think it helps to make such a lame case for professionalism.

one more point . . . i'm not a big fan of kelley's rapturous presentation, but his basic point, that we're inventing the future and we really should do as good a job as possible seems spot-on to me.

Nick, I think this is a great post and is always good to hear criticism. Don't mind what Web 2.0" fans say out there, keep posting your opinion.

Personally I do thinkg the concept of "Web2.0" has grown into a sort of fanaticism which reminds me of 98/99 (not to say com...sm or mar..st). I am really looking forward to a good study on the "business models" of "Web 2.0", hoppefully the guys from MIT (earlier post) would have something soon for the rest of the world. Up to now that there are two business models "sell to another company" (possibly to the one that think are way behind on the wave) and advertising - and we know already how that rollercoster ride goes.....

Just for quality comparison here is Bill Gates entry on Encarta:

Gates, William Henry, III, born in 1955, American business executive, who serves as chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, the leading computer software company in the United States. Gates cofounded Microsoft in 1975 with high school friend Paul Allen. The company’s success made Gates one of the most influential figures in the computer industry and, eventually, one of the richest people in the world.

(Microsoft is the publisher of Encarta Encyclopedia.)

Born in Seattle, Washington, Gates attended public school through the sixth grade. In the seventh grade he entered Seattle’s exclusive Lakeside School, where he met Allen. Gates was first introduced to computers and programming languages in 1968, when he was in the eighth grade. That year Lakeside bought a teletype machine that connected to a mainframe computer over phone lines. At the time, the school was one of the few that provided students with access to a computer.

Soon afterward, Gates, Allen, and other students convinced a local computer company to give them free access to its PDP-10, a new minicomputer made by Digital Equipment Corporation. In exchange for the computer time, the students tried to find flaws in the system. Gates spent much of his free time on the PDP-10 learning programming languages such as BASIC, Fortran, and LISP. In 1972 Gates and Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a company that designed and built computerized car-counting machines for traffic analysis. The project introduced them to the programmable 8008 microprocessor from Intel Corporation.

While attending Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1975, Gates teamed with Allen to develop a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800, the first personal computer. They licensed the software to the manufacturer of the Altair, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), and formed Microsoft (originally Micro-soft) to develop versions of BASIC for other computer companies. Gates decided to drop out of Harvard in his junior year to devote his time to Microsoft. In 1980 Microsoft closed a pivotal deal with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to provide the operating system for the IBM PC personal computer. As part of the deal, Microsoft retained the right to license the operating system to other companies. The success of the IBM PC made the operating system, MS-DOS, an industry standard. Microsoft’s revenues skyrocketed as other computer makers licensed MS-DOS and demand for personal computers surged. In 1986 Microsoft offered its stock to the public; by 1987 rapid appreciation of the stock had made Gates, 31, the youngest ever self-made billionaire. In the 1990s, as Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office application software achieved worldwide market dominance, Gates amassed a fortune worth tens of billions of dollars. Alongside his successes, however, Gates was accused of using his company’s power to stifle competition. In 2000 a federal judge found Microsoft guilty of violating antitrust laws and ordered it split into two companies. An appeals court overturned the breakup order in 2001 but upheld the judge's ruling that Microsoft had abused its power to protect its Windows monopoly. In November 2001 Microsoft reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department and nine states, and a year later, the settlement was upheld by a federal district court judge. (For more information on the history of Microsoft, see Microsoft Corporation.)

Gates has made personal investments in other high-technology companies. He sits on the board of one biotechnology company and has invested in a number of others. In 1989 he founded Corbis Corporation, which now owns the largest collection of digital images in the world.

In the late 1990s Gates became more involved in philanthropy. With his wife he established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which, ranked by assets, quickly became one of the largest foundations in the world. Gates has also authored two books: The Road Ahead (1995; revised, 1996), which details his vision of technology’s role in society, and Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999), which discusses the role technology can play in running a business.

In 1998 Gates appointed an executive vice president of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, to the position of president, but Gates continued to serve as Microsoft’s chairman and chief executive officer (CEO). In 2000 Gates transferred the title of CEO to Ballmer. While remaining chairman, Gates also took on the title of chief software architect to focus on the development of new products and technologies.

http://www.gatheringspeed.blogspot.com/

When will the great Wikipedia get good?

OK Here's a thought. Why not have ratings on the articles (a bit like Amazon) and allow people to comment on the articles in Wikipedia. Then you could have a starting point for which articles need improvement.

You could also use a "Was this review helpful to you" button, to weed out bad reviewers (or to give more attention to useful reviewers).

Perhaps they do this already, but I haven't seen it yet? I've used WP dozens of time in the past, so if it is there, and I haven't noticed it.. then it needs to be more obvious IMHO.

Steve Button

I am not sure ratings would solve the problem of wikipedia. There are two main reason to that
- the reader might not know the entry contained not factual data (therefore cannot rate it)
- most readers don't take the time to rate features, products.

I believe they tried that in search engines and it did not work out well (and offering money made it worst).Check out the "Dr. Daniel E. Rose" webcast at berkeley he talks about it at some point. http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/archive.php?seriesid=1906978252

Finally some Sanity amid the Hype:

Great comments. I too used Wikipedia often and have found the writing to be uneven at best. Nonetheless, I find that it is a good starting point: the collection of EXTERNAL LINKS, for a given topic are usually better than what you can get from a Search Engine.

The triumph of Amateurs at the expense of Professionals is scary. Might it be possible that we may not have a zero-sum game here? The bloggers have been able to correct mistakes that have eluded the "editors" of the NYTimes, the Economist, etc. Without professional publications, I doubt if bloggers will have that much to write about: I suspect that the practice linking to original content from other bloggers will not be sufficient. Remember, most blog discussions start from an article from a professional publication.

What is most interesting is that the so-called Web 2.0 companies have no Business Model. The most famous example to date is Flickr, a great site that Yahoo! purchased. Could it have survived on it's own? I'm not sure about that. Dave Winer recently noted:

"I wasn't at Web 2.0 last week, but I know some of the jargon that developed there. People were walking around saying this is the Flickr of that, and that is the Flickr of this."

Let the hype continue ....

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

You know, there used to be the huge network of intelligence and communication where anyone could post their ideas and thoughts.

Yeah, it was called the "internet" last time too.

Web 2.0 isn't some super machine or anything.

The term "Web 2.0" doesn't even mean anything at all! This is just a fad term to lure venture capitalist who aren't doing their research.

