Wikilove
The Long Now Foundation held a seminar yesterday, down at Fort Mason. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia.com and WIkipedia's "father" lectured on the future of the project, on social innovations and the future of the encyclopedia. It was - of course - a truly fascinating session (with lots of good questions to).
Wikipedia is growing quickly, and the recent brouhaha about there being an error pointing out a certain individual as complicit in murdering president Kennedy has simply strengthened the project. When CNN called me up to yell at me Wikipedia really grew, noted Wales.
But the perhaps most interesting part of the lecture was on what Wikipedia actually is. There are two different views of the true nature of Wikipedia. The first is that it is a collective hive-mind that basically uses pseudo-darwinistic mechanisms and creates a kind of collaborative selective pressure to weed out bad articles and canonize good ones. This view is, Wales submits, clearly wrong.
Wikipedia is, he states, a community. The individuals matter. Yes, there are a lot of contributors and, yes there are more than a million pages in the English version, but the encyclopedia depends on a core group of wikipedians that number, perhaps, 200-300.
This is a radically different view of Wikipedia from the view that is sometimes pushed in libertarian circles of Wikipedia as a new and spontaneous order, he thinks. Well, perhaps. But even in a spontaneous order you would not necessarily expect to find contributions evenly distributed. Knowing what we know about scale-free networks we would probably expect the contributions to be heavily unevenly distributed - not unlike those between seeders/leechers in file-sharing networks.
It is in fact pretty simple to see the synthesis of the two views presented above if one thinks about the network of wikipedians as a scale-free network. The mistake I think Wales does is that he thinks that darwinian systemic order is something like brownian gas order. Darwinian order may instead be the result of a scale-free network of selection where certain elements in the network have stronger selective qualities than others.
But the really interesting issue is if this will scale. Wales thinks - as do I - that it will. And interestingly his view of why it will scale is that the community will have to subdivide into several smaller communities. This is consistenet with the views on social networks today - where there seems to be a limit to how large a certain social network with a certain cohesion factor can actually be, see for example the so-called Dunbar-number.
But there is another distinction, where Wales is right. He says that WIkipedia is not, in any way, a technical innovation. All the technology needed to do Wikipedia was around in 1995. Instead, he states, it is a social innovation, drawing on the fact that people will cooperate if they are given the chance. We must design for cooperation.
This is a point that seems to resonate with the findings of Robert Axelrod on "tit for that" and the evolution of cooperation. And it is a point that Wales makes well. He asked us to think about restaurant design, and went through the steps: we want to offer steak, so we must have steak knives. But wait! If we have steak knives people will be able to stab each other! So, we must put all the people eating steaks in cages...Right? Uh, no...
This is, as Wales notes, not the dominant design paradigm in restaurant design. It is, however, the dominant design in software design. Everyone tries to design out the opportunities to do evil. But when they do this, they also eliminate the possible growth of trust. Wikipedia is designed not with liability in mind, but with accountability. And the basic idea is that accountability always requires social innovation, and that it cannot be design into the architecture.
In a sense Wales is the Anti-lessig. He is working to keep the rules out of the code, out of the architecture.
Wales is also redefining copyright. Surprisingly he notes that WIkipedia would not be possible to print, because of liabilities in copyright issues. The notice-and-take down regime of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act actually protects Wikipedia, and makes it possible for it to exist in the current, repressive copyright regime.
This is a paradox: the DMCA as an enabler of Wikipedia? Well, it is true to a certain extent. The real truth - and Wales realizes this since he is a member of the Creative Commons board - is of course that our current copyright rules were not built to handled collaborative creative work like Wikipedia. And it will have to change to enable even more social networks generated content. Soon.
Wales is now exploring the technologies of Wikipedia in a semi-new company. Wikia. They are recruiting. What are you waiting for? His motto alone makes you want to work for the guy: make [[Wikilove]], not [[war]].