[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Like Boiling a Frog

Wed Jul 1 19:49:28 MDT 2009

The Wikipedia Revolution by Andrew Lih (2009)

by David Runciman

London Review of Books (May 28 2009)

The best one-volume encyclopedia in the world used to be the Columbia
Encyclopedia, first published by Columbia University Press in 1935. In our
house we have the fifth edition, from 1993, and we still get it out
occasionally to look up kings and queens and old-fashioned stuff like
that. It's a lovely book, fat but portable and full of nuggety little
entries on most things you can think of. It also has quite a poignant
preface, in which the editors talk about the difficulties of updating an
encyclopedia in such a fast-changing world: they note how much history,
politics, even geography they have had to revise since the collapse of the
Soviet Empire just a couple of years earlier. They are clearly proud of
their efforts to keep up to speed, but some things inevitably slip through
the net. There are for example no entries for 'email', the 'World Wide
Web' or the 'internet', all of which were just beginning to attract
attention in 1993. The editors think the pace of change at the end of the
20th century means that traditional works of reference are going to have a
hard time keeping up. Really they have no idea.

1993 wasn't so long ago; Bill Clinton was president, a fact that the
Columbia editors boast about having been able to include at the last
moment (the last moment here meaning the weeks or months between the
book's being set and its arriving in the shops or in the hands of
door-to-door salesmen). Yet in encyclopedia publishing, 1993 is now
prehistory. Even 2000, when a sixth - one has to presume final - edition
of the Columbia appeared, belongs to another age. Two years later, a
one-time market analyst called Jimmy Wales started up an experimental
online project called Wikipedia, which allowed volunteers to create their
own encyclopedia entries that could then be revised or even entirely
rewritten by anyone else who happened to be logged on. Wales, like
everyone else involved in the project, didn't know if it would work, but
since the technology was available it seemed worth a try. In its first
year, Wikipedia generated 20,000 articles, and had acquired 200 regular
volunteers working to add more (this compares with the 55,000 articles in
the Columbia, all subject to rigorous standards of editing and
fact-checking, though this in itself was a small-scale enterprise compared
to the behemoths of the industry like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, whose
1989 edition covered 400,000 different topics). By the end of 2002, the
number of entries on Wikipedia had more than doubled. But it was only in
2003, once it became apparent that there was nothing to stop it continuing
to double in size (which is what it did), that Wikipedia started to
attract attention outside the small tech-community that had noticed its
launch. In early 2004, there were 188,000 articles; by 2006, 895,000. In
2007 there were signs that the pace of growth might start to level off,
and only in 2008 did it begin to look like the numbers might be
stabilising. The English-language version of Wikipedia currently has more
than 2,870,000 entries, a number that has increased by 500,000 over the
last twelve months. However, the English-language version is only one of
more than 250 different versions in other languages. German, French,
Italian, Polish, Dutch and Japanese Wikipedia all have more than half a
million entries each, with plenty of room to add. Xhosa Wikipedia
currently has 110. Meanwhile, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had managed to
increase the number of its entries from 400,000 in 1989 to 700,000 by 2007.

Part of the reason the astonishing growth of Wikipedia took even its
founders by surprise was that this wasn't their first attempt to set up an
online encyclopedia. Wikipedia was an offshoot of something called
Nupedia, which Wales had established in 2000 with the aim of using online
volunteers to produce a new work of reference that would be free to use.
The mistake Wales and his Nupedia collaborators made was to assume that
any encyclopedia has to go through a formal editing process if it's going
to be reliable. Editors were appointed whose job was to decide on
appropriate topics, open them up to online editing and then approve final
versions once an agreed standard had been met. The editing process had
seven stages from 'assignment' to 'mark-up', and was a slow, frustrating
and ultimately fruitless business. By the end of the first year about two
dozen articles had been completed, while the drafts of a few hundred more
were still being fretted over. It looked like the vast additional
resources and manpower that the internet had made available for checking
reference books was going to overwhelm the capacities of anyone trying to
process the information.