Every time I see someone talking about "Web 2.0", I have to ask, HAS THE ENTIRE WORLD GONE MAD?!

There is nothing new about the web! It has been gradually developing for the past decade. There is no such thing as "Web 2.0".

The internet is a huge garbage of formated text and other file-formats. This is not something new.You may read a few books from Clifford Stoll. Wikipedia is just again a piece of crap.
Why ? Do they pay people ? Did they have some research experience ?
Blogs are the amateur form of a newspaper article.

If you've got the attention span to read a whole book about the real world (not more specious bloviating about the "blogosphere"), I suggest 'The World is Flat' by Thomas Friedman. Web 2.0 may end up being Bubble 2.0, but only if everyone piles on and pays too much in the portal consolidation getting underway. In the longer run, say 3-5 years out, I doubt that amateur blogging (this decade's CB radios) will satisfy many peoples' desire for concise coverage, informed commentary and/or auhoritative depth reporting -- anymore than one-off hacks and 'perpetual betas' (one of the Web 2.0 articles of faith) will successfully address corporate requirements for stable enterpise-level software.

p.s. Nick -- Just think of Web 2.0 as a style thang, and you won't be so bummed out about it! That reminds me of another topical read: 'Boomeritis' by Ken Wilbur.

Congratulations, you have presented the most long-winded defense of traditional liberal media I have yet seen in a blog. Although not all traditional media is left biased, you site those that are and you feel sad about a revolution that many of us open minded libertarians are elated about. Not all bloggers negate facts and research, and most Wikipedia entries are of quality useful value. But your story cries out "my heart aches for the days of media control and bias" and for you I present the world's smallest violin.

Read our blogs and weep!

you have a lot of free time...

Web 2.0 is made of People!

Nick:



Nice piece -- while there's a lot to talk about with regard to the sanctimoniousness of many of the folks involved in the industry, I'd like to point out a couple of things around the economics here.



Specifically, there are some antecedants to your thinking around the implications of good things being beaten by poorer quality, cheaper competition in the "Worse is Better" essay by Richard Gabriel as well as Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma.



When my co-founders and I launched the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) the volunteer created web directory, and put the entire directory out for free, it changed the economics of the industry. You couldn't charge for a "better" directory -- but it emerged that you could charge people to be *in* your directory (a la Yahoo and Looksmart).



While I'm amused at the sharp stick you're using to poke at the starry eyed idealists here, I don't think the world that's emerging is *worse* for it.



Wikipedia ends up being more up to date than a traditional encyclopedia, not only cheaper. If you want the *real* scoop on the media industry, you read paidcontent.org, 'cause they have the news that mainstream guys won't have for weeks.



And what about all the kum ba ya nonsense around these changes? Well, the idealism is part of the package here -- and something you need to consider when you're building and marketing products, or managing your career. If someone's going to go out and harness the public to create a competitor, you might want to take it seriously. If every one of those people *believes* in what they're doing, it is a force to be reckoned with, whether or not they are right, "good", or "bad". If they believe they are building *The* machine, it's a very different amount of effort than if everyone thinks they're working as part of a machine.

Chris Tolles

co-founder,

Open Directory Project

&

VP Marketing

Topix.net

I'd agree that you should always keep an eye on utopians, and that technologies bear watching for what they are, not what we wish them to be. The telegraph and the television both prompted similarly rapturous visions. (For those interested in this, by the way, Tom Standage's book The Victorian Internet is fascinating.)

But I think beating up on Wikipedia is a little premature, for two reasons. First, I'm not sure the first edition of the Britannica, a copy of which I have next to me on the shelf, would stand up to that level of examination either. To me it seems limited, quirky, and a bit hodge-podge. The third edition, finished nearly 30 years later, was seven times the size. And even then one wonders how accurate and polished it was given that a single person still wrote "many of the scientific treatises and histories, and almost all minor articles."

And second, people carping about particular articles in Wikipedia would do well to remember what makes Wikipedia different: you too can fix it. I understand here the author is making a broader point, so perhaps he has an excuse. But for most people I've heard fret or grumble about Wikipedia, they could have solved the problem in the amount of time they spent bellyaching.

Eheh, the funny thing is how the Jane Fonda Wikipedia entry was completely rewritten since this blog. Just go to the history and compare the version from october 3 and the current one. The full irony is that the modifications can be use by both side of the debate equally well.

I do find indigenous comparing a centenial encyclopedia that takes more years between revised editions than wiki has been in existence as a proof.

I also find grating the insistence on so called amateurism. It's just a framing word chosen, as rethoric lover are wont to do, so that the debate is waged on an advantageous battlefield for those pushing it's use. If you accept the term, then Web2.0 already lost. Most people actually part of the movement prefer to use the term openess, which reflects that anyone, professional or not, can participate.

There's also the irony that many depth pieces found in mainstream media are the work of independant journalists and freelancers. I guess, as per Nick the argument, we should not trust them. They may, after all, not follow the NYT editiorial line properly. ;-)

The homogenous Web 2.0 "Ads by Goooooogle" featuring "contextually relevant" sales pitches for the likes of "The Enlightened Business" contradicts arguments presented.

Amen!

I fail to see what is wrong with the Wikipedia entries on Bill Gates and Jane Fonda. For the purposes of the average Joe wanting to know a little more about these personalities without needing an authoritative or comprehensive account, it does exactly what it says on the tin. What exactly is anyone's objection to the entries? Tone, focus, intellectual snobbery?

if anyone can publish how he rates any information and also browse the Web thru a 'layer' made of the ratings of selected other people we may have some collective intelligence. there is at least a proposal: WebDSign

Go further, and require each of them to make a contribution: you will see how many things are still missing, and you will be obliged to get the assistance of a large number of men who belong to different classes, priceless men, but to whom the gates of the academies are nonetheless closed because of their social station. All the members of these learned societies are more than is needed for a single object of human science; all the societies together are not sufficient for a science of man in general.

Denis Diderot (~1777) Encyclopédie, Article on
Philosphy

The general theme of the piece is, it seems to me, inarguable. Summarized and oversimplified quite a lot, the message is essentially that there is no special magic in open collaboration as a working method. I.e., you can have 100 monkeys clattering away on keyboards in an open environment, and mathematics may tell you that they will eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare, but it takes less time and less trash is produced if you have Shakespeare do it.

Of course Wikipedia contributors are quite a bit smarter than monkeys and Britannica authors aren't Shakespeares, but the general principle holds - garbage in, garbage out, whether produced in an open collaborative environment or a closed proprietary one.

