Thirteen Ways to Look at the Wikipedia — transcript
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0:00–5:00
Since the room is still on, I'm going to take the priority of introducing our guests right now. Those of you who aren't here yet, you just have to find a space. I'm really delighted to welcome you to the final lecture in our distinguished lecture series this semester. We have a really special guest, Mitch Kaper, who comes to us first as a teacher. He's been teaching this semester at CIMS, of course, on open source software, which has been a very popular idea.
Mitch is currently the president and chair of the Open Source Application Foundation, which, for those of you that know, is a nonprofit that promotes the development and application of high-quality applications and software using open source methods. but he may be the best known he's widely known for there are many things he's known for for founding a company called Lotus Development Corporation and actually designing Lotus 1 2 3 which was of course the killer app of its era and
really did sort of transform the PC industry and bring it to businesses around the world he has all sorts of other distinctions that I would reach but it would take up all of his time. He was a DJ at WHCN-FM in Hartford, Connecticut, a commercial progressive rock station in 1970. He taught TM in 1977 in Cambridge. He founded Lotus in 1982. In 1990, I'm just highlighting things that my eyes stopped on,
he founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with John Kerry Barlow and was its first chairman. In 2003, he became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation. Many of us know that very well. And, you know, he's probably read a lot of his work in many different places, newspapers, magazines, journals. We're really lucky that he now lives in the Bay Area in San Francisco, and we're hoping to see more of him here in South Hall.
And without any further ado, I'm going to introduce Mitch. Thank you. So not only do I teach on campus, I teach in this very room on Monday afternoons. And some of the students who are genuinely masochistic from that course are here this afternoon, as if they haven't gotten enough of them. Thank you. I have several apologies to make.
The first is, as you can probably hear, I am in hopefully the end stage of a cold, and I'm somewhat hoarse. I actually haven't spoken for more than five minutes continuously in over a week, so my voice is not coming with a warranty. We're just going to see how this works out. and I also will apologize in advance to Larry Lessig for shamelessly stealing his presentation format which is becoming increasingly popular
among people who do presentations that may actually be as big a legacy as Creative Commons and everything else Lessig has done as sort of changing how we do PowerPoint and Keynote and things like that let me ask a question Since Jimmy Wales, the founder of the Wikipedia project, was here last week and spoke, can I see the hands of people who heard his talk? Okay, so less than a quarter.
If you folks will bear with me, I will do the minimum amount of necessary repetition to get everybody on the same page. I didn't know whether it was going to be virtually everybody or not, But my talk builds on his, and thanks to Joe, I was able to actually, couldn't get here to hear his talk because I got stuck in traffic on the Bay Bridge, but I was able to hear the recording. How many people use the Wikipedia, if I could see hands here? Oh, good. All right, we won't have to deal with the basic introduction.
And how many people have ever contributed an article or edited anything on the Wikipedia? Could I see? Okay, so about half. So pretty sophisticated crowd. That's great. That means we can have some fun. So I've called my talk 13 ways to look at the Wikipedia, and my final apology is to Wallace Stevens, borrowing his title. Number one, the Wikipedia can't possibly work.
When I describe it to people who have never seen it or used it, And I basically say it's a completely open encyclopedia written entirely by its volunteers. Eight times out of ten, this is what I hear. But it does. It does work. It's really amazing. It is now one of the top 40 websites in the world. A few months ago it was 50. Jimmy said in a good week it's number 30.
5:00–10:00
I think it's heading towards the top 10 of any website. That's eBay, Amazon, Yahoo. It's continuing to grow very, very rapidly. I could give you more statistics, but in the interest of time and the fact that you all use it, I think we can take for granted that at some level it works. But it can't possibly work. It's so counterintuitive. when I started using it I mean I understood perfectly that it was open
and anybody could contribute and that it wasn't centralized but I became interested in it precisely because it did work despite the fact that something in me said that it shouldn't and so really it doesn't look like it should work but it does and we go around and around on that and around and around. But there's really a Zen
sort of Cohen aspect to it. When you're given a paradox to wrestle with, you know, you can either kind of go down with it because it's insoluble in its own terms or you can transcend it, the paradox, because you find out you've had some limiting assumptions that you didn't know you had and it's only an apparent paradox. So this talk is my effort to recount how I've wrestled with some of the paradoxes of Wikipedia and share that with you.
And I promise I will leave time for questions and we'll do something interactive. Anyone can edit any article at any time. Not only is this approximately true, it is literally true, which is one of the most striking things. And this, in fact, when you tell people this, it sets them off. And I love to give the uninitiated demos. And I say, pick a topic. And we find the article on it. There are 800,000 articles in the English language edition of the Wikipedia at the moment.
300,000 in the German. Several French, and I forget which others, with over 100,000. And probably 30 different language editions with over 10,000 articles. So it's a very serious global project. And anyone can edit any article at any time. It's kind of just like the Internet. In the early days, I understood the Internet as really being driven by the two-word phrase,
anyone can. Anyone could, you know, set up a site. Anyone could get connected. it has that quality of openness to it. And that really appealed to me, has always appealed to me when I found something like that. It's the sense that there are very low barriers to entry. It probably has something to do with the fact that I was just a total social outcast as a child.
My parents, I will not give you my, the sad story of my childhood here, you're not interested in. But I will say I was two years younger than everybody else in school. And that was not a big help in terms of social inclusiveness, especially being a boy and maturing more slowly. So no matter how many standard deviations from the norm you looked out, I was not in that in-group. And so the idea that you could actually participate in a system because there really weren't any barriers or nobody to say no to you or exclude you has always been very appealing from the early days of the personal computer industry up to the present.
But if anyone can edit any article at any time and you tell that to an intelligent but naive person, they're going to say, but what about vandalism? Do you mean somebody could come in right now and mess up your entry? And I said, yes, absolutely, and that happens sometimes. Does that mean that somebody could intentionally put in false or misleading information and you wouldn't know? And I said, yes, that also happens some of the time. Does that mean you could have very opinionated people with no actual command of the facts being highly participatory and spreading their nonsense all over it?
Yes, that happens. All of those things happen. But despite that, the quality in the Wikipedia, to put it most as conservatively as I would put it, is actually pretty good. Sometimes it's terrific. And there are areas with problems. And that's really the paradox. How does it manage to be somewhere between pretty good and fantastic despite all of those things happening? Well, we're going to get to that very shortly.
10:00–15:00
But what people assume is someone has to be in charge if it's going to be any good. And I love talking to people about the Wikipedia who don't know about it because it helps people find their deep-seated, unexamined belief that authority is a necessary component of all working social systems. Having grown up in the 60s and kind of having problems with authority, I love this because it's a great counter example it's no longer
theoretical I mean in a conventional sense nobody is in charge we'll talk about governance and Jimmy Wales and the subtleties of it but by any standard that people would recognize is there a boss is there a hierarchy are there you know no someone does not have to be in charge it only seems to us that everything has to work that way I heard something last week that I didn't know that testified even to how deeply embedded this is in me.
