John Quiggin, Crooked Timber blogger and some-time Wikipedian, has a good post about Wikipedia and its upcoming milestone (millstone?) of 2,000,000 articles, “Wikipedia at 2 million“.
It’s followed by a lively discussion: 124 comments and counting. Well worth the price of admission, with plenty of crotchety knowledge workers pouring in from a link at the Chronicle of Higher Education blog about blogs, Footnoted.
Update: see comment #125.
I’ve been keeping my eye on Citizendium, watching as the edit rate dwindles and the policy discussion about licensing stagnates. I hoped that Citizendium would help establish the legitimacy of experts contributing to the work of open content, and that it develop a mutually beneficial relationship with Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, it seems like Citizendium has missed its chance, and is slowly fading out. I’ve drafted an article for the Wikipedia Signpost, analyzing Citizendium’s current status and comparing the 31 Approved articles they’ve produced to the corresponding Wikipedia content. Any comments and criticisms to help me improve it before I head off to visit my families across the country (beginning this Saturday) would be greatly appreciated.
Britannica Blog’s Web 2.0 forum is wrapping up this week. On the Wikipedia front, Michael Gorman has delivered his promised Wikipedia post, and danah boyd has an exceptional reply on why Wikipedia, and access to knowledge in general, is important. While Gorman’s posts are consistently vapid and unprovocative (except in the sense that cable news talking points are provocative), some of the other new media critics–particularly Seth Finkelstein–highlight an important issue that I think is at the heart of the debate. Namely, how do Wikipedia and other aspects of the read/write web knowledge ecosystem affect experts/professionals and their traditional systems of knowledge production?
The shared assumption amongst critics is that the effects are largely negative. Finkelstein put it dramatically in a comment directed at boyd. He characterizes the ‘experts should stop complaining about Wikipedia’s problems and just fix them’ refrain as “arguing that “capitalists” should give – not even sell, but give – Wikipedia the rope to hang them with!” He adds, “If an expert writes a good Wikipedia article, that gets claimed as the wisdom of crowds and presented as proof that amateurs can do just as well as experts.” So scholars are putting themselves out of a job by contributing to Wikipedia and the like.
Setting aside the ‘Wikipedia=Wisdom of Crowds’ strawman that so many Wikipedia critics knock down as their first and final argument, Finkelstein (and some of the others) hit on an important argument: amateur-produced knowledge products (often of inferior quality) are free, and this endangers the (political, financial, intellectual, and/or cultural) economies of expertise. But is that true? Is Wikipedia reducing the demand for scholarly monographs? Is writing a good Wikipedia article on the history of biology going to cut into the sales of all the sources I cite? Is it going to fill the demand for history of biology scholarship and make it tougher to find a publisher for my own work? In economic terms, the competition argument against Wikipedia assumes that traditionally-produced expert knowledge and community-produced knowledge are substitute goods with respect to each other (and are not substitute goods with respect to even lower quality knowledge products like cable news, tabloids, and CNN.com), that either demand for knowledge is relatively static or increased consumption isn’t necessarily desirable, and that knowledge products do not have significant prestige value linked to their traditional pricey modes of production (i.e., they aren’t Veblen goods).
Which of these assumptions holds true differs according to what genre of knowledge we’re talking about. Wikipedia is obviously a substitute for traditional encyclopedias (even if inferior); the Wikipedia threat has been obvious to Britannica and her since 2003. And while consumption of encyclopedia-style knowledge has increased tremendously, critics can argue that the quality is so inferior that it isn’t worth the displacement of traditional encyclopedia consumption. Britannica is also realizing that the mystique of their brand isn’t what it used to be; raising prices in certainly not going to increase demand. So for the encyclopedia genre, Wikipedia is harmful to the traditional expert production system, and possibly (depending on the quality level) harmful to society as a whole.
For original expert research, the stuff of scholarly books and journal articles, the situation is very different. In some cases, Wikipedia articles might act as subsitute goods for scholarly books and journals. However, an encyclopedia article is a fundamentally different knowledge product from an original journal article. The typical journal article is far deeper, and far less accessible, than the approximately corresponding Wikipedia article. My feeling is that rather than act as substitutes, Wikipedia articles and expert research usually contribute to network effects: a good Wikipedia article draws in new knowledge consumers, some of whom then delve into the expert research. In the world of the ivory tower, a humanist scholar usually has to worry much more about competition from the countless other topics out there than about an oversupply of work on one’s own topic. The more people hear about your topic, the more demand there is for your expertise.