There are arguments on each side maintaining that the open collaborative process or the closed proprietary process guarantees to an extent against GIGO. These arguments are flawed. The basic flaw can be expressed in a very general way by this "Dragnet" snippet reproduced from my unreliable memory (the dialogue may not be quoted with entire accuracy, but the general idea is there):

Utopian Kid: "We're trying to build a perfect world!"

Sgt. Joe Friday: "Can't have a perfect world."

UK: "Why not?!"

SGF: "No perfect people."

Advocates of the open collaborative method argue for what Mr. Carr refers to as "collective intelligence," and has been referred to concerning Linux as the "many eyes" principle - that is, open collaboration ensures that there will be many eyes to see and fix any mistakes; therefore, even if there is GI, it will be caught before it has been O for too long. However, mere open collaboration doesn't ensure the quality of the "eyes," so who knows whether they will be interested enough in the subject to look at the GI in the first place; to know it is G in the second place; and have the expertise to fix it, or at least know the right person to do so, in the third place?

Advocates of the closed proprietary method argue, explicitly or implicitly, that people paying for expertise want to make sure they get value for it, whether they are hiring people to produce content or paying for its use. Unfortunately, nearly all of us are likely to be able to cite examples of people we hired, even after research, references, etc., who produced bad work, and items we purchased that didn't do what they were supposed to.

Another problem inherent in the production of any content, whether by the open collaborative or closed proprietary method, paradoxically most affects precisely those issues that are most complex and critical. A general description can be found in this excerpt from a message to a mailing list written by Mr. Poul-Henning Kamp, describing the origin of the term "bikeshedding" (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#BIKESHED-PAINTING):

"[C. Northcote] Parkinson shows how you can go into the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.

"Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.

"A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here."

Kamp was discussing problems with a change he wanted to make in the source code of FreeBSD, a computer operating system that is produced through a relatively open collaborative method. (Anyone can look at the source code and submit requested changes; the change requests are vetted and implemented or not by a smaller group of "committers.") Decisions regarding the building of atomic power plants for the most part are, and decisions regarding the Manhattan Project certainly were, made by closed groups. Both systems are equally subject to the tendency to leave the really big complicated stuff to "the experts" (and to assume, perhaps erroneously, that the experts have in fact looked at these issues), while spending lots of time discussing smaller stuff that may be less important, but hey, at least everyone gets the chance to express an opinion.

I don't think anyone can reasonably object to the point that open collaboration *by itself* is no guarantor of quality - but neither is the closed proprietary method. One needn't think very long and hard before coming up with a number of examples of supposed factual content produced by very august proprietary shops that turned out to be simply made-up (e.g., fairly recent scandals at the Washington Post and New York Times).

So are the proprietary outlets indeed doomed by competition from free collaborative sources, especially since there is no inherent guarantee of quality in either method of producing information?

I think the answer will be determined by how rapidly each adapts to the market for reliable information. Parents whose children receive failing grades on reports written from Wikipedia information (making the not-necessarily-justified assumptions that Wikipedia was inaccurate and teachers caught the errors), or other parents who hear of such stories, may well be inspired to shell out for the Britannica. Of course, any ensuing success for the Britannica will be short-lived if the Britannica turns out to have errors itself (again assuming teachers capable of catching them). As discussed above, I don't think we can assume in the first instance that either Wikipedia or the Britannica will be relatively free from errors;* all we can say is that their respective chances for success depend on whether Wikipedia offers reliable information, and whether Britannica offers information that is sufficiently more reliable than Wikipedia to justify its price.

*I imagine that I hear you saying, "But the jobs of the Britannica folks depend on this!" Yep. Did lives depend on decisions made at Los Alamos?

Hmmm.

"I would argue, in fact, that the overall quality of an encyclopedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best. What's the worth of an unreliable reference work?"

"Now, all the same criticisms can (and should) be hurled at segments of the mainstream media. And yet, at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from - and, yes, more important than - what bloggers can do."

So why should be judge the mainstream by its best, but the amateurs by their weakest?

Sure, mainstream media *can* produce quality, well researched material, tending away from extremism. But so can blogs.

You want to argue a stronger case : that its more likely for a media *funded* by people buying content (or advertisers) to produce quality than a pack amateurs.

I wouldn't be so sure :

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/10/06/D8D2IU703.html

If there's an argument to be made that the market for information is better than the gift-economy, its that reader / customers *recognise* quality and switch their custom and attention to it.

But it's increasingly looking as though mainstream media has discovered that it doesn't really need to produce much more than sensationalism, opinion and loose facts in order to win customers.

And if you're going to base your faith in what customers recognise anyway; then why not cut out the middle man and trust the readers to recognise it on wikipedia and in the blogosphere? Are the blogs any worse than media in the hard to measure, but most important metric : "attention paid quality"?

I think most of the reasoning in this post is spot on, except for the alarmist tone at the end. Yes, some quality may lose out to cheap crap, just like it has ever since the industrial revolution. But come on, Wikipedia is not representative of publishing, the web, or even Web2.0.

Wikipedia's core problem is that you can't write well by committee. Unless by some miracle the committee are all made up of great writers who work well together, but that is a statistical impossibility for wikipedia. Without a rigorous editorial process they will never achieve encyclopedic greatness, but on the other hand, it's still a handy reference. It's not as if they're spreading disinformation on a mass scale, there's just a general quality problem.

While the community may hold itself back in the case of Wikipedia, these problems are not that hard to overcome in the general case. For instance, using the community as a filter rather than collaborative producer of content is much more successful. Think Flickr, or Delicious, or even the blogosphere as a whole. The cream rises, and will continue to do so. A few old school casualties along the way is cause for nostalgia maybe, but not alarm.

Nicholas, you rule.

Interesting article - looks like something I would have written in one of my stranger moods.

The point you have missed is that Wikipedia is still evolving. What we see on the site, how it is presented, and how it is added will probably change radically in the next few years. Some of the problems Wikipedia is facing, are the same problems anyone with an interactive website faces. At work we constantly have bots trying to post messages in our non-existant forms (it's actually a customer feedback link) and many blogs have had to deal with this issue - there are a lot people who just have to tell you about the latest breast/p***s enhancement method...

The next ten years on the net will be exciting. Take everything that's been done before, and multiply it by 1000 - that's how big the changes will be.

Carr writes, "The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity."

