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Thursday, July 02, 2009

Like Boiling a Frog

The Wikipedia Revolution by Andrew Lih (2009)

by David Runciman

London Review of Books (May 28 2009)



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

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

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

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


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






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

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


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

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



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

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

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


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

Other articles by this contributor:

This Way to the Ruin · the British Constitution

Cricket's Superpowers · Beyond the Ashes

Oh, the curse! · David Runciman hits a home run

The Garden, the Park and the Meadow · After the Nation State

Tax Breaks for Rich Murderers · Bush and the 'Death Tax'

The Precautionary Principle · Taking a Chance on War

The Cattle-Prod Election · The Point of the Polls

Invented Communities · post-nationalism

ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright (c) LRB Ltd., 1997-2009

Bill Totten


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