Jim was talking about the fact that Wikipedia now, I forget how many servers there are, 30 or so, there are several continents, some number of billions of page views per month. So they have to have system administrators. You know, occasionally machines go down and stuff happens and so on. It's all done on a totally volunteer basis. There is no schedule of it. There is nobody assigning sysadmins. There's a pool of, I think it's actually about 100, he didn't say that, of people with sysadmin privileges. And they just sort of assume at any given time about a dozen people are actually going to be online and watching.
And in fact, it has worked so far. It has scaled. He did admit that they have each other's phone numbers. If something goes wrong, they can call. But I just assumed, well, yeah, that Wikipedia is very decentralized. But of course, they have scheduled assist admins because you can't let the site go down if something happens. And no, I was wrong again. Second big thing where people have an unexamined belief is without experts, you really can't trust the information. You've got to have experts. How are you going to know if it's any good?
So, I mean, it's similar to the other assumption. We don't even know that we have this. and people usually go, well, okay, experts, yeah, I mean, they add value in certain circumstances. I really want to have an opinion from an expert if it's a life-threatening issue, and that's all well and good. But what I think the Wikipedia reveals when you get into discourse with people about it is they just have trouble accepting the fact that you can have good quality information
without having experts, and experts, of course, have to be certified and registered. So the idea of expertise and authority kind of go together in people's minds. When you begin to examine this, this is a little bit odd, because I thought we had learned about not giving our trust over simply to people because they are experts and because they are authorities. I thought we learned this, but evidently not.
So we're still wrestling with these issues in our society. And again, that's why Wikipedia is such a useful kind of actual thing. It's not theoretical. It's there. You can go play with it. You can go. And everything is open and transparent. It's not necessarily easy to find where everything goes on. But the whole process by which it's managed is conducted in the Wikipedia itself. And so if you know which page to go to, you can actually see it. So nothing, and everything that doesn't happen on the wiki happens in IRC,
and all those channels are public too. So it's very, very transparent. So I've become a big Wikipedia evangelist. My user ID is mk4. You can see which articles I've contributed because you can see which articles everybody has contributed. And when I meet an interesting person who I think brings some value to the world, I ask them if they have a Wikipedia entry and if they don't, I tend to create one for them. So if you look I mean, because that's
if it's going to be a repository of all the world's knowledge for all the people of the world, in their own languages somebody has to, I mean I'm a volunteer. So I met Freeman Hrabowski. How many people know who Freeman Hrabowski is? You should go look it up in the Wikipedia. He is the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, but he is perhaps the leading expert, thinker, and genius
15:00–20:00
about educating African-American PhDs in the sciences and has an unbelievable track record, what he's done at UMBC, and has written a book or two, but people don't know. That's why there needs to be an entry on him. So after I met him, when he was here on campus, I created an entry on him. But what I hear when I give people the spiel about Wikipedia, if I haven't lost them yet, is, well, I'll never use it. I just can't trust it.
What's even worse, when I go to gatekeepers, like, and you'll hear more on this, people who run big nonprofits with lots of intellectual capital on their website, and I say, maybe it would be a good idea to get your people to take some of the stuff that's on your website that's interesting and valid and fits the criteria and put it into the Wikipedia over my dead body. So there's still some legitimacy issues and I'm going to talk about what the barriers are, what some of the challenges are, and so on,
because those people who are enthusiastic about it get it, pretty much. but it's still a small percentage. So let's come back to our mantra. Anyone can edit any article at any time. I felt it would be unfair not to say something about in the light of the fact that there's vandalism and people write scurrilous things sometimes how some of the quality control is maintained.
One assignment we did in the class that I'm teaching here early on was to have everybody in the class, this is an open source class, actually make a contribution to the Wikipedia of some kind and then write a short paper about it. And it was really fascinating. And that practice has now been picked up in at least one other class. And I hope it will be picked up much more widely. So one thing that people found was that some people were attracted. When it's an assignment, you kind of have to do it to get credit for the course.
So I admit it's a slightly unnatural situation, but it did give people motivation, albeit perhaps slightly artificial. People reported sometimes having trouble figuring out what to do. And what should I do? But one pattern was that people said, well, I was reading articles and I found problems. I happen to know about knitting or making acoustic guitars, and I read there was a problem, so I went in and I fixed it, and I said, aha, you see, that impulse times about a million
is how the thing manages to get better. So the fact that it's wrong today is one consideration, but the question is what are the dynamics of change, and there are a lot of dynamics for improvement because it's a lot easier to edit an entry into Wikipedia than it is to write source code for an open source project. And many, many, many more people by orders of magnitude have the ability to do that and they stumble on it.
And look, still there's kind of a learning curve. There are some barriers. If you say I want to edit stuff, I would say it's not exactly user-friendly. But despite that, so there's this vector of things getting better. That is because people like to improve stuff and they like to feel like they're making a contribution. And another dynamic is it's very easy to revert an article back to a prior state. There is a complete history kept of every edit to every single article, which is easily visible.
And there are people who, as volunteers, a big part of what they do is to look at changes that have been made, notice vandalism, and go back and fix it because it just takes a few seconds to revert it back. so there's a Wikipedia entry on me you can look that up it was taken, not written by me but basically taken from my website, the biography at some point over the summer
somebody humorously edited it to change probably about a dozen things so they said I was married to like Grace Murray Hopper and it was clearly somebody with a sense of humor and it was clearly done as a demonstration of how easy it was to change. And sure enough, within, somebody can look up here, I forget how long it was, but it was a brief period of time, somebody came in and just reverted it back. But you can see the humorous version, and that happens, like, a lot.
20:00–25:00
In fact, there are some volunteers who are considered to be their civic duty to go and clean up after vandals. And they do that, and it's kind of a game that they play, who can get to the stuff faster. So those are dynamics that really help a lot. In the interest of time, let me go on. Yes? You might want to mention the watch list. Sure. There's another mechanism, because they don't have modern stuff like RSS feeds, which we'll talk about in a minute, called the watch list.
If you are interested in an article, you put it on your watch list. And what that means is any time that article changes, if you go to your page of watched articles, there's an entry there. so you can easily track changes to anything you've written, anything anybody else has written, and people do that because they sort of take responsibility for some area and they watch what's going on in their regular participants. I should say, these few mechanisms I mentioned, they're just the tip of the iceberg. There's probably dozens of these things that people do.
So, all right, that's just first of 13. The others are shorter. Okay, this is in my opinion. Wikipedia is the next big thing. And I have a kind of history, for those of you who know, of being involved pretty early with next big things. In 78, I thought that the PC was the next big thing. I had my little Apple II.
I used to hang around MIT. I wasn't a student, and nobody there took personal computers seriously. They were toys. This is before Clay Christensen had written about disruptive innovation, explaining it all. So I just became convinced that we were going to have to make something out of these PCs to convince people. 1982, I thought a $500 spreadsheet was the next big thing. fortunately there was at least one other person who believed me
which was a venture capitalist. That was Lotus. To tell you where expectations were, when I wrote the Lotus business plan in 82, we forecast first year sales of $3 million. Not unreasonable because the biggest company in the whole industry at that point had just had a $10 or $12 million year. So to come out of the box and be 25% of the biggest guy would be pretty good. In 83, we actually had 53 million in sales. So that was a 1,700% forecasting error.