According to Carr's bio, he's "a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, ... an acclaimed business writer and speaker whose work centers on strategy, innovation, and technology." In other words, he's spent his career doing many things, but none of them involve actually writing code, whether open-source or proprietary. As a result, it's not surprising that he has no understanding of the reality of open-source software development.

The fact of the matter is that widely distributed groups of collaborating developers can successfully produce something that works very well. And the reason is that the very nature of software development is that the CPU is always there as a referee. A programmer can't get away with sloppiness the same way someone editing a collaborative essay can. After a programmer writes the code, it has to run. That's part of the reason that open-source software development works. The other part is that the open-source software development community has a tradition of respect for good work. In other words open-source developers respect demonstrated expertise, regardless of whether the person is amateur or professional.

Carr has just disparaged open-source software because he doesn't know any better. He hasn't been down in the trenches writing the code. Instead he's spent his career writing and speaking about IT, so his name is well-known. In contrast, people like me who have several decades of serious software development expertise are unlikely to have spent any time at all promoting our names to the public. We're the ones in the development labs who make things work, but remain anonymous.

Now imagine that an editor at Britannica needs an article on software development. It's unlikely that he knows anything about the topic himself. So is he more likely to ask someone like me, whom he's probably never heard of, or a self-promoter who's known as an IT expert - someone like Carr, for example?

Would the resulting Britannica article's discussion of the open-source development process reflect the real-world experience of someone who's done it, or would it disparage open-source based on the biases of the professional with the well-known name who has little or no experience actually writing code?

Carr creates a false dichotomy between "amateur" and "professional", when the real distinction is between expertise and lack of expertise.

By setting himself up as an authority on IT and then displaying his ignorance of the subject matter, Carr's just provided us with a graphic example of why an encyclopedia like Britannica developed under the old proprietary model is unlikely to be any more reliable than one developed under the open-source collaborative model.

Wikipedia may have it's problems. It's been criticised for a community culture which doesn't respect expertise. If that's true, then criticism is legitimate. But Wikipedia and open-source are not the same thing. In software terminology, Wikipedia is an instance of the class open-source-encyclopedia. If that instance has developed a community culture that doesn't respect expertise, let's new up a new instance of the class, and encourage a different culture.

The proprietary development model has different problems, but very serious problems of its own. Someone posted the Microsoft Encarta article about Bill Gates to demonstrate how much better a proprietary encyclopedia is than an open-source encyclopedia. But is it better? Or does it just have different problems? Did you notice that the article talks about Microsoft having closed a deal in 1980 with IBM to provide the operating system for the IBM PC, but conveniently neglects to tell the world that Gates left IBM with the impression that he was going to write an operating system, all the while intending to buy a clone of CP/M called Q-DOS on the cheap, and then resell it to IBM. Did you notice that the article conveniently leaves out the fact that Gates bought Q-DOS from Seattle Computer Products for a mere $50,000, and later settled a lawsuit brought by SCP for $1 million for having concealed his relationship with IBM.

An open-source encyclopedia, if not done well, may show uneven quality from one article to another. A proprietary encyclopedia, on the other hand, is vulnerable to spin, and suppression of information based on the self-interest of the company producing the encyclopedia. At least the former problem is immediately apparent to the reader. But you read an encyclopedia article because you're not an expert in the subject matter, so you're not going to notice what's been left out. As a result, the latter problem is virtually impossible for the reader to detect.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather deal with a reference whose problems are immediately apparent rather than one that may have major problems, all of which will be undetectable.

And encyclopedias aside, there's no justification for disparaging the open-source development model just because one example of it might have some problems.

Wow. It's starting to be a long scroll to get down here. Again, thanks for such thoughtful comments. Here are my necessarily brief responses:

Bob Stein: The Fonda and Gates entries have been extensively revised since I originally posted this entry.And, no, I don't think the Britannica entry is pathetic.

Steve Button: I don't think Wikipedia provides any way for users to rate entries - one problem, of course, is that the ratings would always be out of date since entries are constantly being revised.

choi: I too hope it's not a zero-sum game. As I wrote, I value having both the amateur and the professional models. My fear is that the web is changing the economics of media in such a way as to make traditional media worse, not better.

Frapazoid: The way I think about it, Web 1.0 sites have private databases while Web 2.0 sites/services have public (or semi-public databases). Both models have been around from the start (so "1.0" and "2.0" are misnomers) but the interest now has shifted to the latter.

Sandy Borthick: Thanks. I feel better already.

Angry Squirrel: Oh, come on. "Left biased" has nothing to do with it.

Ross Mayfield: And little boys are made of frogs and snails and puppy dog tails.

Chris Tolles: Thanks for the Open Directory Project example. Certainly, the web has the advantage of timeliness, and it's a significant advantage. But it's also a disadvantage. Speedy reporting is not always the best reporting. Again, I'd like to have both. Finally, your point about businesses taking into account their (or their competitors') ability to harness the passion (not to mention free labor) of a community is well taken.

William Pietri: All big technological changes seem to bring out utopianism. (Electrification was another example.)

pitsch: Thanks for that Diderot link. Very interesting.

Jud: Much to think about here. Thanks for "bike shed" reference, which is great. I agree with you about the flaws of both models, but I don't think it's as simple as saying that the more accurate wins out in the end. Even if it does "win," have the economics of the market changed in such a way that it is no longer able to sustain its quality as before. Does the open collaboration model, by producing free content, force its flaws on other models?

Phil Jones: I said an encyclopedia should probably be judged by its weakest entries (since reliability is so important to its value). That's different from saying the content produced by amateurs in general should be judged by their weakest examples. If there were three wikipedias out there, I would say we should judge the wikipedia model by the best of the three. My point is that the web-media and traditional-media models have different strengths and weaknesses, and I fear that the economics of the web model are eroding the strengths of the traditional model.

Gabe: I hope you're right, but if Flickr and Delicious are your standards, I'm nervous.

Mark Rosenthal: Thanks for further clarifying the difference between open-source software development and collaborative writing (I touched on this in a later post). As I said in an early comment, I didn't mean to disparage open source (and if I did, I apologize) but simply point to its veneration as being another example of what I called the cult of the amateur. I agree with you that "widely distributed groups of collaborating developers can successfully produce something that works very well" because, unlike with, say, wikipedia, there's a objective quality standard (the CPU referee) and, in most cases, a more formal organizational screening method. I have to say, though, that when you turn to the Bill Gates biography, I think your comments underscore one of the problem with the open-community model of content development. Too many people have axes to grind, and they become so fixated on particular details that they lose sight of the big picture.

