[photo by factoryjoe]

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, “Diogenes of Sinope,” or “turnip,” or “Crazy Eddie,” or “Bagoas,” or “quadratic formula,” or “Bristol Beaufighter,” or “squeegee,” or “Sanford B. Dole,” and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.

I heart Nicholson Baker to the attack… even more now that I’ve read his essay on Wikipedia in the New York Review of Books. His piece is generous, funny, fair, and– amazingly– accurate. A bit more:

This sounds chaotic, but even the Pop-Tarts page is under control most of the time. The “unhelpful” or “inappropriate”—sometimes stoned, racist, violent, metalheaded—changes are quickly fixed by human stompers and algorithmicized helper bots. It’s a game. Wikipedians see vandalism as a problem, and it certainly can be, but a Diogenes-minded observer would submit that Wikipedia would never have been the prodigious success it has been without its demons.

This is a reference book that can suddenly go nasty on you. Who knows whether, when you look up Harvard’s one-time warrior-president, James Bryant Conant, you’re going to get a bland, evenhanded article about him, or whether the whole page will read (as it did for seventeen minutes on April 26, 2006): “HES A BIG STUPID HEAD.” James Conant was, after all, in some important ways, a big stupid head. He was studiously anti-Semitic, a strong believer in wonder-weapons—a man who was quite as happy figuring out new ways to kill people as he was administering a great university. Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead it’s a fast-paced game of paintball.

David Warlick is wondering whether to cite a Wikipedia entry and posits that the important question to consider might be “what would happen if it’s wrong.” My short answers: yes and that’s always the question that should be asked, whether it’s Wikipedia or not. Now my longer answer:

I will generally use a Wikipedia reference with no more worry than a reference to any other resource… after all, most books and journal articles that people will defer to without question are authored by individuals, with books often encountering no gatekeepers at all and journal articles most often “approved” by institutional affiliation and the existing social network of academicians clucking positively about the tone and use of inside vocabulary than any stringent review of content. Is there any form of traditional publication that isn’t really the result of a social process?

I consider Wikipedia just another information resource, as flawed and potentially suspect as all the rest. The potential problems with its information are more obvious to us and we accept them less readily than we do critical problems with the origin of information in other mediums that we have had more time to accept and/or that have had more time to wear us down. At least at Wikipedia when there is discussion, debate, and controversy it is all there in the Talk pages (which I am coming to believe are one of the most undersung and revolutionary aspects of Wikipedia) for people to make their own judgments about.

It’s hard not to laugh at people in my own original field of education– English Lit– snarling about Wikipedia while unquestioningly accepting political views from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post (not to mention The New Republic, The Nation, etc) or literary views from the Chicago Review, the American Poetry Review, etc. Do they really believe these publications are without slant and ideological motivation, that they publish “just the facts, ma’am?” Which isn’t to say these are “bad” publications, only that citing them should logically entail no less hand-wringing than citing Wikipedia.

The real “problem” with Wikipedia is that truth by consensus and the quest for NPOV can lead to a version of representing the facts that is essentially an appeal to the lowest common denominator. Which is quite acceptable when discussing the chemical composition of sugar, but potentially a problem when trying to portray an “accurate” picture of the politics of sugar and corn syrup in foods or the sugar wars in Uganda or California in the 30s. But again, paying attention to the Talk pages is a must, just as paying attention to the editorial pages and other work by authors is a must when considering traditional media.

Sounding the death knell for social software applications (and classes of application) is a sport for some prognosticators and bread and butter for the naysayers. Most of the time they are equally wrong. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? But this major upcoming change to the Wikipedia editing system has me tempted to join in.

Technorati reveals no links to the page on Flagged Revisions, but given that Wikipedia’s success (not to mention any number of purported failings) is generally attributed to its open editing system, implementing multiple layers of bureaucratic approvals sounds like a very big deal indeed.

After multiple readings I am beginning to think that the documentation of this change is being purposefully obfuscated. The very terminology of “surveyors” who have the right to “flag” a particular revision as “sighted” (meaning: administrators who have the right to promote a page as being correct) is a bit mystifying. But the bottom line appears to be this: there will be a new class of administrators with a rather broad power to vet pages. The mechanism of this power comes in the display: the sighted (approved) version of the page will be the one that users who have not logged in will see by default. The fact that later revisions are available is touted as a major reason why this isn’t a bad change, but being available and being obvious and utilized are very different things. A closed system is a closed system regardless of whether the system is actually locked or only apparently so.

Users who are logged in (an exceedingly small minority of users to whom this change is not really directed) will see the actual, current version of the page. This makes sense: such users are typically those who are editing Wikipedia, they will understand these changes which will be opaque to more than 99% of the Wikipedia users. Far worse and more restricting is the fact that all users will, when they edit the page, will see the current version! This will not just be disconcerting when there are newer, unapproved revisions… it will reduce and dissuade contributions from the general user population which is a significant part of the group of Wikipedia editors. Registered users contribute the greatest number of edits, but I suspect that the majority of original and significant content– as opposed to stylistic, structural and essentially clerical changes– come from the huge unregistered population. It is, after all, what wikis and Wikipedia are all about! And let’s not forget that future registered users come from this vast core of anonymous editors. You know those users, they are the ones who go on to be dedicated, enthusiastic Wikipedians.

Is corporatization an inevitable attribute of long-term, sustained success and growth? More importantly, are all the familiar power structures that have been partially subverted (and re-created in different forms) bound to come back with enough time and popularity? I understand the motivation behind this change, but it seems like a poor– and potentially tragic– implementation. Is this an example of the kind of mediocrity by consensus that some of the negative voices claim? And will this new, officially licensed group do what all special groups of this type tend to do and, consciously or not, assume the role of power-seeker and empire builder?

