Clay Shirky, in responding to Jaron Lanier’s recent essay Digital Maoism, provides an excellent description of the way Wikipedia works today:
Neither proponents nor detractors of hive mind rhetoric have much interesting to say about Wikipedia itself, because both groups ignore the details. As Fernanda Viegas’s work shows, Wikipedia isn’t an experiment in anonymous collectivist creation; it is a specific form of production, with its own bureaucratic logic and processes for maintaining editorial control. Indeed, though the public discussions of Wikipedia often focus on the ‘everyone can edit’ notion, the truth of the matter is that a small group of participants design and enforce editorial policy through mechanisms like the Talk pages, lock protection, article inclusion voting, mailing lists, and so on. Furthermore, proposed edits are highly dependant on individual reputation — anonymous additions or alterations are subjected to a higher degree of both scrutiny and control, while the reputation of known contributors is publicly discussed on the Talk pages.
Wikipedia’s bureaucratic structure increasingly resembles the editorial structure of a traditional publishing operation, with “a small group of participants [who] design and enforce editorial policy” and a large group of contributors judged according to their reputations (ie, talent). As it has pursued its goal of improving its quality, it has naturally evolved away from an open-collective structure, with little central control or rule-making, toward a more conventional hierarchical structure. Today, the essential difference between Wikipedia and other reference-book publishers may well be that Wikipedia can draw on a vast pool of free, volunteer labor, whereas most publishers have to pay their workers. Yet, as I’ve written recently, the myth of the centerless collective continues to cling to Wikipedia, promulgated by Wikipedia evangelists like Mitch Kapor and echoed throughout the press.
So when Shirky writes, at the end of his critique, that “to have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action … is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures” I don’t think he’s actually that far from Lanier’s point that “the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force.” Lanier, too, is arguing against caricatures, ones that, in his view, demean the central role that individuals play in the creation of culture.
But when Shirky adds the word “anonymous” to his sentence “Wikipedia isn’t an experiment in anonymous collectivist creation,” I think he’s missing, or trying to gloss over, a deeper and more troubling point that Lanier makes:
When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn’t just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books. Even Britannica has an editorial voice, which some people have criticized as being vaguely too “Dead White Men.”
When Shirky writes that “contra Lanier, individual motivations in Wikipedia are not only alive and well, it would collapse without them,” he’s misreading Lanier. It’s not the anonymity of the process that concerns Lanier, but the anonymity of the product. Those are two very different things. And while Wikipedia may now have an editorial process, it certainly doesn’t have an editorial voice – it’s committee-speak. Now, it may turn out that this doesn’t matter to people – that we’re willing to sacrifice authorial voice in order to get free content that’s “good enough.” (And I’m not just talking about encyclopedias.) What that choice would bring, though, is a kind of cultural deafness, and that’s a frightening prospect, at least to some of us.
Thanks for posting a link to Shirky’s essay. It is a good one, and the immediate benefit of Lanier’s piece seems to be its prompting of more thoughtful analysis from Wikipedia proponents. But in his key last paragraph, Shirky says “The internet has made group forming ridiculously easy.” Perhaps too easy, IMO, and in most cases one can legitimately question whether the group exists at all. When the demands of social interaction outweigh our individual desires, we can just turn off the PC and go back to “American Idol”, especially if we are anonymous to the other members of our group. And this is Wikipedia’s fundamental problem, which is one of scale. It is a tremendous tool for a true “group”, i.e. those who know each other and have some stake (their reputation) if they do something dumb or annoying, to collaborate and produce written content, usually of a utilitarian nature. But once the “group” broadens to anonymous dilletantes, everything slows down, as reputational bargaining becomes more difficult and uncertain. I still cannot see how the Interent scales as a means of producing culture beyond server software without confronting the ironclad requiement of anonymous contribution. Maybe if those anonymous contributors were getting paid, that might make the group more cohesive.
Hi Nick
I think it’s great that you keep pointing out the cracks and fissures in the “collective/social internet” hype.
Do you see a difference in how this hype evolves in the US compared to Europe? Is there a special “thirst for electronic salvation” to be quenched over on your side of the pond?
Here is a simple question to be asked with regard to the current state of all types of web-related “free”/”open” products:
Cui bono? Who benefits?
My quick shot for an answer:
In the case of software tools programmers benefit in terms of improvement of expert skills, networking and attention which furthers their individual status in a given tool-related community (e.g. html parser code). Some are able to start or sustain their own small software business this way. They may also get attenton from the general lay users but 99.9% can’t or won’t take advantage of that.
Who benefits from “collective” wikis/tags/blogs? The major benefit in terms of “intellectual achievement” or “self-expression” lies with the /authors/ themselves, especially if they get the opportunity to engage in a meaningful and rewarding debate with other authors (i.e. avoiding edit wars). This also sheds some light on social tagging: without meaningful “rich content” feedback on why some item was tagged using a certain term there is no learning taking place at all, so no learning, no “intelligence” whatsoever.)