N Carr: A Fraud born every second

You completely misrepresented (i.e., lied about) the Fonda and Gates wiki entries. It is so much more than what you posted that I cannot help but believe it is intentionally misleading (as of the Oct 3rd wiki entries).

"Extracted Verbatim"? Whoop-te-do. You picked the least important portions to extract for the purpose of your article.

I suggest you update your article to reflect the incredible ability wikipedia has to update / enhance it's entries, the ease-of-learning that comes through the hyperlinked entries, and extend your artical on amorality to investigate the impacts of being able to see the changes to the entries via the history: the "changing story" of history can be much richer now that we can see it change.

I doubt you have the intellectual integrity to do so, though. Proving your point??

Pardon my brevity, Nick, but: Duh!

Whoever said that Wikipedia was a match for Britannica? That's not what it's for.

Does anyone seriously think blogs will entirely replace the mainstream media? It's not an either-or choice. Blogs have added a level of accountability in the MSM that I think is productive. But not only are they not mutually exclusive, they work best when they are both balancing each other out.

And your grand statement that technology is not inherently good or bad, but "amoral." Well of course! This has always been the case (except possibly for bombs and machine guns, I think they're inherently bad).

I don't see any of your argument as a refutation of web 2.0, but just a constant reminder that it's not abuot the tool but how we use it.

Amateurs and professionals are the same in one important respect: both are easily corrupted in a position of power. The web makes concentrating power (eyeballs) hard and social mobility (changing judgements about specific sources of information) easy.

I don't worry about the new web making professionals extinct. As the benefits of the web grow more apparent, professionals will join it. And they will be valued and easy to find. The cream rises to the top.

I can see this argument has been made before in this thread. Quality doesn't always out, but I think the new web makes things more meritocratic. It seems you disagree. Why?

I really appreciate how you have been responding to comments, btw.

Hi Nicholas

Great article - thanks!
Posted a comment at: http://www.oneafrikan.com/archives/2005/10/20/the-amorality-of-web-2/
if you're interested...

Gareth

For the record, this is the complete Jane Fonda article at Wikipedia as existed on 25th September 2005, the last form of the article I can guarantee was not fixed up as a result of this blog entry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jane_Fonda&oldid=23889485

Readers will find additional content of a very different quality to that characterised in the blog entry above.

Here's the entry for Bill Gates as appeared in its entirity prior to the blog entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Gates&oldid=24515209

Which I agree is appalling.

It should be noted, however, that both Bill Gates (to a massive degree) and Jane Fonda (to a lesser) are figures that cause above average amounts of controversy and, therefore, those articles are particularly prone to bad faith edits by people seeking to denigrate the subjects.

When will the great Wikipedia get good?

It used to be that cathedrals would take decades to build. Nowadays, using modern engineering, an equivalently-sized structure takes much less time. Does that mean that, five years into the construction of a cathedral, "when will the great cathedral get good" is a valid question? Nobody's attempted something of the scale of Wikipedia before; hence, nobody can clearly state exactly how long it will take to reach what any individual decides is "good". I imagine the first edition of Britannica took more than five years as well.

And yet, at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from - and, yes, more important than - what bloggers can do.

Agreed. However, any individual element of the mainstream media (single newspaper, single TV news program, etc.) has much more influencing power than does any individual blog or other "amateur" content provider. Hence, to paraphrase an old nursery rhyme, "when mainstream media is good, it is very very good, but when it is bad it is horrid". Sensationalism predates blogs. Passing opinion off as news (e.g., Sinclair Communications' forced broadcasts) predates blogs. And when the mainstream media does these things, it causes much more harm to society than when individual bloggers practice sensationalism or passing opinion off as news.

And free trumps quality all the time.

You cited various news sources you like, such as the New York Times. Last I checked, such news sources are not free. Yet, you have access to any number of news sources that are free: over-the-air television, radio, free newspapers (most US communities have at least one of these; major metros may have a few), membership-controlled magazines (the ones you get the free subscription to in exchange for completing a survey), and so forth. Yet, you continue to pay for certain news sources. In fact, it would appear that lots of people have paid for certain news sources for decades despite the availability of free ones. I mean, I like blogs, but you're giving them way too much credit if you think that they somehow will destroy things that have, in theory, been under attack since WWII.

Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

Please understand that, for many of us, the current hegemony of the professional is fairly frightening. You've portrayed here a dystopian future with the "amateur" being in control. How many more dystopian futures have been depicted, in opinion pieces and fiction, where authorities and professionals, such as the government, are in control? Which do you think is the more likely outcome? We're just trying to provide some competitive balance.

And, of course, I posted this on my blog...

Yeah, that wonderful bastion of accuracy and fact-checking, The New York Times. Sure, they "can place, with equal weight, opposing ideologies on the same page." But they don't. See their witch-hunt of Wen Ho Lee and Jason Blair. Judith Miller's reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were every bit as slipshod as the Wikipedia entry on Jane Fonda. But the Times criminally sloppy "journalism" led the country into an unnessesary and unjustifiable war.

I use wikipedia in my capacity as a philosopher, and I find it just fine. It seems the more serious the topic, the more seriously it is taken - as it should be. Let the 'professionals' sweat the mundane details of trivial topics - sorry, that was redundant.

Lots of good points but a couple of nits.

1)“And free trumps quality all the time.” Really? I like to see enough examples to even justify saying “some of the time.”

That whole Britannica example is written without any understanding of the root causes of the encyclopedia’s failures as a profitable business… such as not listening to their customers.

2) The same is true when you ask will "the economic pressures caused by the web will in the end make [the] shortcomings of the MSM even worse." These "economic pressures" are a self inflicted wound.

The advertising client / MSM business model has deep flaws that the media refused to address for decades. That's the root cause of the economic pressures.

I don't have a problem with Nicholas' general thesis. This is a first as I thought his 'IT Doesn't Matter' stuff was bordering on the insane.

There is a very real risk that when a technology trend takes on the whiff of cult status, there's going to be a falling out somewhere along the way and a lot of well-meaning people will get hurt.

The fact that hype seems to be spiralling out of control is a very bad thing. The last thing this industry needs is another dotbomb bust. But it could easily happen. And here I'm with Blodget when he says Google is a one trick pony at risk of any ad spending downturn.