News is the other main genre to consider. The newspaper industry has been in a downward spiral for years. Television news is a powerful competitor, and it’s plausible (though by no means obvious) that Wikipedia, citizen journalism, and the blogosphere are contributing to the slow death of the newspapers as well. (Sadly, it’s not plausible that Wikinews is contributing to the downfall of print journalism. At some point, the disintegration of professional journalism may reach a critical mass, and citizen journalism will step up to fill the holes left by the shrinking New York Times. Wikinews has the potential to become the most important media organization in the world, but at this point it still has virtually no impact beyond the Wikimedia community.)
But it seems that the shift to the web (with its drastically lower ad revenues) and the competition among newspapers that can now compete across the country (or even globally) is the main cause. Papers used to have more-or-less local monopolies for print news; they would buy national and world news from the wire agencies (for which they were the only local suppliers) and pour most of their revenue into local and regional reporting. But now, any paper can use the internet to hock national and international news, and consumption of that kind of knowledge product is fairly static (at least compared to encyclopedia article consumption). So competition lowers the price of broad news (with modest increases in text-based news consumption, at best) and restricts the production (and increases the price) of local and investigative journalism.
The situation is much the same as the late-19th/early-20th century steel and railroad industries: there is just to much competition for a stable marketplace, so we’re seeing mergers and increasingly powerful media conglomerates (and the government is more willing to sign off on cross-media mergers). So I don’t think that web 2.0 knowledge products are responsible for the troubles of professional journalism, but if they don’t step up to fill the gaps, maybe nothing will.
Roger Kimball (cultural critic and c0-editor of the conservative literary magazine The New Criterion) has a sharp take on the dangers of cyberspace (hint: they have nothing to do with threats to traditional expertise and everything to do with the real world we’re missing as we piddle around in virtual worlds). Kimball’s points are worth keeping in mind, and on the topic of journalism and web 2.0, one of the key ways to avoid some of the dangers of cyberspace is to create and participate in online communities that are focused on the real world (e.g., Wikinews and the parts of Wikipedia that are not about entertainment).
(P.S.: I don’t actually know anything about economics, so treat my analysis like you would a Wikipedia article)
Bonus links:
The Britannica Blog (“where ideas matter”) is holding a Web 2.0 Forum, built on Michael Gorman‘s contention that the internet is in the process of rapidly destroying civilization. Gorman, former president of the American Library Association, engages in two posts worth of polemic that may pass for discourse in a few disreputably forms of traditional print, but online is unmistakably in the genre of trolling. In “Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason” Part I and Part II, Gorman lays out an argument about the evils of the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, the cult of the amateur, digital Maoism, and the online retreat from authority and authenticity.
Clay Shirky disassembles Gorman’s essay nicely with “Old Revolutions Good, New Revolutions Bad: A Response to Gorman“. At the Britannica forum, Andrew Keen and Nicholas Carr (to overgeneralize slightly) back Gorman up, while Matthew Battles tries to bring some common sense to the high and mighty.
Gorman has promised a post next week dedicated specifically to Wikipedia (the epitome of the Web 2.0 devolution of traditional media and respect for authority, and the worst thing on the internet since pornography). The forum is scheduled to run until June 29th, and if it keeps up the current post frequency (5 posts in three days) it should be worth keeping up with.
Bonus Link: Ben Yates of the Wikipedia Blog had an insightful critique of the Britannica Blog a while back.
Yesterday, I went to New London to participate in an anti-war protest as President Bush spoke at the Coast Guard Academy commencement. It was a worthwhile experience, and I took over 200 pictures (33 of which I put on Wikimedia Commons) and wrote my first Wikinews article (“Protesters demonstrate at US Coast Guard Academy“). Next time I go to something like this I’m going to take extensive notes, write down quotes, and do full-fledged original reporting.
There were about 500 spirited protesters (one news article put it at 1000, but I doubt that), and a much less formal (i.e., Democratic Party line) slate of speakers than the politician-led rally in Hartford on March 17. For most of the protesters, both speakers and the crowd, impeachment was emphatically not off the table, and the main organizing group, ANSWER Coalition, has a bunch of real-life socialists and other assorted radicals. There was also a sizable group (ca. 50-75) of counter-protesters, mostly combat vets and family members (of which there were also a fair number on the anti-war side). As one kid remarked, the counter-protesters (organized by Gathering of Eagles) were way more metal than anything the anti-war side could manage. This guy was the most interesting: he was hurling insults and provocative statements through his loudspeaker almost non-stop. Choice quotes:
“Don’t take the brown acid!”
“I like the women’s movement. Especially from behind.”
“Freedom. It’s not just for white people anymore.”
“War freed the slaves! War saved the Jews! Anti-war racists go home!”