Fortunately, the variance was favorable. And then the next year, sales tripled again to 150 million. Now, I have to tell you, I didn't know it was going to come out like that. But I just felt it's the next big thing, and people are going to want to have PCs, and they're going to want to have tools on them. And that was Lotus. 1992 I made an investment in a company called UUNet which was one of the first ISPs that returned about 300 to 1. I was too chicken to put in a lot of money.
So again, kind of knowing what the next big thing is is one thing and sort of knowing how to take advantage of it is a slightly different thing. But I tried to get John Doerr, Premier Venture Capitalist to take a look at this company and he said what? And he wouldn't take the meeting because it was just too soon. The idea that, I mean, remember, you people are old enough to remember 1992, unlike many of the students. We won't talk about streaming media in 1995,
but to me, Wikipedia is that order of next big thing. But the question is how it's going to play out. Who are the winners going to be? The losers? What's the time frame? is it Wikipedia itself, is it something like the Wikipedia but different? And look, there's no way to know that. I mean, I think theoretically there's no way to know that. I don't believe in precognition. But what we can do is to sort of inform our intuition better
by diving into what currently is in order to figure out what might be. And that's about all you can do. So what is it that drives the Wikipedia? Number three. It's community. Jimmy said it last week. It's not technology. And I think he is absolutely right. He said, look, it's not an anthill. It's a community. It's people actually relating to each other. The quality of the articles does not emerge through some random stochastic process.
It's not like a market. It has nothing to do with Adam Smith. it's a community. It's an internet enabled community of a particular type, but the magic is that it's, in a sense, not magical. It has lots of things that other successful social organizations have. It has a vision. A free encyclopedia of the world's knowledge for the world's people in their own languages. The vision is the goal. It sort of states what the whole project is heading to.
25:00–30:00
It's very helpful because it provides a kind of an orienting field for a million questions, large and small, because you ask, is this thing that we're thinking about doing, is it going to get us to the vision, or is it going to take us further away? Wikipedia has always had a very clear vision. It also has a clear mission. The mission of the people in the project is to make this thing happen. So they have a kind of a purpose. So it's not just a goal in the abstract, but it's a goal and a direction.
And it has an active sense of identity for its members. They call themselves Wikipedians. This summer, last summer, I went to Hamburg, Germany, to go specifically to a conference called Wikimania. which was the first time the Wikipedians ever gathered together on a worldwide basis. Being a globally distributed community and being a volunteer community, there would be no occasion to get together.
Logistics are pretty hard unless they made a specific point of it. And I always figured, if you really want to understand what's really going on, you've got to go and meet the people and talk to them face-to-face. And these were people with deep connections to each other who had been working with each other for a number of years who were actually meeting each other face-to-face for the first time. It was quite remarkable in many respects. As a community, they have values.
There are things that they believe in together, and we'll get to that in a minute. but values are part of what holds the community together. And as a community, they have practices, things they do, cultural practices, ways of doing things that are consistent with the values that advance behavior in accordance with the mission towards the vision. That's the second time I spoke, man. That's pretty good. Joe, this will probably dry. It's not on the tape recorder.
You're okay. Just on the fleece. So I'm not, I know nothing about social theory, nothing formal, but it just seemed to me that these simple concepts of community, participants, values, practices, and, oh, it has a leader, and that's Jimmy Wales. really interesting model of leadership. I don't know if there could be leaderless communities,
but the successful open source and open content communities, except for maybe the Apache community, but we can get into that if you want in the Q&A. By and large, they all have leaders who exemplify a very different style of leadership than the stereotype model of a corporate leader sort of directing the action and commanding the troops to march forward. The Wikipedia style of leadership actually in some sense is imposed
by the fact that, look, there are no employees. Well, there are now two employees. We can get that. There was one, now there are two. but 99 point something percent of the people working on it are volunteers. You can't tell them what to do, because if they don't like it, they don't have to do it. And so you can't command. And also, there's no money. There could be money, a lot of money. We can talk about that too, but the whole thing has basically been run on not nothing,
but maybe half a million dollars to date of donated services and goods. And more now because of all the bandwidth and the servers and so on. But remarkably little. It should go into the category of things money can't buy. So there's A, love. I didn't think to make a slide. But B, a Wikipedia. If you had a billion dollars five years ago and you could pick the smartest entrepreneur in the world
and say, Mr. or Ms. Smart Entrepreneur, here's a billion dollars I would like you in five years to build this encyclopedia and the statistics. There's a billion words in the English version now. A top 30 website in the world. I don't think it could be done. You can't spend money to do this sort of thing. People have to find their own motivations and it has to be this aggregation of really widely distributed, decentralized volunteer work.
30:00–35:00
And the leadership task is to figure out how to enable that. And I think even more than that, how not to disable it. So, we'll talk a little bit more about that. So, but it's community. I don't think it's a big mystery. I think there's kind of a mantra if we dive down to the next level about how the Wikipedia works.
Let a thousand users edit. So it turns out that here I think we're talking about the English version but I believe similar things are true for the other versions. The bulk of the edits to the Wikipedia are made by a fairly small and distinct group of users numbering not more than a thousand. You know, 50, 60, 70%. Now, that's not necessarily the number of words
because it might be that these thousand users do a huge number of little edits. If you actually go and look at the edit history, there's people who do writing and adding stuff, and then there's people who clean it up, put the links in, make sure the syntax is right, sort of, they're editors. But one of the reasons, and I think this is both the good news and the bad news, and it really speaks against the anthill theory, this is a coherent community of about a thousand people who not everybody has regular contact with everybody else, but
routinely many of these people have contact with each other online and know each other and have personal regard for each other and have an appreciation of strengths and weaknesses and how they work and when to leave them alone and when to push them. I think what's remarkable is that you could get something like Wikipedia coordinated by a large number of volunteers like this. The first thing, you could get volunteers at all. The second, that they can self-coordinate because nobody is saying go do this, go do that.
Everything is self-designed. I mean, it really is. And that's part of the miracle of it. And it's also, if you think about it, a fairly small number of people. None of these people do it full time. I shouldn't say none, but they all presumably have jobs or are students. But I'll tell you, we don't really know the answer to what do these thousand people do with themselves. There are so many interesting research questions here, and it's such a great subject of research.
I'm always promoting the idea that people should do more research about it. So not only is it a community, but it's a real virtual community. By which I mean a community does not have to be physically real to be metaphysically real. People actually have regard for each other. They care about each other as people with respect to their contributions to the project. And that matters a lot. So a great example is that people have reputations.
