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April 19, 2005
Sanger, Part II
Posted by Clay Shirky
The second half of Larry Sanger’s piece on Wikipedia and Nupedia is up. I haven’t even read the whole thing yet, but it’s fascinating, especially as it goes considerably deeper into the governance issues.
It is one thing to lack any equivalent to “police” and “courts” that can quickly and effectively eliminate abuse; such enforcement systems were rarely entertained in Wikipedia’s early years, because according to the wiki ideal, users can effectively police each other. It is another thing altogether to lack a community ethos that is unified in its commitment to its basic ideals, so that the community’s champions could claim a moral high ground. So why was there no such unified community ethos and no uncontroversial “moral high ground”? I think it was a simple consequence of the fact that the community was to be largely self-organizing and to set its own policy by consensus. Any loud minority, even a persistent minority of one person, can remove the appearance of consensus.
Read it.
Comments (2)
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1. Andrew Lih on April 20, 2005 12:19 AM writes...
Clay,
Larry recently rejoined the wikipedia-l mailing list following his memoir posting. I posted this question to him:
----
I'd like to challenge some assertions in Part 2 of your Slashdot memoir. You list several alternatives the project could have taken and conclude, "These differences would not have threatened the basic principles that made the project work, listed above." I'm skeptical because you don't provide any proof or logical reasoning to back up the claim, or relate it to accepted scholarship about the nature of commons-based peer production (eg. Coase's Penguin).
These alternatives you stated:
* "For instance, radical openness, that is, being open even to those who brazenly flouted and disrespected the project's mission, was surely not necessary; after all, without them, the project would have been more welcoming to the many people who felt they could not work with such difficult people."
* "And if we had required people to sign in, that would not have made very much difference (although it probably would have made some in the beginning; the project wouldn't have grown as fast)."
* "Of course we didn't have to use the GNU FDL for the license."
* "The project could have officially encouraged and deferred to experts. An article approval process could have been adopted without threatening the principle of posting unedited content for collaboration."
Again, your conclusion was, "These differences would not have threatened the basic principles that made the project work, listed above."
If any of these ideas were floated on the list today, there would be an outcry and threats of desertion by the community. In fact "requiring people to sign in" comes up nearly every month or so on the list and is quashed within a day.
So I'm wondering whether you could elaborate on this, because I found it quite hard to swallow this paragraph as a given.
-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)
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2. BG on April 22, 2005 3:12 AM writes...
Consumerpedia.org appears to handle many of these governance / enforcement issues within the context of user-driven rating/feedback loops that are akin to a Google Page Rank system for contributors - meaning that the reputation and weighting of a user automatically increases or decreases based on how helpful other users consider their contributions to be...
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