Hence the Wikipedia solution, stumbled on more by chance than by design:
don't try to process the information. It is generally assumed that what is
distinctive about Wikipedia is that it is open to anyone to contribute,
but that was true of Nupedia too. Wikipedia is different in that it
doesn't try to frame the creation of new entries with commissioned
beginnings and fixed endpoints. It is open to anyone to initiate an entry
on Wikipedia, and no entry is ever formally closed, since it is also open
to anyone to keep editing and altering whatever is already there.
Wikipedia still uses a large volunteer army of editors and 'janitors' to
oversee the whole process, looking out for flagrant abuses and sounding
the alarm when disputes get out of hand. But it is not the job of any
editor to decide what counts as an entry. If there is any doubt about
whether something is too trivial to take up space even in so limitless a
space as Wikipedia it is put to the vote of others users (and any vote can
always be overturned by another vote further down the line); otherwise, if
you don't like an entry it is up to you to change it. The editors are
there to try to ensure this is done in as non-abusive a way as possible.
But it is not up to anyone to call time on anything.

That's how it works. The puzzle is why it works, given that this way of
compiling an encyclopedia seems to have a flaw so obvious it is hardly
worth stating: if no entry is ever nailed down, how do you know when you
are reading an entry that someone hasn't just interfered with it, making
it thoroughly unreliable? The early years of Wikipedia were dogged by this
suspicion, and many people - including a lot of schoolteachers and
university lecturers who could remember the distant days before 2002 when
books were books and editors actually edited - were openly derisive of a
work of reference that appeared to make no effort to discriminate between
good information and bad. It is easy to assume that some version of
Gresham's Law, which states that bad money will always drive out good,
must apply to the circulation of facts as well. Why would anyone with good
information want to put it in a place where bad information could
contaminate it at the touch of a button? Wouldn't they choose to keep it
to themselves, or at the very least give it to someone who could recognise
its true value, leaving open-access encyclopedias to the mercies of all
the flakes and grudge-bearers who want to use its veneer of objectivity to
force their craziness down other people's throats? Well, the answer is
apparently not. One of the remarkable achievements of Wikipedia is to show
that on the internet Gresham's Law can work in reverse: Wikipedia has
turned into a relatively reliable source of information on the widest
possible range of subjects because, on the whole, the good drives out the
bad. When someone sabotages or messes with an otherwise sound entry, there
are plenty of people out there who see it as their job to undo the damage,
often within seconds of its happening. It turns out that the people who
believe in truth and objectivity are at least as numerous as all the
crazies, pranksters and time-wasters, and they are often considerably more
tenacious, ruthless and monomaniacal. On Wikipedia, it's the good guys who
will hunt you down.

Wales thinks this tells us something surprising and reassuring about human
nature. 'Generally we find most people out there on the internet are
good', he says. 'It's one of the wonderful humanitarian discoveries in
Wikipedia that most people only want to help us and build this free,
non-profit, charitable resource'. But in truth it's a bit more complicated
than that. Wikipedia works because it is highly distinctive in the way it
pulls knowledge together from many different sources. Most internet-based
techniques for gathering information are aggregative, in that they try to
pool as much information as possible, allowing all the prejudices and
random bits of disinformation that attach to individual opinions to cancel
each other out. This is true of the many different kinds of polling that
take place on the internet, which use the wisdom of crowds to produce
answers far more accurate than any individual can give. It's also pretty
much what happens at Google, where everybody else's searches are monitored
to help filter the information that you might find useful. Aggregative
methods minimise personal responsibility for what is produced and place
all the emphasis on collective outcomes - after all, who knows, or cares,
what their own Google searches are adding to the sum of knowledge (or
subtracting from it)? However, Wikipedia's approach to knowledge gathering
is not aggregative but cumulative. It builds up information bit by bit,
edit by edit, and it never stops. It also leaves a virtual paper trail for
every entry, so that it is possible to trace the various steps by which an
article has reached its current form.

