aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Monday, April 17, 2006
Questioning the wisdom of crowds
A couple commenters on apophenia led me to Jason Scott’s speech at Notacon 3 from a couple weeks ago. Jason says, “I’m very happy with this speech...”
A lot of people thought I was going to attack Wikipedia as being “wrong” and something that should be “stopped”, which is a useless argument/approach to take, especially if you’re into freedom of expression. My main thesis is that Wikipedia’s initial design and architecture, which is now changing constantly, failed to take the reality of humanity and the way people interact with information into account, and in doing so, has wasted a nearly-incalculable amount of energy and has betrayed, to some extent, it’s promises, credo and goals. You know, minor stuff.
I’ll have to listen again, contemplate and dig deeper into some of Jason’s good criticisms. [text] [audio] My gut tells me that while he measures Wikipedia against its lofty goals, I still consider Wikipedia an extraordinary experiment so I am much more forgiving. For example, I’m pleased that the design and architecture are changing. It seems obvious that they must.
To date I excuse Jimbo Wale’s rhetorical excesses, though I may have much more to learn. The part of Jason’s rhetoric that I find troubling is his assessment of the human character:
The most frustrating part about Wikipedia is the fact that that when you make a change, somebody who wants to undo that change is just some guy. Jimbo holds this up as the great aspect of Wikipedia is that everybody gets to get their hands in it and we’re all working together but they don’t realise we kill each other. We kill each other every day. Over shit, over Nintendo games, over the fact that somebody parked in the wrong space. We do this. We’re human beings.[...]
What I think we can learn from Wikipedia is to understand that people will always act this way… With Wikipedia, if you say given this set of behaviours, and given this stage that people could put things on, people will act this way, it’s a pretty good indicator of saying “OK, well the next time I set up an organisation the next time I make something editable by the public, the next time I make the going-on, this is what’s going to happen, people are going to go on and try to destroy it, they’re going to try to destroy it on the front end, they’re going to try and destroy it from the back end.”
Now I’m no Pollyanna, and I know human beings are not ants. But I believe we can be pulled up to our higher selves or down to our lower selves. I’d look to build Levitt/Dubner Freakonomic-style incentives into the culture and architecture of Wikipedia, even as I acknowledge that today I don’t know what that means.
And while Jason is critical of Jimbo’s “control of Wikipedia” - the inference I took was that it should be more democratic - I’ve pointed to Jeff Bates’ implication that Wikipedia would benefit from being more like Open Source, “In every open-source project, he said, there is ‘a benevolent dictator’ who ultimately takes responsibility, even though the code is contributed by many. Good stuff results only if someone puts their name on it.’”
Maybe Jimbo’s not the one. His style is vastly different from that of Craig Newmark - who literally did put his name on it even as his business card lists him as co-founder and customer service rep of Craigslist. Craig and Jimbo have very different styles but likely share a more optimistic view of humankind than Jason:
Some things are fairly universal. One of those is that people pretty much everywhere have some of the same values, and pretty much everyone out there is trustworthy.
I’d add “with the right incentives.” Craig’s found some. Jimbo’s found some too but he needs to find some more.
There is a wisdom of crowds. I cling to my optimism that now we have the technology to develop the tools that will help us harvest it. Wikipedia may not be the way; but I continue to believe that it is pointing in the right direction.