Secondly the big network and search engine operators profit from the increased traffic, the time spent online by users (g..gle search is certainly a major way how wikipedia is accessed).
And the users/readers themselves come in third. They save the money and time they would have spent buying books, going to the library or sifting through pages of ambiguous web content found by search engines.
So there you have your “collective”. To me it looks pretty familiar, you could call it “pluralistic society driven by personal profit”.
Anything new that I missed?
One more comment on “good enough” content:
Learning or education requires fact checking, positive interaction, intelluctual challenge, criticism grounded in mutual respect… (among many other things I have certainly missed here).
The peculiar form of content and authorship of wiki-type internet content should be a great opportunity to educate people (young and old) on how to work with information in a critical and constructive way.
If that’s not what’s happening in schools and universities rigth now then these organizations have a big problem with the quality of their own internal structure/process.
No wiki in the world is going to fix a poor educational or scientific system.
“Good enough” should mean: use the internet to get a first glimpse on the topic in order to get the key words you want to look for and then do your own rearsch using works of reference. Whether Wikipedia is among those is a different matter.
Interesting post (and topic in general). I wrote about the wisdom or madness of crowds a week or two ago which comes at the same thing from a different perspective: http://www.badlanguage.net/?p=134
Nick,
The future you describe seems particularly awful. No more individuality. No more Encyclopedia Britannica. Individual expression crushed by anonymous structures hiding behind hive-minds avatars.
Wikipedia should clearly be banned to allow for the survival of authorial voice and personnality. It is clear that this crusade will not be won by mere speech. Action must be taken. Laws must be passed Culprits must be hanged. Masses must be tamed.
One doesn’t have to pass laws or hang culprits to destroy a resource. He merely has to prove that a different resource is more useful. Mr. Carr demonstrates how books are more useful for knowledge by showing how Wikipedia doesn’t have a soul, waters down its information through compromise, and is actually a small self-appointed bureaucracy masquerading as a consensus of the people. I agree with all of his accusations, but I still use and link to Wikipedia more than any other resource, and I’m not alone. Mr. Carr has proclaimed the death of Wikipedia more than once and even suggests that its users are “willing to sacrifice authorial voice in order to get free content that’s ‘good enough.’”
I use Wikipedia for a variety of reasons. Saving $69.95 a year isn’t one of them. I want a single authoritative source that isn’t going away, that is accessible to everyone and that is updated as technology progresses. I have found no better resource for those things than Wikipedia. It would be an added bonus if the authors were Nobel Prize winners, university professors, commentators, museum curators, scientists, and other experts chosen for their field expertise, as they are at Britannica, but that isn’t the most important thing.
What?!!! The authority, expertise and eloquence of each author aren’t the most important things? That’s right. When it comes to a resource that is being used to define the concepts behind each part of our language, a common understanding of each term is more important than the quality of the article. Don’t take my word for it; look at the numbers. Comparing any article in Wikipedia to Britannica that isn’t a current event leaves little doubt as to which has better information, but how many Britannica articles do I reference? Zero. How many Britannica articles come up on the typical Google search? Zero. As a result, the terms that are defined differently in the two resources invariably give preference to the Wikipedia definition in common usage. It isn’t because we wouldn’t like to have great authors define our words, and it isn’t because we’re too chintzy to pay seventy bucks a year for more knowledge. The reason Wikipedia is becoming universal, even with all of her blatant flaws and dumbed-down definitions, is because there isn’t a viable alternative. Earth has become an integrated network that doubles her knowledge annually. We absolutely must have a common database of terms to define each concept of this new knowledge in order to communicate this wealth of information. It would be nice if Nobel Prize winners, scientists and experts contributed to Wikipedia, and I’m sure many have tried, but when a 15-year-old administrator or a gang of Zionists has the absolute power to decide “the truth” for everyone else, what’s the point?
Wikipedia isn’t useful as “the sum of all human knowledge” because the few people who approve content are rarely, if ever, the most knowledgeable in each field they control. Only someone who wants to get a cursory idea of a subject uses Wikipedia for that. Rather, Wikipedia is a common source of definitions for our words, a necessity for efficient communication. It only succeeds in being this common source because no other universally accessible source exists that can keep up with technology. It’s our best option because it is our only option. When a sort method based on branches of usefulness replaces the linear chronology of the Wiki engine, the world will have a better repository for its languages.
“A voice should be sensed as a whole.”
That’s a key sentence in Lanier. I don’t think its so much writer’s voice that’s missing from many W. articles, as integration, unity, wholeness. It’s much worse than that W. articles are stylistically bad; they aren’t a cognitive sum as a good article should be, with the points and sub-points consciously structured to serve an overall purpose. Where there should be a brick house, too often we find only a pile of bricks.