[Ed. Note: Jake wrote such a long and thoughtful comment responding to my post of yesterday on the Wikipedia and authority that I wanted to re-post it as an entry, with comments and trackbacks of its own.
I have re-formatted it to use box-style quotes and expanded some acronynms, but changed none of the substance. -clay ]
Clay writes:
Picking up on yesterday’s theme of authority, the authority of, say, Coleridge’s encyclopedia was the original one: authority derived from the identity of the author. This is like trusting Mom’s Diner, or the neighborhood tailor — personal reputation is worth preserving, and helps assure quality.
The authority of Britannica, by contrast, is the authority of a commercial brand. Their sales are intimately tied into their reputation for quality, so we trust them to maintain those standards, in order to preserve an income stream. This is like trusting Levis or McDonald’s — you don’t know the individuals who made your jeans or your french fries, but the commercial incentive the company has in preserving its brand makes the level of quality predictable and stable.
Jake comments:
Yes, but a brand is some sort of an ethereal thing. [I think a ‘not’ was dropped, as in “… not some sort of ethereal thing.” — ed] It is a symbolic representation of a product or the underlying institution that created it. Trademark rights are common law in nature and they attach through use.
So while it is true that at some level this sort of structure is a reification, in practical terms its role in building trust must be considered. To me this is really the core of the concerns about Wikipedia. Is the structure adequate to the task of establishing something authoritative enough to be useful.
So, is Wikipedia authoritative? No, or at least not yet, because it has neither the authority of the individual merchant or the commercial brand. However, it does have something that neither mechanism offers, which is a kind of market, where the investment is time and effort rather than dollars and cents. This is like the eBay model, where people you don’t know (no Mom’s Diner effect) can sell unbranded things like art or one-of-a-kind clothes (no Levis effect). EBay can do this because the syndication of user attention and the possibility of recourse for bad behavior keeps people generally honest.
True, but the transaction costs involved in making something like the Wikipedia effective are very different than those on eBay, because they address very different sorts of transactions.
This doesn’t mean that Wikipedia couldn’t be evolved to address these differences, but I think it’s useful to acknowledge that existing approaches to processing this sort information may be as they are because they meet these exigencies better than the Wikipedia structure can (at least as presently constituted.)
Now when eBay launched, people were skeptical, because the site wasn’t trustworthy. The curious thing about trust, though, is that it is a social fact, a fact that is only true when people think it is true. Social facts are real facts, and have considerable weight in the world. The fact that someone is a judge, for example, is a social fact — the authority that attaches to judgeship is attached by everyone agreeing that a certain person has the right to make certain statements — “Court is adjourned”, “I sentence you to 5 years in prison” — that have real force in the world. Those statements are not magic; their force comes from the social apparatus backing them up.
I think trust is more than simply a social fact. In many cases, it is an empirical fact. This is what separates eBay from something like Wikipedia (at least in many cases). I have been playing the guitar for 26 years. If I buy a guitar on eBay, I have the knowledge necessary to determine whether I got what I paid for. I’m buying a tangible good. I can play it. I can see if it works. I know enough to see if there are buzzes, a warped neck, etc.
The only reason I would look at eBay feedback is for assurance that the seller isn’t going to take my money and not send me what I think I am buying (and if returning the item is an option that the seller will take it back).
But ultimately, if I didn’t feel confident that I could assess empirically the good I was purchasing, I would not buy it on eBay, even if the seller had great feedback. At least for me, the risk is simply too high. That’s why there are many items I would never buy on eBay.
Nevertheless, there are enough people in the world who have knowledge about at least a few items of merchandise available on eBay, that a system like eBay can function and trust can be built. For at the end of the day, mechandise is a tangible thing. It usually has a zone of purpose for which it was designed, so at that level there already exists a reasonably clear consensus about what it means for that item to “work.”
But when the market relates to intangibles like ideas, analysis and information, it becomes much more difficult for the average person to assess the trustworthiness of the information empirically.
This is why it’s much more difficult for most people to hire a Doctor, Lawyer, Mechanic, etc. The thing being purchased is much harder to pin down and assess than something like a guitar or computer, because one needs a certain amount of specialized expertise to truly determine whether what you are buying is good.
In this context, people are much more likely to look to testimonials of other people they trust, or look to external indicators like price, a fancy office, or whether the person has on a nice suit. Even though these things ultimately have no direct connection to quality, they are the best we can do. So we use them, and if nothing goes wrong, they validate that we have made the right choice on the right basis.
I suppose to some extent one might argue that things like a fancy degree are kind of the same thing. But I think credentialing structures do have more of an empirical conection to quality than do things like a fancy office and testimonials of satisfied customers.
Ebay has become trustworthy over time because the social fact of its trustworthiness grew with the number of successful transactions and with its ability to find and rectify bad actors. Indeed, the roughest periods in eBay’s short life have been when it has seemed in danger of being a platform for fraud.