When knowledge is generated by crowds, no single individual has much
personal responsibility for what is produced, but nor does any one person
have a realistic prospect of shaping the outcome. With Wikipedia, the
opposite is true. The fact that there is no final version means that
anyone can change anything, but it also means that every given change can
be attributed to a particular individual. Though it is possible, and
common, to make edits on Wikipedia anonymously (by hiding behind a
nickname), it is still true that someone is always responsible for
everything that happens, and that someone always knows who they are. So
the fact that there are no authoritative versions on Wikipedia is what
makes it possible to generate a sense of personal accountability for
particular entries, since any entry at any given time is the
responsibility of the last person to edit it. This seems to be enough to
make most people want to get it right. But it also means that those who
don't want to get it right can have their mistakes corrected. The secret
to Wikipedia's success lies in the fact that personal responsibility for
particular mistakes can't be erased, but the mistakes themselves can be.

Still, it takes a lot of policing. Wikipedia has a 'Recent Changes Patrol'
whose job is to surf the site picking up on all the endless obscenities
and absurdities that are inserted by people who can't believe a website
would allow anyone to change any page on it (when they discover that they
can, but that changes quickly get corrected, the fun wears off). More
serious tinkering requires more concerted oversight. From its outset
Wikipedia has aimed to operate according to a code of conduct (of which
the centrepiece is the proposition that 'Wikipedia has a neutral point of
view'), but to dispense with firm rules. However, in 2004, the three
revert rule ('3RR') was introduced in order to prevent tit-for-tat
battles, whereby corrections are corrected back to their original form
(known as 'reverts'), then corrected back again, and so on, because two
contributors cannot agree on a single point of view. The classic case
concerned the entry for Gdansk. The name of the town was changed by a
German contributor to Danzig, then by a Polish contributor back to Gdansk,
then back to Danzig, with no sign of this stopping until the
administrators intervened. The 3RR states: 'An editor must not perform
more than three reverts, in whole or in part, on a single page within a
24-hour period'. Just three changes per 24 hours in a work of reference
might seem absurdly fluid by traditional standards, but for Wikipedia this
was a draconian measure, adopted with deep reluctance by some. Even so,
the Gdansk/Danzig wars were only finally settled when the matter was put
to a vote of the wider Wikipedia community, and it was agreed that the
town could be referred to as Danzig in relation to the period between 1308
and 1945, and in the biographies of 'clearly German persons'; otherwise it
was to be Gdansk. It took two years of back and forth to reach this point:
a traditional encyclopedia editor could have settled it in ten minutes.
Nevertheless, the consensus position on the name appears to have stuck,
which given the history of Gdansk/Danzig is no small achievement.

That Wikipedia represents a finely calibrated balance between licence and
surveillance, and between anonymity and responsibility, is something often
missed by those who want to translate its achievements elsewhere. It is
not an easy model to replicate. One notorious failure came in 2005, when
the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times decided to experiment with a
'wikitorial', which would allow anyone to contribute to the writing of an
editorial column using the same techniques as a Wikipedia entry. The aim
was to let readers shape the views expressed by the newspaper; the result
was a complete mess, as the entire process was hijacked by vandals
determined either to skew the political slant of the piece, or to
overwhelm the Times editorial page with the sort of shock images in which
the internet abounds, and the project was quickly abandoned. The newspaper
had made two mistakes. First, its editors seemed to imagine that a
wikitorial would edit itself, so they left it alone while they devoted
themselves to other things (like editing 'real' columns). But as Wikipedia
shows, freedom requires constant vigilance, and a column will write itself
only if someone is on hand to fight off all the people who will try to
wreck it. Second, a newspaper editorial is actually a much less open-ended
form of writing than an encyclopedia entry. Newspaper writing has a
shelf-life: it appears and is read at a particular time, often on a
particular day. As a result, contributors have an incentive to try to skew
the whole process at the moment of maximum impact. The Wikipedia principle
that all mistakes can be corrected (so that it is hardly worth trying to
introduce them) has much less force in the case of newspapers, because by
the time any corrections have been made most readers will have moved on.