Which as far as I'm concerned is great. Because an ad model, which is tempting so many wannabe blog/hacks, will weed out the crap pretty quickly. Which is just as well because the noise level coming from the BS merchants is getting unbearable.

But none of this should take away from the sterling efforts made by the OSS community. Heck, a lot of this discussion would never see the light of day without it. And that, and when it's intelligent, considered discussion, instead of a tirade of demeaning abuse, is a good thing.

In the end however, no amount of brickbat throwing will take away from the fact that Carr has influence. He does not lose any of his kudos by putting himself up for the literary battering he's taken from some commentators. If anything, his presence encourages debate in which he is gracious.

But who's to say he's wrong - other than those who derive a living from peddling their own skewed view of the world? Like me. Like all the other correspondents to this posting. Except on this occasion, I believe Carr's words should serve as a salutary warning about how things can go pear-shaped - in even the most good meaning of environments.

I prefer to think of the web as information anarchism, not a democracy. The reason why we can fit ideas of enlightenment and capitalism is because the web ultimately is dictated by neither - it accomodates both. In a democratic system there still needto be rules, but there is no overall constitution dictating the web's behaviour; neither doI think there should be.

I love Wikipedia, but it is flawed. Yet at the same time the web has also illustrated how inaccurate traditional media can be. In the end everything has a downside and the web is holding upa mirror so we can start seeing some of these problems. I don't think Wikipedia is very factual, but I dount Britannica is giving me all the information there is on a topic.

Is the web perfect? Not at all, but it is chaotic and that makes it a pretty unique concept. And in this uniqueness it can accomodate a lot of things: laws, lawlessness, quantity, quality, fanaticism and apathy. These do not even need to be tied together.

I believe the web's chaotic and anarchic character makes it a complete wild card in terms of human existence. Don't worship it - it really doesn't care. It's essentially an entity made out of a collective and an accidental entity at that.

Web 2.0 is a foolish pipe dream. It might make sense, but the beast has already been unleashed and it's growing at an amazing rate. Even when the 2.0 technologies really come into play, don't think they will harnass the web. The web will accomodate them. It's not a dogmatic view: this is the nature of an information network that draws from a large pool of unrelated information and participation. Men can barely run their countries - how do you run a technology that fuels itself off all men?

Wikipedia is really a rather primitive application, and Web 2.0 is early days yet. Give it another thirty years, and we're liable to see much more sophisticated systems, that do a better job of aggregating collective judgement and creativity. Web 9.0 will probably look much different than anything people envision today.

Nicholas' "The amorality of Web 2.0
October 03, 2005" was well done. I would reinforce, however, that "professional journalistic media" (aka newspapers) bring it on themselves when they lose readership due to:
a. Blatantly partial/biased reporting
b. Printed product loaded with ads and wire service stories

With any luck at all, the layoffs at the newspapers will continue and avalanche until their ultimate demise. Lacing every story with slanted political tripe is not the way to sell newspapers.

The first thing any intelligently managed business does is stay out of politics. You run the risk of losing half your customer base before you even get started.

Where will all these dead tree journos end up? Not in the dole Q...

When I hear writers and journalists cry about Web 2.0 Wikipedia and the likes, I think: that’s how The Grand Chefs must have felt when McDonald’s (quel horreur!) entered their territory. Nothing new here, democratization began many centuries ago and (only) now it is touching the information. What a concept for the Information Age, I say.

Evolution works this way because we, people, have learned, accepted and assigned privilege to Choice. In almost all disciplines of human endeavors we favor Choice. That’s why we can eat substandard food, buy substandard merchandise or even provide a non-standard medical treatment to ourselves (when we choose to heal ourselves or with help of various alternate sources).

However, since we also recognize that such a laissez-fair approach may at times be dangerous we do provide for exceptions. In many fields such as education, medical, banking, insurance etc. we regulate. To operate in those fields one must pass rigorous tests.

So, back to Information: are The i-Chefs calling for regulating? Let them. Fat chance of that but they do have a choice. They can (still) move to China.

I, meanwhile, might consume another scrap of (say) Mr. Carr’s writing and say: Vive le Choice! As for Jane Fonda’s tortured life stories I really wonder: Why does anybody care?

I can only agree with you Nick. I have lately discussed the future of mainly the future design of social software at the my blog at Stanford (http://fellows.rdvp.org/eriksundelof/blog/). What is a bit scary these days is the unconditional trust people put on system like the Wikipedia and Delicious. People that say that we should not compare the Wikipedia to Brittanica clearly haven't read the true intentions of them.



A bit more general about the subject. I am a true believer of technology and think there might be a way to go to really make a difference, but as you said "The Internet had transformed many things, but it had not transformed us. We were the same as ever." This is a essential message that tends to get lost when people are discussing new technologies. We have to be ready for it and able to handle them. The sad part is that the absolute majority has to or else we (might) end up loosing in the end.



I am a strong believer in the power of the people, but still believe there are dangers with the complete freedom, by which I have not at all said we should not have the freedom that Web 2.0 is said to represent. I think it is just said that people like you say put a bit to strong belief in that technology will change the world.



Technology is a tool, nothing else. If we want to save the world we just have to do it ourselves probably by the help of technology. Technology by itself do very little. :)



I am a supertech, but nevertheless I have to (and all other (super)techs) have to reflect on the awareness and readiness to exposure of the users that we develop for.



Web 2.0 is something that is better than Web 1.0, but that does not mean that it is perfect. It is far from perfect, but however a leap in the right direction.

Blogspin http://www.blogspin.com/ looks like a good web 2.0 app for weblogs

I don't believe that free trumps quality every time - if that was the case the world would be a vastly different place, and premium brands (like the Apple I'm typing this on) would have no market.

However free content does often trump what may be better, paid, content - if it's only marginally so. The Britannica is a wonderful encyclopaedia, but Wikipedia isn't a million miles off it - and a good web search can fill in the Wikipedia's blanks and provide enough information.

What's more, while paying for information doesn't really offend or affect me in any way - the fantastic thing about the Internet (1.0 or 2.0 or later) is that diverse cultures and economies can access it - so while free is fine for me, it's absolutely essential to people that live on dollars a week, and anything other than free means 'inaccessible'.

Web 2.0 is no more or less amoral as Web 1.0. Business is business and shareholders and capitalism demand profit. But that doesn't mean the web isn't ALSO what Kevin Kelly calls it - which I believe can co-exist with the business side of the net.

If 'information is power' then regardless of technology amorality, the Interent has empowered an awful lot of people that would otherwise not be so.