Now, these are not like eBay reputations, which are a kind of mechanical sort of thing that is quite subject to gaming, although quite useful. These are actual reputations based on actual behavior, so less tidy but more nuanced. So if there's a discussion on a subject, and every article also has a talk page for discussion, even if 10 people have one opinion, if the 11th person is someone who is highly respected
in the community or sub-community, more often than not, that's where the conversation will stop. So it's not like, in that case, voting 10 to 1. It works kind of like the real world, a good part of the real world. And that's interesting. Again, it's so non-magical that it's magical. So let's talk about the values a little bit. And again, it's probably a list of 10 or 15 core values.
I just picked out two. Oh, this is so profound. But no fooling, this is an action. If you go to a Wikipedia and you go, you know, is be nice a value? They're going to go, absolutely, it's number one or number two. It's actually a value there. And they mean it. And that means, it means like, be nice. This is sort of like, the last time this stuff got taken as seriously was in kindergarten.
35:00–40:00
But by consensus, it's a be nice sort of place. You're just nice to people. It is not okay to go and tee off on people just because you're in a bad mood. So it is just so opposite most of the rest of what's published on the net. And it holds things together. People like being there because people are nice to each other. Duh. The only remarkable thing is that it actually exists and works as well as it does.
Be nice. so what it does though is it undercuts one of these hidden assumptions that we have see that's why it's interesting and that's why I put it up here there's an unconscious expectation a lot of us have basically because we've ingested the dominant culture which is a culture of business you know that's the bottom line of our society to use a business metaphor and there's a kind of
ethos in business that justifies cruelty based on necessity. Nature read in tooth and claw. And it's so internalized we may not even know that we have it, but it's kind of the zero-sum game thing. It's the justification for all sorts of petty cruelty in the business world comes from thinking that the competitive, scarce resource
aspect of reality is the only significant one that matters in the carrying out of activities. The Wikipedia is a fabulous counterexample, to its extent, that you can actually have a large-scale, high-impact thing that explicitly does not share that premise. That's very hopeful because it leads me to ask,
well, heck, if they can do it, can anybody else do it? Is this generalizable or is this just one of a kind? And we'll talk about that. So I think it's interesting. Jimmy Wales, on this point, describes himself over and over again as someone with a libertarian political philosophy. In fact, he says he was kind of an objectivist, you know, in Ayn Rand. And I found that just totally striking because the net dot libertarians that I know
have a tropism towards the emotional development of teenagers and a kind of self-absorption and selfishness to stereotype, I'm stereotyping here, that it's just not the way things are run on the Wikipedia. So I probably have had much too narrow a kind of personal take on that. I've been assuming that, well, if you call yourself a libertarian or whatever, you're really a jerk. It's probably because in the early days
at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I just got harassed terribly by people I don't want to go into a long aside so you can ask me more about that if you want but Jimmy I said to Jimmy I don't understand this because you describe yourself as a libertarian and an objectivist but as far as I can tell you don't do anything any different than what the Dalai Lama would do if he were in your shoes trust me he's not a libertarian so
It may just be that our conventional labels don't apply very well, whatever they are, with this type of phenomenon. And that, I think, is the deeper point. NPOV, it's probably the top acronym on Wikipedia, Neutral Point of View. So it is a kind of a tenet, a sort of value. It just says articles should be written from a neutral point of view,
but there's an enormous amount of depth to that and lots of discussion about it. And it has served things very well because it is the basis of trying to form agreement between people who do not otherwise agree? Is there some set of facts about this contentious subject, whether it's North Korea or abortion or Palestine, that people can agree on,
40:00–45:00
even though their sort of opinions and values differ? Not always possible. But he hewing to having a neutral point of view in the content of the Wikipedia has been one of the main drivers towards convergence rather than divergence. It's very interesting. I think it's true at a meta level. So I said, I asked at one point, so is there an obligation or responsibility
on the part of Wikipedians to ensure that the content of it is inclusive in a comprehensive sense. Now, why is this an issue? Well, because in the early days, there were many more articles about Middle Earth than there were about Africa. No longer true. Because it reflected the interests of the people writing things.
But the answer I got was yes. There is that responsibility. And so if we determine that we're really not representing, we Wikipedians, of the world, we have an affirmative responsibility to go and bring people in who are going, who in some will be more reflective of the diversity of the world itself. And in that way, we will not implicitly be saying Middle Earth is a lot more important than Africa.
So I thought that was pretty good, that there's a real willingness to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Practices. Well, this is one of my favorite ones. Don't criticize, improve. I mean, you can literally find that written down. It says, look, if you find something that's wrong, don't bitch about it, go fix it. It's a community value. You know, you get points for doing that. you get a finger wag if you don't,
and it's practical, and it's like grade school stuff, but it's being applied, and it works, which is really great. Another practice. I hadn't heard the term until last week. Real-time peer review. I'll just tell one story. So there is a recent changes law in the wiki of all the changes that are made. People used to watch it because that's one big way to monitor quality. It got to be so many changes
that a human could not keep up with it. What they were actually doing is they were piping the recent changes into an IRC channel and things were moving too quickly. So what somebody did is to write a tool in Java that ingested the IRC feed and let you put filters on it so you could watch for new articles
or articles being created by someone at a particular IP address. And in particular, you could get a feed of all of the edits being made by anonymous users. About 20% of the people, 20% of the contributions are made by unregistered users just from an IP address. Some of them are people who just forget to log in. But of course, it's very thoughtful of the vandals to be anonymous because then they're easy to find.
And that's what people do. And it's somewhat competitive to watch the filtered feed of anonymous contributions because that's a good place to find people messing with the system. So it's real-time peer review. Okay, I've got to pick up the pace a little bit because I want to try to go another 15 minutes and then leave time for questions. So this is going to be about the future. So how big is a fully grown Wikipedia? Look, I don't know, but I'm going to speculate and I hope that somebody challenges me or it starts a discussion.
So we call it an encyclopedia, but if you actually look at it, it's more like a nascent reference library. It has lots of different kinds of volumes in it of specialized reference works, like biographical dictionaries in different subject matter. So if it's a reference library, then how big is that if it were fully done? So I'm guessing a big reference library might be 50,000 volumes. No, not a million, not a thousand. There might be 10,000 entries in each
45:00–50:00
to pick an order of magnitude. I think not 100,000, not a thousand. Okay, I'm going to do some multiplication. 500 million articles. That's how big that would be. It's just straight multiplication. That's a lot. If there are a little less than a million, right now there's 0.2% of the thing that's done. And that's just the reference library, not of other kinds of stuff. So the point is, if it were filled out on this account, it would be pretty big. It would be like a lot bigger than it is now.
Fortunately, a lot smaller than the web, and you could actually index the whole thing nicely using existing technology and isn't going to break anything. So is it likely to get that big? Well, that's really complicated. I believe that one of the drivers, I call it the eBay effect here, but it's just increasing returns, that as it becomes better known for being better known, more and more people go to it. They have less incentive to go anywhere else.
