Wiki truth or different perspectives?

Sunday Times, Sunday 24 Dec 06
Stand-off in Wikipedia Land

In just six years, Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written and edited by the people for the people, has become one of the most remarkable phenomena of the Internet. But does such egalitarian sharing of knowledge lead us towards truth or chaos? Richard Waters talks to the website's two founders, who have reached different conclusions

THE article about Mr Eric Raymond in Wikipedia certainly paints an intriguing portrait, even if some of the facts seem to be in dispute.

A US technology visionary, Mr Raymond is described as both an anarcho-capitalist (defined elsewhere in the online encyclopedia as a libertarian who believes in the completely unfettered workings of the market) and a neo-pagan 'initiate witch and coven leader'.

He is said to be an 'enthusiastic amateur musician', a strong opponent of gun control, and a controversial commentator who has argued that blacks are responsible for a larger proportion of crimes than whites because they have lower IQs.

His claim to a black belt in taekwondo is unsubstantiated, and his self-professed leading role in the Linux software development project is said to be in dispute.

If these incidentals in Mr Raymond's life seem to get undue prominence, the article also finds room for his main claim to fame. As the author of The Cathedral And The Bazaar, an influential book about the workings of a new approach to software development known as open source, Mr Raymond is considered one of the early proponents of an intellectual movement that has swept to prominence with the rise of the Internet.

Its essence is simple: that ad hoc groups of like-minded people, working in loosely organised online communities (the bazaar of the title) are capable of producing feats of intellectual achievement that until now had been thought within reach only of highly organised teams of specialised experts (the builders of the cathedral.)

That makes him just the kind of person likely to lend his intellectual weight to a project like Wikipedia itself. Open to anyone with access to a browser, the collaborative encyclopaedia has become one of the most remarkable phenomena of the online world since its launch in 2001.
Its English language version claims some 1.4 million articles, with another 3.5 million in 229 other languages. It ranks as the 15th most popular site on the Web, and its listings often appear near the top in Google search results - the modern stamp of public approval, since it shows that many other websites consider its results authoritative enough to link to.

For Mr Raymond, though, mixing with the masses on Wikipedia has left a lot to be desired. His contributions on the subject of science fiction have frequently been rewritten by others and his attempts to reinstate his own ideas have been shouted down.

'It left a bad taste in my mouth,' he says. His unflattering conclusion about the quality of intellectual debate on Wikipedia is: 'You tend to find that articles are taken over by moonbats.'

Asked what he thought of the Wikipedia entry about him, whether it was accurate, fair and balanced, he replied: 'Last I checked, it was neither accurate, nor fair, nor balanced.'

Mr Raymond has now retreated into the sort of intellectual cocoon that might seem surprising for an arch-proponent of open online collaboration. He points with pride to his contributions to Encyclopaedia Britannica - a distinctly closed realm where the traditional virtues of scholarly excellence and expert editing are still valued.

Ironically, those contributions will soon include an article on the open source movement, whose aspirations seem so antithetical to those of Encyclopaedia Britannica itself.

According to critics such as Mr Raymond, there is a crisis in Wikipedia-land, an idea that is starting to show its fatal flaws. 'It's not a process issue: it's a fundamental philosophical issue,' says Mr Raymond, who argues that a loosely organised group can never agree on something as important and as subjective as this: how to present the sum of human knowledge.

Others are trying to do something about these supposed weaknesses. Mr Larry Sanger, one of the two co-founders of Wikipedia and its first editor, is working on a rival project that would take all of the online encyclopaedia's existing entries, then feed them through a filter comprised of expert specialists. Known as Citizendium, it would in effect impose a traditional layer of scholarly order on the unruly masses.

The very idea sends Wikipedia purists into paroxysms. Mr Clay Shirky, a technology writer and teacher who is one of the project's most vociferous supporters, says that trying to impose a more traditional hierarchical system on top of an open collaborative one would kill the idea stone dead.
The outcome of this intellectual tussle is about more than just Wikipedia. The online encyclopaedia is the most visible and ambitious example of a new cultural movement that is forming around the Internet.

It is based on the belief that the collective actions of millions of individuals, properly coordinated, can yield powerful results. If Wikipedia can overcome its shortcomings and create a stable model for mass collaboration, it will have gone a long way towards breaking down the entrenched power of society's experts.

The idea that a specially trained group holds unique insight and power has been prevalent 'ever since the formation of guilds', says Mr Ross Mayfield, founder of Socialtext, a company that sells 'social software' tools like wikis - webpages that are open to a group of people to write and edit. 'Things are different today: we have an alternative, and it is more open.'