Like trustworthiness, authority is a social fact, though authorities often want to obscure this. A PhD is an authority figure because we all agree that the work that goes into getting a doctorate (itself a social fact) is a legitimate source of authority.
I don’t disagree that authority is a social fact. Everything is socially constructed. But this is beside the point. The issue isn’t that this is so. The issue is what sort of institutional structures yield authority that furthers a social good. Obviously this is a political questino and a political process. It’s contested terrain, and I think the people who have concerns about Wikipedia worry that at least as presently constituted it will be bad for society if it acquires too much authority (or in the alternative that the existing structure is incapable of acquiring enough authority to make it truly useful to society).
So, under what conditions might the Wikipedia become a kind of authority, based on something other than authorship or brand? And the answer to that question, I think, is when enough people regard it as trustworthy, where the trust is derived from the fact that many eyes have viewed a particular article.
I can’t agree with you on this. In this context I’m not sure there can be any meaningful authority that isn’t based on authorship or brand (to the extent that brand is the outward symbol of an underlying institutional structure that insures a minimum level of quality)
To my mind, the quality of the eyes looking at an article is much more important than the quantity. Five hundred people reading/editing an article who know little or nothing about the topic do little or nothing to improve its authoritativeness. Conversely, one person who knows what they are talking about can produce something that’s very useful.
Ultimately, this is one of the flaws with any sort of system like eBay or for that matter customer reviews of a product on Amazon or whatever. It’s useful as far as it goes. But it’s only as good as the people reviewing the product.
That’s why authorship and brand/underlying institutional structure are such important and imbedded concepts in our culture.
It’s also why the open source idea makes more sense for software than it may for something like the Wikipedia. If you are building software, eventually it will have some stated purpose, and there will be at least some provisional empirical standards against which it can be assessed. To use a term from the comment above, if the mob decides to build a word processor, eventually the success or failure of this project will hinge on how well the word processor works. So if an incompentent programmer contributes to the code base, it will be relatively easier to see that their code either doesn’t work or is inefficient to the task.
Information processing and synthesis doesn’t work quite this way. An open source model has its merits at the level of style and grammar editing (which is akin to making existing computer code more efficient). But at the level of editing substance, I think it becomes far more complicated, and issues of governance, etc become paramount if the work product is to have much utility.
1. David Smith on January 7, 2005 12:33 PM writes...
I think this makes a number of good points and the last paragraph in particular points to what is needed if Wikipedia is to "have … utility" of the kind Jake is talking about. I've tried to gather my thoughts on this recent round of the debate here and here, and then today felt clear-headed enough about these issues to add this.
Whilst I'm here (!), can someone at Many2Many tell me how to unearth the trackback URLs for your articles? I read M2M daily, but have never been able to work this out …
Permalink to Comment2. tpodd on January 8, 2005 9:05 AM writes...
I posted about this debate on my site here and here as well.
I agree with Jake (and David's most recent post) that the quality of the eyes looking is important. If you want to talk about things that are facts (social or otherwise), we have to agree that expertise is also a fact. Some people know more about certain topics than others. Is it right that their contribution should be given the same weight as anybody elses? These people will almost always be in the minority so the odds are that their knowledge will be buried under the submissions of the unknowledgable masses, no matter how well meaning those masses may be.
The real question, and I believe this is the root of the heated debate, is how do you establish that someone has expertise. Educational credentials? Ordination by other experts? Size of their bank account? Whoever shouts the loudest?
Deciding that there is a hierarchy of exptertise doesn't mean that the hierarchy has to be built top down. There are democratic, bottom up approaches as well. Epinions and other reputation/ratings-based systems are one approach.
Permalink to Comment3. Jake on January 8, 2005 4:14 PM writes...
Actually, I did mean that a brand is an ethereal thing. On it's own terms it has no value. It's just a graphic element or word. Tangible things have to happen in the world to give it meaning.
If I decide that "Jake" will be my brand, it means nothing on its own. It only acquires meaning through my use of it. With any luck, the "Jake" brand has more meaning today on this Blog than it did before my long rambling post (what the meaning is I won't hazzard to guess ).
And if "Jake" was a big multinational company that produced encylopedias it would have even more meaning, because it would symbolize that whole institutional structure and the goods and services produced by it.
That's where trademark law came from in the first place: craftspeople put their marks on the things they made so that consumers would know they had made them. Over time, a body of common law evolved governing this practice. It continues to this day. And the primary goal of it is to prevent consumer confusion.
As such, Trademark law protects both the producer and the consumer. And in the terms of this discussion it is very much about authorship/authority.
Given that this is the case, I think Tpod is on the right track with his comments above. It probably isn't necessary for Wpedia to require that people have an advanced degree if they want to post or edit an entry. But there needs to be some sort of structure in place for establishing who knows what they are talking about.
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