This is why eBay got all the auction action of the general market and killed Yahoo and everybody else. Well, it's the same thing. If people just go to the Wikipedia, because that's what they know, if you're contributing, where are you going to contribute? Is it to the Wikipedia or to something else? No, you're going to go to the Wikipedia. Now, there are other... That doesn't dominate everything, but I think it is kind of this winner-take-all sort of thing that plays out.
We'll talk about some challenges to it, but in my mind, I don't think that it's impossible. The Wikipedia, assuming it doesn't fall over, could be 500 million or a billion articles. It's certainly on a path to going on. Okay. Another perspective. The Wikipedia is fundamentally not about technology. Technologists find this very upsetting. They don't want to hear this. They assume otherwise. It's another one of these deep-seated beliefs that somehow the magic of Wikipedia is, I mean, there's, you know, a bunch of technology if you're doing 40 billion page views a month.
But is this sort of cutting-edge, innovative? Is it the secret sauce? Now, my, this is what I found out when I went to Humber, there's little technology leverage that's there, you know, compared to the potential of what your average geek like me can imagine them doing. Most things are actually done by the electronic equivalent of passing around little slips of paper, which I find just completely troubling.
but again, this is my bias. Hey, it works. So then I'm forced to go, well, wait a minute, maybe I think the new technology is more important than it is. You can't deny the fact that it works. So the example is this votes for deletion page. They've changed the name. I forgot what it's changed to. Articles of deletion. There's a process in the community by which people can nominate new articles
to be considered for deletion, being expunged. Why? Well, for one thing, there's a kind of a notability criterion. It says to be in the Wikipedia, the fact of the information should be notable. This is why not every single high school in the U.S. should have its own entry. At least that's what the argument is about. But also, there are other reasons. There are actually 20 different reasons. You could look them up. There's a page there about why things could be deleted. and what they actually do is they have a wiki-based discussion.
There's not a bulletin board system. There's no forum. There's no reply to to participate in this. You hit the edit button, and you put your two cents in at the bottom of the page. And then after a certain period of time, you quote, vote, which you go, you know, remove it or keep it. It's really a discussion. there's certainly no notification there's no voting you don't press a button it's like doing old school
editing of wiki pages in Marka that's what I mean by not a lot of technology leverage because you look at it I look at it and go, what's 50 ways this could be better so how does the community think about it well Now, and I hope this is a fair characterization, they go, you know, if we automated this, we'd be losing something valuable. And I gave earlier the example that the last person weighing in on the discussion that would remove something,
50:00–55:00
if that's a high-reputation person, that can turn the whole time. And you don't actually want to be counting votes. You want a sense of it. And I go, yeah, that's fine, But it's much harder than it ought to be. And it could be a lot easier, and people could be more productive if the tools were better. But the value currently is that community trumps technology in the Wikipedia,
and I think that's kind of an issue because there could be some problems. So this is the next time I see Jim. there's a little subtlety here hang on Wikipedians are not technophiles they're technoskeptics they're unwilling I think for good reasons to want to put community at risk for the sake of technology and they're therefore willing
to be very selective about technology upgrades and that's what I mean like the Amish. You know, the Amish don't have phones in their houses. They don't think that's consistent with, and I don't know which Amish we're talking about, forgive my ignorance, but some Amish, and I'll tell you how I know about this in a minute. But they have them out in the fields. They have cell phones out there. They made a decision through a community process that their lives would be enhanced, even if there's emergencies and problems and issues. And they actually have cell phones out in the fields.
They're still agricultural. Not in the houses. Kevin Kelly, the author of Out of Control and many other books, is researching, writing a book called, I think, What Technology Wants, and he actually went out and visited the Amish, and he's written about this. It's online. So the Wikipedians are actually a bit like the Amish in that they're being selective about it, but I think it's not unfair to hold the point of view that, like the Amish, they may be missing out
on some opportunities by being pretty conservative about stuff. So let me quickly talk about a challenge that involves that. It's all text in there. There's no XML. It's not structured. You can't get at it. There's no web services interface. There's a ton of quantitative data, but you can't extract it. The Wikipedia is not a database. It's not anything like a database currently.
And it's a significant limitation because it is disconnected from the entire world of the emerging semantic web and meta information and microformats and web services and anybody who is in that world can take five minutes looking at Wikipedia and say, wouldn't it be great if you could do A, B, C, X, Y, and Z also? And it can't. And I wouldn't say that there's no forward motion towards that but there's very, very little.
Fortunately, and that's a huge challenge, fortunately, there's also nothing preventing somebody from adding them. It's open. The content is all free. You can get a four gig dump of all the Wikipedia text and more if you want all the images and put it on your machine. You can actually make that available to the public and you can start hacking on it. You could develop, it's going to be a great project for somebody to develop, I call it a demonstration of what the Wikipedia could do if it also dealt with structured information.
If there's a compelling demonstration, I think you could take it back to the community and convince them, based on that, that it's worth adopting. We can talk more about that, but time is short. The one intriguing thing is if the Wikipedia were enabled in this fashion, we could, in an almost perverse, bizarre, and ironic way, get to the big semantic web in which all of the information of the world is marked up.
Usually when people talk about that, what they mean, the big brains of the WCC, is they want people to produce information, whether it's a blog or a bibliographic database or anything that's both human-readable and machine-readable to begin with. And I won't, I mean, there are whole courses here that go into that, multiple courses. You can probably get a degree in it. So I cannot possibly do justice to it. The one thing I realized was,
if it was as easy to add semantic information or metadata to a page in the Wikipedia as it is to edit it, the Wikipedia community would mark the whole thing up in no time. It would be human power. You would never have to have all the machines do it. Over a period of time, every timeline, every fact, it would all get marked up by people because that's what Wikipedians do. And the value of it would be enhanced. So it's waiting for somebody
55:00–1:00:00
to take on this challenge. Ecosystem collapse, I'm not talking about global climate change. If the Wikipedia becomes big and globally important, I mean, look what's happening with Google. Look at the search engine optimization business. Look at the economics being invested in fooling Google to the benefit or advantage of somebody with a website. If the Wikipedia becomes the essential source for global information, Can any organization, any faction, any person afford not
for it to say what they want it to say about them? No. If that happens, then there will be massive organized attacks on it. It is kind of like, usually your immune system does a pretty good job at detecting self from not-self, and marshalling forces when it recognizes alien invaders, and the antibodies come and they attack whatever it is. But in this scenario where Wikipedia is real popular,
you've got to ask if it's a kind of a race, could it be overwhelmed just in the face of everybody trying to game it or will the immune system get better? So I don't know. I forgot the slides here. Yep, yep. So I worry about that. Okay. Where to from here? In three minutes.
So I think that there are some areas where, of application of the Wikipedia, that would be pretty profound. I would like all of the papers assigned in all of the graduate courses, at every department, in every school, that ever get assigned more than once to have a Wikipedia entry, which you could start and read and say, it's a summary of the paper. It says, this is what this paper is trying to say.