While plenty of professors have complained about the lack of accuracy or completeness of entries, and some have discouraged or tried to bar students from using it, the history department at Middlebury College is trying to take a stronger, collective stand. It voted this month to bar students from citing the Web site as a source in papers or other academic work. –Inside Higher Ed

No one disputes that Wikipedia has inaccuracies and outright errors. Students should definitely be taught how to use it as a resource. But blanket rules against citing it at all are simply reactionary and myopic. Educate students on how to negotiate the terrain, don’t try to keep them on only the same old paths you are comfortable with. Most of academia’s denizens make their hay questioning and challenging the published work of others… now students are being subtly taught to reinforce that very power structure… question Wikipedia but not every other source they find? Verify Wikipedia but you can’t cite it? What’s really being taught here? Hint: not much compared to what’s being ignored.

One of the more interesting sessions I attended at the recent HICSS conference was a presentation on (eventual best paper prize winner) Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia by Fernanda Viegas. Using both content analysis of Wikipedia Talk pages and an internally developed visualization tool called History Flow, Viegas and her fellow researchers were able to provide interesting insight beyond the rate of Wikipedia’s growth and into the nature of that growth.

One interesting result was the observation that while vandalism continued to happen in Wikipedia as it became a “high value target,” it remained very resilient to such acts: mass deletions of various kinds, for instance, are both still deleted in a median time of under 3 minutes!

The History Flow visualizations show the phenomenal increase in editing and a simultaneous decrease in “edit wars” (long sequences of editors undoing each other’s changes):

Finally, it is easy to see that while the volume of Wikipedia content continues to blossom, pages in non-content namespaces (talk, templates, categories) are growing disproportionately:

Further analysis of the Talk pages, whose content was independently coded into ten different categories (coordination request, reference to guidelines, off-topic remark, etc) showed that nearly 60% of the content on Talk pages was made up of various requests for coordination of content, over 10% were requests for further info and clarification, nearly 8% were references to Wikipedia guidelines, and over 1.5% were info boxes of various kinds!

Wikipedia remains a prime example of decentralized, collaborative resource creation and maintenance. It’s often used as an example of what people can do working together with a goal and letting the coordination and organization of a project emerge naturally from the group. That makes it all the more satisfying to see this kind of research into what that distributed coordination actually looks like and what kind of structures are emerging.

I expressed my skepticism about the Citizendium Wikipedia fork at TechCrunch… Clay Shirky has thoughtfully dismantled the most fundamental flaws in the conception of the project. Is there some new way around them I’m not seeing?

Most of Jaron Lanier’s critique of Wikipedia (to use an unfair shorthand– go read the essay for yourself) is John Dvorak style trolling: build the strawman (Wikipedia without any administration or bureaucracy), light the torch with controversial, fiery rhetoric (calling Wikipedia an “online fetish site for foolish collectivism”), and set it ablaze with appeals to the elitist, self-righteous intellectual inside each of us that likes to consider ourselves above the rabble.

The reality is much less interesting than Lanier’s fantastic vision. There is, of course, a danger in creation by community. Anyone who uses the web has seen the horrific results of design by committee, and I wouldn’t harness the collective intelligence of the crowd to write an insightful volume on what poetry is (create) or make a good goulash (perform). But it seems to me that the collective intelligence is more than a match for things like creating an encyclopedic entry for goulash and poetry. These are very different activities. Recognizing that group consensus leads to positive results in only some circumstances hardly seems like an intellectual breakthrough.

Nor is Wikipedia free of administration or bureaucratic procedure as even the most half-hearted investigation reveals. In fact, if you want to be a significant contributor to the effort it takes quite a bit of time to figure out all the rules and procedures that govern the site once you get beyond simple editing.

There is one thing Lanier gets right: we are currently living in a time in which the perception of power of collective thought has swung radically to the positive. Instead of hearing about the lowest common denominator and too many cooks spoiling the broth we hear about the wisdom of crowds and the power of the community. It’s good to suggest caution in assigning the product of collective efforts as authoritative. I would suggest that the problem of authority is much larger than this particular issue and it would be wise to recognize that even the Wikipedia is essentially an infant, rather than infantile; it is an experiment that is helping to answer the very questions Jaron raises, not a collective Frankensteinian monster.

Clay takes up the sense-making cause with News of Wikipedia’s Death Greatly Exaggerated. It’s really not that complicated: while Wikipedia has been and remains “open” for editing, it is not open in the sense that it is wholly open to anyone with no rules. There have always been rules and guidelines governing Wikipedia. To its credit, Wikipedia has worked diligently on making most of those explicit. Even at the most fundamental level, the rules must be there or else there would be no guarantee that Wikipedia would be an encyclopedia like resource from one day to the next!

Free is as free does– and allows in others– just like free speech. Nicholas Carr, on the other hand, has simply created a fantastical strawman and set rhetorical fire to it. Lots of smoke, a little light, but not much insight. At least he recognizes his fantasy in the followup.

Mr. Carr should spend some time actually participating inside the community to see how it all actually works. Because in the end, the Wikipedia works and that should matter a great deal. It is by far the most open system of editing and publication I’ve ever seen (note that it is a system, so it has to have some form of structure and organization). Even the “locked” pages demand just a free registration for editing– and even then the balance of the community rules the day, not the administrator. As one who has been directly involved in the process of trying to delete pages (and protect others from being deleted), the whole process comes down to the community, not the administrators alone.