Ed: "All the time," in common speech, doesn't mean "every time"; it means "frequently." If I say "People jaywalk all the time," it doesn't mean that people jaywalk every time they cross a street; it means that jaywalking is commonplace. That's what I meant, too.

Sorry Nick, I didn't mean to nitpick on a single phrase - you're right of course, and I agree with you.

What I'm really trying to say is that between Kevin Kelley's utopian view, and you're kind of cynical view, is a median where the web actually exists.

Big Business always have their own interests at heart, often to the cost of the people - that's true on-line and in the real world. That's the amorality of the web. And then there's people who want to make a difference - donating to charity, working with poor, homeless and underpriviliged people and nations. These people have a role on-line as well, they're the web's moral fiber.

Sorry, I fell asleep somewhere inbetween the Matrix and the talk of Angels.

Any chance you could do a new article with the key points laid out? Rather than this ramble. I can't actually work out what you're saying?

I personally think Web 2.0 is a good definition(this is against Web 2.0 right?)

This is worse than bad, and it is, unfortunately, representative of the slipshod quality of much of Wikipedia.

Sorry, you expect a lot more from a user-submitted encyclopedia with almost a MILLION articles? It is commendable in its own right for being a big player in interaction.

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies - a machine, not a Machine - that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

Oh please... yes you're right; We're all going to die because of Web 2.0... *sigh*... Web 2.0 is not going to take us anywhere, it will be us who does so. Just because we class the current web age we're in as Web2.0 doesn't mean it changes whats going to happen in the future. The 'Ice Age' was not named first and then it suddenly got cold. The same works for the web, we didn't name the current age 'Web 2.0' and suddenly every web app became AJAXy.

While I agree with most of the points you make regarding wikipedia and the cult of the amateur, one should also point out the difference in quality between the first edition of the EB and the seminal 1911 edition: how long did it take for the "experts" to get it right? To polish it requires dedication and commitment to excellence, but get to the level where one needed to make only incremental improvement?

This is an amazing piece of writing. I'm sorry I just found it about 10 minutes ago. Your opening paragraph coupled with your use of "if not a fallen angel" makes me think that you are familiar with the Gnostics. Specifically that trait in humans that leads us to think that there is just one, pardon the expression, kernel of knowledge that will bring us to perfection.

Needless to say - living here in Seattle I'm just a bit jaundice about the whole Web 2.0 thing.

And BTW - John Seignethaler *jr* used to do the weekend news on the ABC affil here in Seattle.

Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its
science entries, a Nature investigation finds.

LINK IN MESSAGE = http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html

Whilst many bloggers are "amateurs", the work they produce is often of a higher quality than that produced by "professionals".

Take the SCO vs IBM case.

None of the professionals with a capacity to fund "in-depth reporting and research" did so. They did none of their own, instead reporting things from analysts with no knowledge of code or Unix.

The "amateurs" like Eric Raymond of OSI and Paula Jones of Groklaw were the people doing the serious investigative work.

Y'know, I've read all this discussion. Most of the points I'd like to make were already done.

However, I do remember Britannica and I still have the edition, where an article about lemmings endorsed the Disney version that lemmings march to their deaths every year - they just happened to believe Disney's manufactured documentary was real (hint - it wasn't). So much for peer review, eh?

Indeed the web is ammoral. And that's great. Because morals, like it or not, are not set on stone - just as pure democracy and pure communism are thoroughly flawed and, ultimately, worst for their countries than any middle ground, any strict set of morals is doomed to fail with time, as any enterprise that will not adapt, as any species that will not change to accomodate its environment. Flexibility, rather than stagnation.

Yes, the Internet is ammoral - and better for it.

The examples you use to discredit Wikipedia are not representative of its content at large. Why didn't you pick up excerpts from Science articles, where the real information is ?
Hasn't it cross your mind that nobody cares about Bill Gates and Jane Fonda ? This is precisely why Wikipedia plays a role : it skims real information from garbage.

This article is not honest. It wouldn't be accepted in Wikipedia...

Nicholas, this is what modernism is all about: structural differentiation and cultural generalization. Sociologists have been writing about this for decades, it just appears as though the Internet is accelerating this evolution. It is not the cause, it is the accelerator.

collective intelligence such as the types found in the "online world" can only be of average quality. The concept of mass collaboration might seem alluring, but the fact is that "too many cooks spoil the broth". The truth about something.... anything does not depend on how many minds collaborated and concurred... it comes to a single mind (others copy and re-hash).

Great article: in-depth, well-written, and accurate. I have also been, for long, a "Web 2.0" skeptic for the same reasons you enumerated.

A lot of people have a tendency to venerate the "hip" new technology, the emerging cyberworld, et cetera. They fail to give any reason why these things are so world-chaningly novel. Consider what Google (to use one example) actually does: one who knows anything about the PageRank algorithm will understand that it merely bolsters the status quo. Which only means that the "new media" of the blogosphere, if mediated by Google or like technology, will eventually crystallize into the old. Unfortunately, the merits of "old media" have not been replicated adequately by Google, Wikipedia, and the blogosphere.

On the latter, I don't buy for a second that the blogosphere is nearly as significant as people make it out to be. The blog is a medium of communication-- a weak, sometimes useful one-- but not a social revolution. Within five years, I suspect that this concept of the "blog", stripped of novelty, will lose its "hipness" and the genre will refold itself into the blander and more inclusive "webpage" category.

I always find myself amazed by the techno-enthusiasts these days: they seem to predict virtual miracles without paying any thought to limitations of resources and feasibility. Who will pay for the "Over-mind", who will administer it, and how do we know that we can trust them? (Anyone familiar with Wikipedia knows that its administrators are often poor-to-mediocre contributors with long editing histories, people who got in on the gig first and played nice.) If Wikipedia foreshadows an emerging social reality, the future doesn't look good.

I'd say, overall, that one of Wikipedia's greatest flaws is its perpetual adolescence. Many of the articles are in a neverending state of rough-draft truthiness; work that would be dismissed as garbage at Britannica is taken (unless the editor is disliked by others who frequent said article, in which case he is reverted without thought given to his work) as a valuable contribution-- a start, a partial solution. This makes the production process more rapid-- more people can contribute-- but also leaves a lot of crappy partial solutions (half-started articles, incoherent writing) lying around.

More to the point, Wikipedia fails because it has no successful mechanism for discriminating between what is good and what is bad. It merely throws all of it up there, leaving the reader to decide. This system melts down when good and bad come into direct conflict, and the dispute is resolved via "community consensus"-- that is, whoever has a longer edit history wins.