This is why encyclopedias have been made better by the advent of the
internet, but newspapers have been made worse: the cumulative impact of
the readers' comments that can now be appended online to almost any
article tends to diminish most forms of human understanding. Bias is not
cancelled out on the readers' pages of newspaper websites, as might happen
if opinion were being aggregated, but nor is it eliminated over time, as
in the case of Wikipedia. Instead, each contribution just sits there,
glowering back at you, demanding your attention. I recently read through
the hundreds of comments that Guardian readers had attached to an article
about Julie Myerson, the novelist who wrote about her drug-addicted son
and sparked a wave of middle-class outrage and voyeuristic delight. What
was striking was not just the anger of all those who wanted to see the
Myersons suffer horribly for their crimes, but the equivalent anger of all
those who were disgusted by such vindictiveness, and the anger of the
people who were appalled by the prissiness of that response, and the anger
of the people who couldn't believe anyone would waste their time caring
about this rubbish, and on, and on. Everyone was furious with everyone
else, and determined not to be shouted down. No one with a reasonable
point of view would bother wasting it on a site like this. When tempers
are frayed, and time horizons are short, the bad drives out the good.

One of the ironic consequences of the open-endedness of the Wikipedia
editorial process is that many of its articles are preoccupied with the
immediate past. The desire to update the facts about any given subject
often means that the facts that remain are the most up-to-date ones.
Biographical entries on living individuals tend to concentrate on the most
recent things they have done, particularly if these have generated a lot
of newsprint that can be used as source material. For an encyclopedia,
Wikipedia devotes far too much space to the latest scandals and
controversies, whose significance, if any, is impossible to gauge. But
this is not a reflection of some desire on the part of the founders of
Wikipedia to stir up interest by courting topicality and trivia. Far from
it: it reflects an almost touching reverence for properly grounded
evidence that underlies the entire Wikipedia project. Although anyone can
edit anything in Wikipedia, everything that appears there is supposed to
carry a reference to some published source so that it can be checked by
other readers. The Wikipedia policy on this is as follows:

The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth -
that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to
Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we
think it is true. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations
and for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, or the
material may be removed.

The proliferation of newspaper sources on the internet means that this is
often the best place to look for new, verifiable source material
(particularly if you are not too bothered about truth). Most of the
information out there is recent information, and so therefore is most of
what winds up on Wikipedia.

The insistence that everything in Wikipedia can be referred to something
outside itself stems from an anxiety that the encyclopedia might otherwise
become its own source material, and start to generate free-floating facts
out of nothing. One of the many fascinating details to emerge from Andrew
Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution is that both Jimmy Wales and one of his
first collaborators, Larry Sanger, are self-confessed and totally earnest
'objectivists', meaning followers of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Sanger
wrote his doctoral thesis at Ohio State University under the title
'Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification'. He
and Wales first encountered each other on an internet forum Wales had
established in 1992, which offered a 'Moderated Discussion of Objectivist
Philosophy' and described itself as 'the most scholarly of all Objectivist
discussions available on the networks'. Other early contributors to
Wikipedia learned about its existence through the community of online
objectivists, and it was this bond as much as anything that drove the
project forward in its initial stages.

