Wikipedia: a good thing?
Larry Sanger
It's been years since I posted regularly to h.p.o (I used to be a
resident gadfly on h.p.o and on alt.philosophy.objectivism before
h.p.o existed.) I and two other of your loved/hated posters here,
Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell, have started up a surprisingly active
encyclopedia project. It even has the attention of the New York
Times, which is going to do an article about it in their Circuits
section next Thursday.
I posted something about Wikipedia to sci.physics.relativity, and
Stephen Speicher pounced on the topic in his inimitable way, so I'm
curious what other Objectivists might have to say about it.
First, I would ask you please to have a look at it:
http://www.wikipedia.com/ . Drawing conclusions before you have
adequate data is, as Sherlock Holmes and Ayn Rand might say,
irrational.
So here's the rundown: we started the project in January 2001, and we
now have well over 10,000 articles. One of our resident statisticians
estimates we are growing by 2,000 articles per month.
Why is Wikipedia growing so quickly? Because anybody can edit any
page, without signing in, and it's really *easy* to edit a page.
This, you might think, is a recipe for disaster. That certainly seems
to be a very reasonable prediction to make. But the data is in and
our experience has not borne the prediction out. In fact, the quality
is not bad (many articles are very slender on details, but give us
credit--we did start just last January), and it is constantly
improving. Moreover, there's hardly any vandalism at all. How can
this be? Well, we have a "recent changes" page that the regulars are
constantly monitoring:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Recent_Changes
We pay attention when someone new comes along--someone whose
reliability is not yet proven. We check up on these people. If they
delete articles (which hardly ever happens) we restore the articles
from the old version history (copies of older versions are saved and
easily accessible). Generally, we feel a sort of collective
responsibility for the project, and if people start messing stuff up,
they are given a talking-to on the /Talk page corresponding to the
article. The idiots tend to leave and not come back.
So, what philosophical questions might this raise for Objectivists?
* Is it desirable to have *just anybody* working on an encyclopedia?
(My answer: yes. Peer pressure means we cater to the highest common
denominator. Complete openness means we get lots of people involved;
then we separate the wheat from the chaff, or more accurately, it
pretty much separates itself with just a little help from us.)
* Aren't wiki-based collaborative projects totally contrary to an
individualist ethic, which *might* lead one to conclude that this is
"authorship by committee" and thus doomed to mediocrity? (My answer:
no. We each benefit by adding to the whole. We each gain significant
satisfaction from being involved in the creation of something
exceedingly useful. This isn't traditional authorship by committee,
as I can explain more if you like.)
* Since collaboration, to avoid endless disputes, requires some sort
of nonbias policy, is there any validity to the very concept of
nonbias, of a "neutral point of view"? (My answer: there is. Please
see http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?NeutralPointOfView .)
Larry Sanger, Ph.D. (philosophy, Ohio State, 2000)
Wikipedia main organizer