It's collaboratively edited by the world's graduate students. I know it's a much longer discussion about why that would be a good thing. I hope intuitively I saw some body language. People go, oh, that would be pretty good. I should say there are also very obvious reasons why it's not in the interest of lots of people in the academy for that to happen. But there's nothing stopping people from doing that, and I'm hoping it starts small.
But it would really change things a lot. Nonprofits. I mentioned this before. I had a conversation with the head of a big environmental organization in Washington, D.C. They got a ton of stuff on their website. And he was initially really enthusiastic about the idea of transferring their intellectual capital into the Wikipedia in an appropriate kind of way. And then very little happened.
So I did a follow-up. And you begin to see that the Wikipedia community is one thing where you select into it if you feel like you fit and want to do something. and an existing organization out here with a budget and priorities, even if the mission is to disseminate knowledge and information, it's not so easy. And this guy said to me, yeah, some of our 20-somethings, the young staff has got all excited about this because they're really into the Wikipedia.
But those people, they don't decide what to do with their own time in this organization. So what, they're going to do it in their spare time? and the management up here, they don't really get it. They're going, well, how do you trust this information here? And there's some real stickiness in kind of organizational adoption. People can buy in. And I've beta tested. I've tested the idea a dozen times with people to try to see the pattern. The issue is going to be one in which people will recognize the value generally,
but will they take what they know and put it in a useful form. Will they become participants or not? I think it's going to be a slow process. But I will tell you a story about a conversation I had with David Kessler, who is the dean of the medical school at UCSF and used to be the commissioner of the FDA, the tobacco suits. I met him.
1:00:00–1:05:00
Listen from 1:00:13 (MP3 audio)
And we actually grew up in the same small town on Long Island. That's a strange coincidence. And he never heard, he's roughly my contemporary, never heard of the Wikipedia, but this was a year ago. I was explaining it, and he said, you know, let me talk about a conversation. I was just in some part of Asia, in the developing world, at a conference, and I was having a conversation with a very senior medical practitioner,
Listen from 1:00:45 (MP3 audio)
and the conversation was, what is it that you most want from the developed world in terms of help with global health issues? And Kessler said, so I thought it would be something involving money, you know, equipment, or, you know, we need surgeons, or we need training, and they need all those things. And what he said was knowledge.
Listen from 1:01:16 (MP3 audio)
If we knew what you knew just now, and we had that available to us, we could save thousands of lives a year. We just don't have the knowledge. We have internet connections. And I said to Kessler, so here is a great example, and we had a further conversation. So it turns out that if you're a medical resident, if you graduate in a hospital, there's an online service. It's published by Harvard.
Listen from 1:01:46 (MP3 audio)
And it's the theme that you look at all the time when you're first actually treating patients clinically. It's a kind of a database organized by what it is that people have that has all of the latest stuff. Harvard charges a lot of money for this. They make a nice business. I said, so why don't you start the Wikipedia equivalent of this? It's just information. People know what it is. The Wikipedia proves that you could get contributions from health practitioners on this
Listen from 1:02:20 (MP3 audio)
and keep it current, and that you could make available for free, and you could be saving thousands of lives right now. And he said, you know, you're absolutely right. That's a project that's waiting to be done. So it's not just, Wikipedia is not just about kind of looking up neat, interesting stuff. It's, if its potential can be manifested and if we can carry it forward through our organizations, Wikipedia itself, a derivative, all open for debate, it can make a huge impact
Listen from 1:02:54 (MP3 audio)
because information is what matters and counts. It's going to matter more and more, and it's just a wonderful, fabulous cultural invention. That's why I keep wrestling with it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You have about 20 minutes for questions. 20 minutes for questions. Yes. I love your idea of every paper that's ever written to be on there, but there's a problem.
Listen from 1:03:24 (MP3 audio)
It's not just... Just one? There's a big problem, but it relates to, in general, how do we get more information in there. And that is that there's this value of non-original research. And it's very hard to know where the line is of, is this notable enough to be there? And sometimes you have these great fights with people about putting this or that in there. If you're doing original research, you do not publish it yourself in the Wikipedia. That's kind of one of the values.
Listen from 1:03:57 (MP3 audio)
But look, if there's some paper, McGowan's paper, which we just read in my course on open source licensing, that is cited, it's like 80 pages long, and it's like law review stuff, which is pretty hard for me to read. It's pretty not, but it's actually saying something important, which could be expressed in a page or two for us non-legal types. It's pretty uncontentious that that could go in and lots of things like that. start with the low-hanging fruit because there are big problems. Yes?
Listen from 1:04:28 (MP3 audio)
I think it may be possible to generalize something which you were saying about Jimmy Wales and his personality and values sort of informing the way the community built. In this class we were teaching here a month ago, we had a name from Flickr. And Flickr grew out of a gate. And she didn't have a lot of people at first. We sort of died from the gate and greeched them. And the gate was full of her values, welcoming these people. when Flickr grew out of it. It's been bought by Yahoo since. And she's very worried about the currency kind of getting debased by people flooding in.
Listen from 1:04:59 (MP3 audio)
So Yahoo's little button, it doesn't make part of Yahoo. They want to grow slow and sustain it. Yeah, so that's one route to take. I mean, Wikipedia, they've decided to stay outside that commercial realm. Websites that are much smaller, that consist of just information, have sold for many hundreds of millions of dollars. So there is this ongoing discussion about maybe there's a good way to monetize something, at least a little bit, to fund...
1:05:00–1:10:00
Listen from 1:05:30 (MP3 audio)
They would like to convene a meeting of scholars in the Arab world about Wikipedia. There's a nascent version in Arabic, but it could use some attention. That's not where I was going with it. I think often you do need a strong personality with clear values growing slowly. You do. And it can be overwhelmed, and you've got to worry about it. you know that also yes um a little more long-term survivability and even that took this huge hit from now and blogging fighting it off right now that as soon
Listen from 1:06:02 (MP3 audio)
as what the video reaches some valuable critical mass it's going to be the chief bull die uh i i we all prefer that it wins but what are your thoughts on his chances well like i said i don't have a crystal ball. One asset it has is a large number of highly motivated individuals. I believe that they could be much more leveraged by technology than they are. So we're just going to have to see. Some of it is that the cultural values are part of what, you know,
Listen from 1:06:35 (MP3 audio)
to keep it together. It's kind of like that study, I think it was by Putnam at Harvard. I may be mashing things up, but he cited community policing. If in some marginal or transitional city neighborhood you fix the broken windows in the buildings before it gets really bad, You prevent a tipping point of urban decay from happening.
Listen from 1:07:07 (MP3 audio)
So that may be an asset that Wikipedia has. They care a lot about that environment. But it's a huge unknown. I mean, really, I don't think that they quite take it seriously enough sometimes. Yes, in the back. I'm curious. I'm just going to be doing it now extensively. But how does it feel now and how will it be featured with information that is very contact sensitive? So I'm thinking very basic things like Polish, if it's capitalized, one thing if it's non-capitalized, it's Polish.