What is objectivism? Frankly, I have no idea. I have never read a word by
Ayn Rand, and though I know she is an object of veneration in some
surprising places (Alan Greenspan, for instance, is a fan), the little
bits I have picked up always sounded a bit bonkers to me. {1} So this
seemed a good test of Wikipedia's much vaunted NPOV (neutral point of
view): I would look her up on Wales and Sanger's encyclopedia to find out
what she's all about. Well, it's hard to express in mere words just how
dispiriting an experience it is trying to find out about objectivism on
Wikipedia. This isn't because the entries seem biased or uncritical. It is
just that they are so introverted, boring and just long. The entry on Ayn
Rand herself is more than 8000 words long and covers her views on
everything from economics to homosexuality in technical and mind-numbing
detail. There are separate lengthy entries on objectivist metaphysics,
objectivist epistemology, objectivist politics, objectivist ethics, plus
entries on all Rand's various books, including the novels The Fountainhead
and Atlas Shrugged, and entries on all the characters in these novels, and
entries that offer plot summaries of these novels, and even entries on
individual chapters. All of it reads as though it has been worked over far
too much, and like any form of writing that is overcooked it alienates the
reader by appearing to be closed off in its own private world of obsession
and anxiety. Compare this with the entry on Rand in the 1993 Columbia
Encyclopedia:

1905-82, American writer, born St Petersburg, Russia. She came to the
United States in 1926 and worked for many years as a screenwriter. Her
novels are romantic and dramatic, and they espouse a philosophy of
rational self-interest that opposes the collective of the modern welfare
state. Her best-known novels include The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas
Shrugged (1957). In The New Intellectual (1961) she summarised her
philosophy, which she called 'objectivism'.

That's it (with a couple of references appended), and seems admirably
clear in seventy words. Also, by allocating her seventy words, the
Columbia editors give some indication of what they think she's worth: on
the same page she gets more space than the French architect Joseph Jacques
Ramée (1764-1842) and the Swiss novelist Charles Ferdinand Ramuz
(1878-1947), but fewer words than the French historian and politician
Alfred Nicolas Rambaud (1842-1905), the Spanish histologist Santiago Ramon
y Cajal (1852-1934) and the Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay
(1852-1916). That also seems pretty clear.

Wikipedia still has its advantages, however. Despairing of discovering
anything about Rand that I could make sense of, I looked up the article on
Jimmy Wales, to see if that shed any light on his personal philosophy.
This article is also long, but more reasonably so, given that Wales is
responsible for one of the most significant inventions of the 21st
century. It is also admirably even-handed, managing to convey that Wales
is both something of a visionary and also something of a creep. The
section on his personal life includes this detail, which neither he nor
anyone else has seen fit to edit: 'His first wife, Pam, was quoted in a
September 2008 W magazine article as saying that Wales, because he
believed altruism was evil, discouraged her from pursuing a nursing degree
when they were married'. The entry also details the break-up of Wales's
second marriage and the claims of a subsequent girlfriend, the Canadian
conservative columnist Rachel Marsden, that she only discovered he was
ending his relationship with her by reading about it on Wikipedia. I guess
that's 'objectivism' for you.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wales has long since fallen out with Sanger,
re-editing his Wikipedia entry to remove any reference to him as a
co-founder of the project, even though both men were there from the
beginning. But it may be Sanger's PhD title that gives the clearest
indication of some of the difficulties that lie ahead. 'Epistemic
circularity' is a fancy way of saying that Wikipedia could prove too
successful for its own good. This is not because entries on the site are
likely to start cannibalising each other and end up reducing the whole
thing to a relativistic soup: Wikipedia is still very good at
distinguishing cross-references within the site from source material
outside it. Instead, the problem may come as the source material itself
starts to ape the wiki-model. Already, academic publishers are grappling
with the problem of open access, which makes increasing numbers of
academic articles freely available on the web ('free' here meaning not
only free to use but also free to dice, slice and reproduce in another
format). Some of the pressure for this move is coming from the people who
fund academic research and who want to see it disseminated as widely as
possible. But a number of funding bodies (particularly in the sciences)
are also questioning whether it makes sense to wait until research is
'completed' before publishing it. Why not put earlier draft versions out
there, or even just the initial raw data, and let others see what they can
make of it? This opens up the possibility of collaborative editing online:
authors might 'publish' draft versions of their books and readers could
tinker with them to produce something they are happy with. Of course, the
idea of the permanently updatable book raises the prospect of nightmarish
copyright issues (or more likely the end of copyright altogether), and it
is hardly attractive for academic publishers, since it cuts off their most
obvious revenue stream, which has always been to charge for the finished
product, properly edited in-house. It also raises difficulties for the
idea of verifiability. Wikipedia needs its source material to be
relatively stable, so that its entries can have fixed reference points.
But if the reference points are themselves subject to endless change, then
it becomes much harder to know what counts as verification.