An Internet and two "Webs" later, we're still the same humanity and not nearly competent to administer what some expect from mass communication.

http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/10/20/nick_carrs_amorality.php#59480

Submitted for anyone's perusal, is the above link. A link that grazes the border of the tiffany twisted spaces of what I'd like to call The Corante Zone.

But seriously, what in the blazes is everyone getting their panties into a bunch over. It's, it's not OZ people! It's not like we finally found a place where we can dump our persona, and not have to worry about the person. Geeze, someone makes a reference in a black book with the letter B I B L E about "the flesh being weak", and everyone has to run around like chickens with their brains severed trying to find a place to immortalize themselves.

Maybe that's what it really boils down to. All the Boomers who brought us Web 1.0 and Dot-Bomb ( thanks folks, no really, you didn't have to, and here I didn't get you anything ), are getting older and they're wondering, "Ok, how to I leave my mark, what can I pass on to those who come after me." Sorry, even that was a little too soppy sweet for me. If this was their REAL motivator, to make things "just work" ( sorry SJ, but I hope you don't mind my borrowing that ), they wouldn't be running around all over THE valley and the the nooks and craggy crannies of Seattle, trying to find angels that peddle in greenbacks instead of sounding off just like the "Barons of the media" have.

Such smart people, such pomposity ( did I spell that correctly ? Hmmm. ). Keep hammering away, Nicholas.

Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

Then you have a very poor imagination; and in my opinion the above is an embarrassment to Web 2.0. But as you've ably noted, it is hardly the only one... last time I checked traditional and new media are composed of people. Quality and bias will certainly vary.

Nicolas, are new technologies are immoral, from some point of view..

This is an interesting argument and one I have not given enough thought to in the past. However, to regard independant amature media on the web as inaccurate and ignore the corporate/political bias of commercial media is just ignorant. As someone who works in the media I have been exposed to exactly how full of shit commercial media can be at it's worst.

what a load of wank

What I find interesting is that many people here see mainstream or commercial media being by default biased and the collaborative community being by default earnest and true.

The sheer amount of open-source and blogging/wiki advocacy in the comments in this blog is in my opinion a clear indication that there is a bias here in the "Web 2.0" sphere also - different from typical political/commercial bias, yes, maybe even benevolent, but a bias nonetheless. The road tho hell in indeed paved with good intentions.

Had this been an open-source site, I would have been able to edit the author's misspelling of millennium (second paragraph, line three), as well as millennialist (final sentence of the article)!

All jokes aside, that being said, I agree with the quality control issue re: the reliability, or lack thereof, with the information listed on free, open-source sites such as Wikipedia.

However, I believe we none should be obtaining any substantial amount of facts from any one source regardless.

While my comments come far too late to be likely to actually be read I have a few points I'd like to make in reference to this well written and timely blog entry:

1. I marginally agree with the quoted author who suggests that the current changes relating to the internet may be quite historic in scope. I do not really agree with his time frame. I would have to include from the moment people started adopting Tim Burners-Lee's technology until about 5 years from now. I also do not really agree with his fervor.

2. Wikipedia has been found to be very close in ACCURACY to Britanica (slightly less). I completely concur that the quality is much lower. Unfortunately I care about data not specifically how that data is presented. I don't think I'm alone. Additionally the best accuracy can be found when consulting multiple data sources.

3. BLOGs have their place and news agencies have theirs. Unfortunately I think the news agencies are missing their opportunity to compete with BLOGs properly (as many businesses do when the market changes). News agencies can learn to use the web to increase readership and revenue if they will study it, understand it, and learn from it.
The RIAA is a good example of a business too inflexible and willingly ignorant to properly compete in a changing market.

I hope the news agencies will not languish in the same ignorant state.

It's funny that you prefer facts to opinions, yet only state your one sided opinion on that topic.
Yawn.

I would prefer reading what is in Wikipedia against "googeling around in the trash". Encyclopedia Britannica is for the british! - Wikipedia is for the world.
Now there is the interesting question: are you an expert or an amateur, and in which field, and where is the boarder between amateur and expert?
Are there millions of amateurs or millions of experts sitting in front of the microsoftblackboxes.
If you don't confess that you are an amateur and think you are an expert, contribute something! As long as the earning of bread is guarantied, everybody can afford to give some virtual donation for free.

Amorality:
The Information in the Internet is the product of the used tool - the tool is stupid, but the outcoming product is either good or bad.

I wonder how Nicholas Carr is thinking about this topic now. It's odd, I do feel there is something spiritual about the Web 2.0 phenomena, but it will be many things to many people, not One Mind and secular humanism orthodoxy and the usual rigid paganist beliefs one finds on the Internet. It's a space where spirtuality is possible, that's all. Not always going to be so grand.

What I'm intrigued by looking back at this post of a year ago now is the idea that Web 2.0 was going to be so democratizing and so participatory and so You -- like Time Magazine says on the cover story of the 'person of the year'. The celebration of the amateur, supposedly. Except...it's nothing like that. What we've seen of the virtual worlds like Second Life, or the even more complex Multiverse, is that programmers rule them with an iron hand. Code is law. Only the most talented and superior in skills can win. The Snowcrash notion of elitists making and running the world is being enacted.

The idea that just below that 1 percent of top content creators is another 10-15 percent of amateurs happy to work at their amateur level is a certain kind of fiction sustaining the entire thing. It's what enables Second Life's maker Linden Lab to get paid huge sums in tier for land (server space) by people wishing to "build their dream).

There's also the obvious point that when you have both a lot of amateurs just putting up their cat's picture on MySpace, a lot of sectarian idiots on Wikipedia, or even a bunch of very smug and superior programmers and graphic artists on SL, what do you have? You do not necessarily have a *better* culture or world. You merely have a *synthetic* culture that is merely...linked up.

Would you *want* to be networked into a great mediocre hive mind like that? We may all be looking for a place to hide from it soon.

I believe that Web 2.0 is not the cause of the amorality of which you speak, but a tool for a revolution that has been brewing for quite some time.
As an example, we "amateurs" are tired of professional encyclopedias just ignoring the fact that there were such things as "Meganthropus" in the hominid chain. Sure, Wikepedia has some erroneous entries on that example (the gigantic hominid never lived in Australia), but at least Wikepedia has SOMETHING on it, and we can research to verify. Brit