Listen from 1:07:38 (MP3 audio)
That's kind of simple. Or Stripe, which could have any none of a dozen meanings. But as you then start to go further and further... They have what's called a disambiguation page, which is a standard reusable element. When an entry has multiple senses and they create it, and there's an entry on the disambiguation page for each particular sense that has its own article, and there are people, that's their job in Wikipedia that they volunteered for us and if you go to the volunteers page they may
Listen from 1:08:08 (MP3 audio)
put up a call. We need some help over in disambiguation. We need help in votes for deletion or articles for deletion. That's how it's done today and it's working. There's questions about will it scale or not. I'm wondering how it will work at Thanksgiving. If you go into that 500 million articles, how are you going to... Well, all I can say is before you get to 500 million, you go to 50 million, and then you go to 5 million, and you probably hit, you know, it's a question of the extent to which it can successfully respond to challenges along the way.
Listen from 1:08:44 (MP3 audio)
Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to invent it, and so I think that applies here, too. Yeah, Carl? Do you think that anonymity is survivable long term for the Wikipedia, or will they eventually have to go to some kind of authentication mechanism for people who edit articles? Here's what I have to say about that. I have been wrong about anonymity in the Wikipedia so far. When I first saw it, I said, you've got to get rid of it. It's just going to kill things. And it just hasn't. So my position is that I'm like the confused beginning Zen student.
Listen from 1:09:18 (MP3 audio)
So I don't have opinions about that now. I have opinions and they're wrong. So far. So far. And I don't know, there's no intention on abandoning that. And so far, and you should hear Jimmy go on about it, about how anonymous contributions are important and I can't do that as well as he does. I mean, if I were doing it, I would have made everybody register and authenticate
Listen from 1:09:50 (MP3 audio)
and it wouldn't have been as good. You can imagine that totally effective, huh? Yeah. Very simple stuff. You can go on your computer. Right. So yeah, there are reasons that people do. I mean, you know, I'm a co-founder of EFF. We've done a number of cases to protect anonymous speech, even though it's noxious in many circumstances, because in the broader context, there's a social value. It's a kind of, you know, an escape hatch. There's a thing called sock puppets, which is when you set up an account, you know, under a different, you know, name to do something and that may or may not be, you know, a secret.
1:10:00–1:15:00
Listen from 1:10:22 (MP3 audio)
But no, it's, we have to see what happens. Yeah. You mentioned the moving from information to meta-information. Yeah. And how someone might be interested in downloading it. Well, that's what we did this week. Well, great. And we're going to do it. Who's we? We is a group here at Simms. Uh-huh. And we have this project that's been going on in some ways it's trying to reinvent the reference library as an online service
Listen from 1:10:54 (MP3 audio)
and you can just ask for a topic you're interested in and be given an automatically generated portal that says here's people, here's places, here's times and events that are associated with it. And one of the things we are currently working on is the biographical part and Wikipedia is just fantastic for biographies. Right. But you can't do a search on, you know, by birthday and get everybody, because it's not marked up.
Listen from 1:11:25 (MP3 audio)
But, yeah. Yeah. You say it's not marked up. In English. But it is marked up in many ways. Yes. And one of the things, because all of the, like, the subtitles, you know, articles are indicated in a way so that you can be described. There are templates. Right. And they use standard templates, and people go around conforming articles to the template that they should be in. Yes, and you can use that information. It's like a halfway house. Right. Yeah. And very often it's good enough, as well as the category labels,
Listen from 1:11:57 (MP3 audio)
to get associated with anything that you use for links. Right. So we're hoping to mine a bunch of that stuff and make some things. In the German version, there is a CD or DVD version of it, which there is not because of rights issues in English. And one of the value-added things they did there was just that. They built a tool. And then they asked for volunteers from the German Wikipedia to spend a few days checking it so they had a big party.
Listen from 1:12:27 (MP3 audio)
And they cleaned up 30,000 biographical entries, all of which are now searchable in the DVD version. And it's like real metadata. Well, almost real metadata. So well, good for you. That's a great project. Our previous work was building sort of time and event things. And actually, most of that we got from the Library of Congress. But what you have with the Library of Congress is also books related to the bookshop to talk about people. And the people can link the bio.
Listen from 1:12:57 (MP3 audio)
Once you've got metadata that's a handle, then you can connect an article about Person X from the Wikipedia with some other reference work about Person X, because you really know it's person X. And so this interconnecting of these disparate sources of data through common metadata, it should be a very big deal. We know it's a big deal here. It's just interesting in the Wikipedia world, at least as of August, it was still foggy. Yeah?
Listen from 1:13:30 (MP3 audio)
I'm not a Wikipedia user, but there are two types of, it seems like a single type of discourse or positive discourse. What I'm missing is, number one, the notion of a tutorial, like a software developer, like a web school thing, and it says, okay, here's how to learn this thing. And the other thing I don't see is code. I don't want to go to a code repository that has neat ways of, you know... So, an encyclopedia of all the world's knowledge? Isn't he ambitious enough?
Listen from 1:14:00 (MP3 audio)
I guess it's not all the world's knowledge. That's your point. So, I take... You said code and... Tutorial. Tutorial. So... Yeah. There are actually about a dozen projects under the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the umbrella, including Wikibooks, which is to do a complete set of textbooks about everything. As you can go look at that, I just didn't talk about the Wiktionary, which is the dictionary thing. I didn't talk about WikiQuote, which is like the Bartlett's and quotes. It's actually
Listen from 1:14:32 (MP3 audio)
big. You keep looking at it. And so there are projects inside that to do things. And there's this very interesting startup called Krugel that's trying to essentially be the Wikipedia of code. K-R-U-G-L-E. They're still stealthy. There's more than one. I happen to have a meeting with them. I think by February they're going to be out at the O'Reilly Emerging technology conference. Very cool stuff because it's going to go spider the web for code,
1:15:00–1:20:00
Listen from 1:15:07 (MP3 audio)
index it, categorize it, let you tag it, but it's also all wikiable inherently so that people can comment on it and develop entries about it because they saw that there's meat. So yeah, one of the points that I didn't make because I just lasered in on Wikipedia is it is a great instance of the sort of thing of which there are actually dozens of activities that are going to transform how we produce knowledge. I tend to focus on Wikipedia because it's real. Many of these other things are embryonic
Listen from 1:15:38 (MP3 audio)
or they're starting off in time, and sure, they'll be great. But I love looking at the actual things to see what we can learn from it. Yes? I've heard a couple of articles that have actually criticized the quality of writing information on Wikipedia. I was wondering what your response was. What were the criticisms? Was the criticism well taken? I don't know. I've been in the writing, so I thought that too before.