No wonder the experts, through projects like Citizendium, are planning a counter-attack. The bestknown test to have been carried out on Wikipedia's accuracy was largely a red herring. Last year, the magazine Nature published the findings of a comparison between the open online encyclopaedia and Britannica. The apparent conclusion: that there is really not much to show between the two.

The Nature test, however, was hardly representative, or even one that touched on the most fundamental questions raised by the Wikipedia experiment. It turns out that a collaborative reference work like this is pretty good at explaining the basic facts (the focus of the Nature experiment). Even the encyclopaedia's critics concede this point.

Things start to go awry when it comes to less clear-cut issues - history, say, or politics. The so-called 'edit wars' that are waged on Wikipedia over any issue that attracts strong ideological disagreement have forced the site to retreat from its own ideal of openness. The article about US President George W. Bush, for instance, has been 'locked' since 2004, open only to a few people to edit. Roughly one out of every thousand pages is protected in this way.

This invites a philosophical question. If anyone can present his or her own view of the truth on a communal website like this, which should take precedence?

Mr Sanger, who left Wikipedia after its first year, says: 'As a philosophical point, the Wikipedia doesn't add much to our understanding of truth or knowledge. But it's adding a lot to the debate about these as social topics.'

Mr Sanger comes across as a man with a grudge. With a PhD in philosophy and an abiding personal interest in epistemology, he must have been an easy choice when Mr Jimmy Wales was looking to hire an editor-in-chief for Nupedia, his first attempt at an open online reference work.
That project quickly ran into the sand: the process for editing contributions took too long, with the result that few articles saw the light of day.

In its place, Mr Sanger proposed something altogether simpler: a reference work built around a 'wiki', an online document that is open to anyone who wants to write in or edit it.

Freed from Nupedia's constraints, Wikipedia took off quickly. Yet to hear Mr Sanger's version of events, things started to go off the rails just months after it was launched. By the summer of 2001, he says, the new online community was being overrun by what he calls 'trolls' and 'anarchist-types' - people 'opposed to the idea that anyone should have any kind of authority that others do not'.

Mr Sanger's response was to propose a stronger role for expert editors, people with the power to resolve disputes and lay down the law. Citizendium, the expert-edited version of Wikipedia that he says will be launched before the end of this year, is his latest attempt to rewrite this particular piece of history.

He is unconcerned about sounding unfashionably elitist. In the online community that he proposes, people with the trappings of expertise - such as an academic or professional qualification, or demonstrable experience in a particular field - will hold sway.

Mr Wales, by contrast, has always taken a less interventionist stance. While he says that expertise certainly has a role in Wikipedia, he has not tried to enshrine it in the encyclopaedia's editorial processes. Asked how disagreements should best be resolved, Mr Wales offers only this: 'With strong support for individual rights, and respect for reason.'

On one side of this divide are the idealists who believe that individual expression and mass online collaboration, freed from the traditional constraints found in the offline world, can yield incalculable benefits.

According to this view, the experts represent a ruling caste whose main interest is in protecting their own privileges. The Internet offers a historic opportunity to undermine that authority.
The other side of this argument was outlined by technology author Jaron Lanier in an essay earlier this year titled Digital Maoism. Wikipedia, he argued, is part of a broader movement on the Internet that aims to promote the collective view above individual judgment.

The rivalry between these views points to what Mr Sanger calls 'the new politics of knowledge'. How a society's collective knowledge is determined - what appears in its encyclopaedias - depends more than anything on the processes at work. Like a political system, the design of these processes is all-important to the final result.

In Mr Sanger's view, Wikipedia has fallen into the trap that befalls all anarchistic societies: starting in a perfect state with no preconceived rules, they collapse into mob rule or dictatorship. Constitutional representative democracy, on the other hand, relies on a willing transfer of authority to people charged with representing the interests of the many: in other words, the experts.

Translated to the utopian world of Citizendium, anyone with sufficient specialist knowledge and training will be able to volunteer to become an expert, and order will be maintained by a cadre of volunteer 'constables' whose job it is to keep the peace.

The critics say it simply isn't possible to impose an authority structure like this on the sort of free-wheeling and open online communities that seem to thrive on the Web - such as Wikipedia - without destroying the very thing that gave rise to them in the first place.

A more recent study by research scientists from software giant IBM may offer some hope that the online community could evolve its own processes.

A debate has grown up around Wikipedia's editing processes, producing an explosion in the number of pages on the site dedicated to airing, and resolving, disputes. One possible conclusion, say the IBM researchers, is that Wikipedia 'is becoming less anarchic and more driven by policies and guidelines'.

The mob, it seems, may have the power to create order out of its own chaos: 'Such trappings of bureaucracy are often seen as the result of the exertion of power from the top down. Yet in Wikipedia they seem to emerge, to some degree, spontaneously.'
Financial Times