{"id":128,"date":"2005-10-18T15:13:30","date_gmt":"2005-10-18T21:13:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=128"},"modified":"2005-10-18T15:13:30","modified_gmt":"2005-10-18T21:13:30","slug":"the_law_of_the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=128","title":{"rendered":"The law of the wiki"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Register’s Andrew Orlowski<\/a> finds “encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and \u00fcberpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.” Noting that up to now “criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor,” Orlowski quotes from an October 6 post that Wales made<\/a> in response to my criticism<\/a> of Wikipedia’s quality: “I don’t agree with much of this critique … but the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific embarassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.” Although the Internet encyclopedia “appears ill-equipped to respond to the new challenge,” writes Orlowski, “at least Wikipedia is officially out of QD, or the ‘Quality Denial’ stage.”<\/p>\n

Other responses to my critique from wikipedians (as I write that word, I am overwhelmed by a vision of very tiny, very cheerful people dressed in green velvet dancing in a dell) point out that some of the encyclopedia’s entries, particularly those on technical or otherwise esoteric subjects, are quite good. That’s true, and it’s worth thinking about. Why are entries on arcane topics generally better than those on more broadly understood topics? I would guess that the reason’s pretty simple: Fewer people contribute to the arcane entries, and the contributors all tend to have some degree of specialized expertise in the field. For general-interest subjects, on the other hand, it’s a free-for-all. Everyone feels qualified to add his two cents, and the entries decay toward, as Wales puts it, “unreadable crap.”<\/p>\n

In other words, the example of Wikipedia actually undercuts, rather than supports, the Web 2.0 tenet of “collective intelligence.” It reveals that collectivism and intelligence are actually inversely correlated. Here, then, is what I’ll propose as the Law of the Wiki: Output quality declines as the number of contributors increases. Making matters worse, the best contributors will tend to become more and more alienated as they watch their work get mucked up by the knuckleheads, and they’ll eventually stop contributing altogether, leading to a further fall in quality. As Dave Winer<\/a> puts it, “No matter how good something is, there are always more idiots and morons to take it down.”<\/p>\n

Now, there’s a way around this “collective mediocrity” trap. You can abandon democracy and impose centralized control over the output. That’s one of the things that separates open-source software projects from wikis; they incorporate a rigorous quality-control filter to weed out the crap before it pollutes the product. If Wikipedia wants to achieve it’s goal of being “authoritative,” I think it will have to abandon its current structure, admit that “collective intelligence” makes a pretty buzzphrase but a poor organizational model, and define and impose some kind of hierarchical power structure. But that, of course, would raise a whole other dilemma: Is a wiki still a wiki if it isn’t a pure democracy? Can some wikipedians be more equal than others?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Register’s Andrew Orlowski finds “encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and \u00fcberpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.” Noting that up to now “criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor,” Orlowski quotes from an October […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}