Listen from 1:16:11 (MP3 audio)
So, here's my observation. Many of the critical articles have been written by people that, in my opinion, just don't believe that it's possible, per my discussion earlier. So I know what they're going to write, because they're not actually writing, they're not giving it a fair trial. But there are issues and problems. When we did the class assignment, here's 30-some entries, several people noted that there were problems. This was horribly inaccurate, so I rewrote it. Well, there you go. You see, one day, bad. Next day, good. So you can't just look at it now. You've got to look at which
Listen from 1:16:45 (MP3 audio)
way it's headed. Now, that doesn't mean it's automatically getting better, but it means you have to do the right kind of assessment. A useful heuristic. not always correct. For estimating quality is to look at the number of edits since there's a complete history. In general, the more edits there have been, the better the quality. Now, when are these wars going back and forth, people put stuff in and take it out and get a lot of edits without the quality. So it's not infallible. I remember what the reason was.
Listen from 1:17:15 (MP3 audio)
The reason was that you don't know at which point something is at a place where and the longer visible, and that if they... It's always... Compared to other products that were released if they weren't complete or fine. If an authority says this is released 1.0, we know that it works. That's that kind of thinking. It's the same thinking again. You've got to go under that and actually look at do a different type of quality
Listen from 1:17:47 (MP3 audio)
test. I think it's hard to do, but possible. I don't believe there have been any rigorous quality tests done yet. Everything is informal and anecdotal. It's looking good, but hey, this is why we have academia. Come on, people. Yes? I sort of want to go back to point eight. It's not about technology. This is the most important one. And also, the original parent of the parent. It shouldn't work. Yes. If I'm somebody who is very much into the issue of information quality, I want to make sure when I see information, I understand it.
Listen from 1:18:18 (MP3 audio)
But I don't understand technology. so I don't understand how things can go back and I don't understand the web page and I don't understand the new discussion boards because they're just, I'm not getting technology at all, I don't have to come. How can I trust it? And that's the issue for me so if I send this to Canada I have no idea how to send it to Canada but my library trusts it my school trusts it So if you're traveling, what I say to such a person is look, if you're going off to some part of the world you're unfamiliar with do you think you ought to go and figure out if there are any shots
Listen from 1:18:50 (MP3 audio)
You need, I mean, a person has a certain amount of responsibility, even if they're not a technophile, to kind of know what they're getting into, and we should be teaching kids that and educating them. Some of these things that we, I don't know about me, or technology background is, but there are things that we might take for granted, people should know about how the web works. Well, we do. Well, that's the other problem is, This is actually very, very exciting in technology. A lot of things aren't done. Right. So, yeah, the other, so point one is people have a responsibility regardless of the conditions.
Listen from 1:19:24 (MP3 audio)
Point two is we suck. I mean, that's not this talk today because you can't fit everything in. But in general, are people who know technology designing things well for people who don't to actually use them? Oh, come on. No, so, I mean, I said we. So, but some of us are trying, but in the same way that the world of business is still undergirded by this kind of zero-sum, lighting a zero-sum game, the world of technology is still undergirded by a lack of concern for how regular people actually use it.
1:20:00–1:25:00
Listen from 1:20:05 (MP3 audio)
we haven't hit the cultural tipping point yet. But that's another talk. So yeah, on your larger point, that's right, and that's the origin, and it's a huge problem. So yeah, in the back. I think so that there's an expectation that you set up in the language that's kind of like old language, like Wikibook. Why keep the same language there? Why not invent a new thing? Whoever thought of Wikibooks? because there's an argument about why that's a good thing.
Listen from 1:20:37 (MP3 audio)
There's pros and cons. There's nothing to stop somebody from inventing a new kind of non-linear medium, whatever it is that comes after the book, as a big cultural artifact. Thinking. What's it, thinking? Individual thoughts. But the book is a kind of a public embodied artifact. Unless you've got some mind-reading technology. In which case, I could introduce you to some VCs. The granularity of Wookiee is done in the article.
Listen from 1:21:08 (MP3 audio)
Yeah. Individual thoughts are like, you have six words. Not just the placeholder, though. They call them radio wireless. And you call them earlier refrigerators iceboxes. You get used to the new technology. But it's sort of, yes, there are always old forms persist in the new media until people invent those new media. But that's also another talk. I think we have time for one or two more quick questions. Okay, so let me give people who haven't asked a question a chance. Yes, sir.
Listen from 1:21:38 (MP3 audio)
I would like you to say a little bit more about the neutral point of view of Wikipedia and how that compares to the scientific method and whether there's, you know, is there a way to create a Wikipedia that does more like a scientific method or is that built into this or how does that play out? I guess the other end of the spectrum would be ideology. I think neutral point of view is a convenient and useful fiction.
Listen from 1:22:11 (MP3 audio)
I've got postmodern DNA, and I don't believe that you could really be neutral. We all have a point of view, and we're well advised to sort of know what it is and be open about it. But NPOV really is a convenient fiction. It's useful. And so it's like a Newtonian approximation in a quantum world. It works well enough for a broad enough range of phenomena at the moment, but it's certainly not the ultimate.
Listen from 1:22:43 (MP3 audio)
And you can point to where it tends to go off. So if there are disputes that are very hard to reconcile, the community value is to give a lot of weight to received opinion. in society. So it's 1978 and I want to write an article about the future of personal computers. I'll probably, my edit will probably get squashed because I'm so far off to receive the opinion
Listen from 1:23:14 (MP3 audio)
that everybody is going to have one of these things. Just me and Bill Gates and a few other crazy people. So, you know, trying to establish what the neutral point of view is by appeal to what most people believe or what, not most people, what experts believe received opinion, it has some problems. So, you know, that's why we still need philosophers, because there are hard problems. I have one last question in the back.
Listen from 1:23:44 (MP3 audio)
I'm wondering if there's been any discussion in the sort of role of equity-community scales of making your education an explicit ranking or something like that. Yeah, there has been discussion. The general view is negative for the same reason they don't want to have voting as votes. They think that a reputation is a much more fragile, human, and delicate sort of thing, and that if you reduce it down to a number, you're actually losing a lot of what it means. Now, the other side of that is arguable, which is, yeah, once you've got to quantify it,
Listen from 1:24:17 (MP3 audio)
you can do all this neat stuff with it. And that's not entirely false. My observation is that Wikipedia is a community where community trumps technology. So if there's going to be more technical affordances in a Wikipedia-style thing, it's going to have to be done initially on the outside, because natively it just doesn't get any momentum. And we'll see. And I'm very interested in experiments, because I do think they're not Luddite.
Listen from 1:24:49 (MP3 audio)
They're a little bit more Amish than I would want to be about it. But I'm a technical kind of guy. And it is in the interactions of the technical folks and the non-technical folks and the people with the different points of view, if we can engage with each other in a respectful kind of way, we're collectively going to figure out what the next stage is in a much better kind of fashion. That's true in Wikipedia, that's true for political reform in the U.S., but as I've said several times, that's another talk.
1:25:00–1:25:39
Listen from 1:25:24 (MP3 audio)
Thank you.
Untranscribed interval, 1:25:24–1:25:39: possible silence or omitted speech. No description of this interval has been verified.
Generation and audio provenance
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- 2026-09-09T22:55:27.673394+00:00
- Speech-recognition engine
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Audio stayed local during generation. This provenance identifies the source and process; it does not certify transcription accuracy.
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