MaxedOutMama
Friday, June 17, 2005
Wikipedia And Capitalism
I found No Oil For Pacifist's post on Wikipedia charming and oddly fascinating. He objects to some pieces of it that various readers find politicized. But it was his beginning paragraph that has been holding my attention all morning:
(Here I should disclose my own bias. I both use and contribute to open-source projects, and I find them on the whole far better than the commercial products. The reason is that they remain closer to their user base; if we want something it will appear, but it will usually appear in a way that's less tyrannical than in commercial software. With most successful corporate packages, there comes a time when the improvements cause more problems than they solve.)
Open-source is, as Carl notes, not just confined to software, but to all sorts of collaborative projects. Among those, by the way, are sites such as Bankers Online, which is composed of professional bankers pooling their knowledge to meet the growing needs of the profession. As you might suspect, since banking is a highly regulated field, 90% of the traffic on the site is related to compliance issues. The collaborative effort may have evolved as a defensive measure, but it is a well-established venture at this point.
There is nothing political about the site; it is used so widely because it is extremely useful. Nor does any particular political mindset dominate. I suspect your average banker is somewhat more conservative than the average American, but that's simply because dealing with money quickly strips the rosy tint off your cognitive spectacles. Many people encounter their financial problems because of what they do, not what happens to them. In general, compliance types tend to be extremely concerned about the letter of the law and regulation, so I would describe the average user as rather corporate-minded. In fact, compliance is all about corporate control.
So it's not the political bent that explains phenomena such as bias in Wikipedia. My theory is that all such collaborative efforts are dominated by the input of those that are interested users of them, and I think their attractiveness stems from the interest of the people who contribute. Carl writes:
Open-source projects are simply a more natural way to collaborate than hierarchical structures. At worst, you get publicly corrected. Usually one acquires a lot of knowledge or functionality free, and often you receive strokes and ego-rubs for your participation. It's a win-win type of deal and that's one reason why people love it. But the public corrections and the public ego-rubs serve as a powerful corrective source. Perhaps allowing users to rate a contributor on several points (accuracy, completeness, bias) would serve to improve Wikipedia's information.
As one of Carl's commenters wrote:
So I think Carl got hold of the wrong end of the political spectrum. Only bad open-source projects resemble socialism; all good ones are capitalistic and driven from the bottom up.
"Open Source" is software speak for computer based intellectual property created and maintained by a voluntary collective, made widely available normally without charge. The concept was a conscious marrying of "hacker" and libertarian cultures starting in the 1970s, often to challenge or avoid copyrights (and thus fee-based licensing) for software. The "root-level" politics combine leftist collectivist utopianism with an aversion to corporate control.I wouldn't describe it that way at all. I would describe the roots of open-source as programmers hating to be boxed in, and I think if anything open-source software began as a libertarian/egalitarian movement.
(Here I should disclose my own bias. I both use and contribute to open-source projects, and I find them on the whole far better than the commercial products. The reason is that they remain closer to their user base; if we want something it will appear, but it will usually appear in a way that's less tyrannical than in commercial software. With most successful corporate packages, there comes a time when the improvements cause more problems than they solve.)
Open-source is, as Carl notes, not just confined to software, but to all sorts of collaborative projects. Among those, by the way, are sites such as Bankers Online, which is composed of professional bankers pooling their knowledge to meet the growing needs of the profession. As you might suspect, since banking is a highly regulated field, 90% of the traffic on the site is related to compliance issues. The collaborative effort may have evolved as a defensive measure, but it is a well-established venture at this point.
There is nothing political about the site; it is used so widely because it is extremely useful. Nor does any particular political mindset dominate. I suspect your average banker is somewhat more conservative than the average American, but that's simply because dealing with money quickly strips the rosy tint off your cognitive spectacles. Many people encounter their financial problems because of what they do, not what happens to them. In general, compliance types tend to be extremely concerned about the letter of the law and regulation, so I would describe the average user as rather corporate-minded. In fact, compliance is all about corporate control.
So it's not the political bent that explains phenomena such as bias in Wikipedia. My theory is that all such collaborative efforts are dominated by the input of those that are interested users of them, and I think their attractiveness stems from the interest of the people who contribute. Carl writes:
Still, bulk isn't quality. Indeed, Wikipedia's structure guarantees inconsistencies, says Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Über librarian Karen Schneider agrees, "I can't recommend Wikipedia to users. How do I say you can trust an information resource whose riding claim is that anyone can edit it?"Well, people who have a passionate interest in something are the ones who will choose to edit articles about it. I'm really not sure at all that this is any worse than the bias and slant of some "professional editor", especially since others can correct Wikipedia. If anything is needed, a good way to adjust slant might be to keep a centralized corrections list by contributor name, because I believe that named individuals are far more careful of their identifiable contributions to open-source projects than they are to some anonymous corporate project.
Open-source projects are simply a more natural way to collaborate than hierarchical structures. At worst, you get publicly corrected. Usually one acquires a lot of knowledge or functionality free, and often you receive strokes and ego-rubs for your participation. It's a win-win type of deal and that's one reason why people love it. But the public corrections and the public ego-rubs serve as a powerful corrective source. Perhaps allowing users to rate a contributor on several points (accuracy, completeness, bias) would serve to improve Wikipedia's information.
As one of Carl's commenters wrote:
There's been a debate recently about the accuracy of Wikipedia, triggered by comments in the mainstream media by columnists who cannot bring themselves to believe that anything created by a self-organising collective effort could be any good. This led Ed Felten, a well-known computer scientist, to conduct an informal test by looking up entries on subjects familiar to him and comparing Wikipedia with Britannica. On most of his test subjects, Wikipedia won hands down. Where it faltered was on the Microsoft anti-trust case: Felten detected multiple errors - and then went on to correct them. I have no doubt that his blog entry describing all this will prompt someone else to go and revise the entire entry.Exactly. All such projects are robust, in the same way that capitalism is comparatively robust. There is constant adjustment and adaptation to the environment, which results in a better match to conditions. If anything, open-source projects seem to operate in a zone of psychic capitalism. We are social, group animals, and we carry the need for recognition and acceptance within our natures. Capitalizing on that aspect of human nature is what drives and improves projects like Wikipedia.
And therein lies a clue to the project's significance. We have become so imbued by the conventional wisdom of managerial capitalism that we think the only way to do things is via hierarchical, top-down, tightly controlled organisations that are highly tuned and incredibly fragile. Wikipedia is none of these things, yet it works brilliantly. There's a lesson there for control freaks.
So I think Carl got hold of the wrong end of the political spectrum. Only bad open-source projects resemble socialism; all good ones are capitalistic and driven from the bottom up.
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You make some good points, and I've updated my post accordingly. Still, open source advocates' certainty about the superiority of collectives bugs me.
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