Meanwhile, as conventional publishing starts to open up to the Wikipedia
way of doing things, the encyclopedia is toying with a revert back to more
conventional methods. German Wikipedia has started experimenting with
'flagged' articles, which means articles that have been certified as
reliable and free from vandalism, to meet a demand for certainty from
German users. (Incidentally, this is not the only international variation
in Wikipedia practice that seems to conform to national stereotypes: on
Japanese Wikipedia, editors are much more reluctant than their Western
counterparts to alter existing pages and prefer to conduct their exchanges
on adjoining discussion sites rather than blithely interfering with what
someone else has written.) The German experiment has now led to a demand
for approved articles to be published separately on a static website
protected from editing, in order to give readers the option of something
that has been pre-verified.

The question of 'flagging' is one of the issues discussed in the afterword
of Lih's book, which addresses the most pressing challenges Wikipedia is
likely to face in the future. Other concerns include the creation of a
fully-paid executive staff, something that may cause serious divisions in
an organisation that relies so heavily on voluntary labour; the risk of a
major lawsuit by someone who has been libelled in a Wikipedia entry (the
fact that anyone can remove the offending information doesn't prevent them
from trying to sue, though it isn't clear who would be liable - the person
who introduced the libel or the last person to edit the page on which it
appears?); and the increasing complexity of the editing software, which is
putting off many new contributors. More interesting than any of this,
though, is the fact that the afterword was written as a wiki: that is, as
a collaborative exercise using software similar to that of the
encyclopedia itself, and made available to be freely copied and
distributed. It is good of Lih to include it, since it is somewhat better
written than the rest of the book, having a tighter style and a sharper
focus. The single-authored chapters are full of interest but rather
indulgent, containing too much incidental detail about people Lih wants to
please. The afterword has none of that - it just gets to the point, and
doesn't worry about offending anybody. It helps that this is a book, so
space is limited, and this particular wiki can't indulge in the commonest
vice of entries on Wikipedia, which is not knowing when to stop.

Yet even a piece of writing that has been edited by so many people can't
resist the occasional cliche. The multiple authors of the afterword write:
'The Wikipedia community might be like the frog slowly boiling to death -
unaware of the building crisis, because it is not aware how much its
environment has slowly changed'. When I read this, I thought: is it really
true that frogs can be slowly boiled to death without realising what's
happening to them? So I looked it up on Wikipedia, confident that there
would be an entry. There is: type in 'boiling frog' and you go straight to
a page that tells you everything you need to know. It gives you examples
of the use of the term, its history and a discussion of the veracity of
the central idea, including a description of the late 19th-century
experiment in which it was first demonstrated and the more recent
experiments that have cast doubt on it. Links at the bottom of the page
take you to accounts of these later experiments in scientific journals,
which suggest that the whole thing is a myth. So there it is: you won't
find any of this in the Columbia, or Encyclopaedia Britannica, or anywhere
else for that matter. There is no other way I could have found out about
boiling frogs - truly, for all its flaws, Wikipedia is a wonderful thing.

Note {1}: Jenny Turner wrote about Ayn Rand in the LRB of 1 December 2005.

_____

David Runciman teaches politics at Cambridge. He is the author of
Pluralism and the Personality of the State (2005), The Politics of Good
Intentions (2006) and Political Hypocrisy (2008).