He was the perfect example of that weird juxtaposition of conservative political ideology and intolerance in the name of American Christianity.
Overall, the event was pretty disappointing. One seventeen-year-old said something like “there has to an element of transgression, or it’s just more shit in the system.” This was an orderly gathering of fairly orderly citizens, separated by about five times the number of police officers necessary to keep the peace. No civil disobedience, and the designated protest area was well beyond the radius of the commencement activities. We caught a brief glimpse of the President’s motorcade, but mostly it was just reporters (I’d guess at least two dozen, maybe more, with several news vans) keeping us company. I did mentioned in a follow-up article this morning in the Norwich Bulletin:
Yale doctoral student Sage Ross was protesting the president and snapping photos of both sides for the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the Internet-based, free encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
He said this protest was livelier than others, because it was next to the academy. Pro-troop protesters rebuffed him when he approached them to take photos.
“They didn’t quite buy it that I was one of the press,” he said with a smile.
Related blogging:
For a few weeks now (or is it months?) I’ve been struggling to get a hold of a coherent dissertation topic. I actually have a pretty good idea of the general subject I’m going to do my research on: the disciplinary splits and diversification in biology since the 1950s, especially the “Molecular Wars” between organismal and molecular biology and the history of molecular evolution, which straddled the divide. I’ve been getting to know the existing secondary material (which is very thin) and the individuals and archives that might be at the center of an extended history of molecular evolution (which are numerous).
As I collect and organize all this information, searching for a sufficiently limited yet compelling research approach, I’m increasingly drawn to the potential of prosopography (the historical study of groups of people and the connections among them). My advisor, Dan Kevles, was one of the pioneers of prosopography in the history of science with his dissertation-project-turned-first-book The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America. But wikis offer the potential for a new kind of prosopography, which surprisingly has seen very little development outside Wikipedia itself. (One major online non-wiki prosopography effort is Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England, which has an amazing amount of information but has an all-but-useless interface.) As an experiment, I took my recent acquisition of the Evolving Genes and Proteins book (the proceedings from a 1964 conference on molecular evolution that produced a number of very influential papers) and created List of participants in the Evolving Genes and Proteins symposium. About 40 of the ca. 250 participants already have Wikipedia entries, including 22 of the 56 who contributed to the proceedings (and probably the majority of the rest will have entries as some point). If similar wiki-databases were created for other important conferences, contributors to important journals, scientists in specific fields who had been associated with specific instititution, etc. (either on Wikipedia, or elsewhere to facilitate original research), it could be the groundwork for the kind of quantitative history that social historians have been pining for but have never really pulled off. It could make prosopography (and maybe even collaborative history) worth doing.
Two months ago, I posted about the concept of Notability on Wikipedia and discussions about reforming that guideline. I concluded: “It’s heartening to see that Wikipedia is not so resistant to change that it cannot deal with its scaling problems, though it remains to be seen how effective the response will be.” I’m sorely disappointed in how that turned out: essentially, inertia prevails
Historian and intrepid educational technologist Mills Kelly has a great post with yet another outside view expressing bafflement over the insanity that is notability. (Of the articles written by students in his Western Civ class, only one was deleted as non-notable, though several were merged or redirected, and even the deleted one was primarily a case of unverifiable original research.) Mills discusses a Jimmy Wales interview by Bruce Cole, chairman of the NEH, in the most recent issue of Humanities, which sounds interesting but is not yet available online (damn you, old-fashioned physical publishing!)
Everyone has their own idea of what the “the problem with Wikipedia” is (the canonical answer is found here). The most common “problem with Wikipedia” is that anyone can edit, but most Wikipedians regard this as a feature, not a bug. David A. Russell has a nice old post (which came up on my radar because of real bugs in the open wiki blog planet aggregator) on the general increase in convoluted processes and meta-content in Wikipedia; “process wonkery” is common villain for Wikipedians who can still remember when things were much simpler (well before I started editing).
To me, notability is the only issue that seems like a potentially project-breaking problem (aside from legal issues). It’s the only thing I could imagine a sizable portion of the community forking over (though things are far from that point right now).
UPDATE: Bruce Cole’s interview of Jimmy Wales is now online.
Within the last 24 hours, (at least) four Wikipedia administrators have had their accounts hacked, resulting in four deletions of the main page, and a bit of other vandalism. It appears that each one had a weak, easily guessed password. All editors, admin or no, should change weak passwords immediately, on all Wikimedia projects. No “password”, “fuckyou”, “wikipediarocks”, cat’s names, dictionary words, meaningful numbers, etc.
For more, see:
After Roy Rosenzweig’s June 2006 article on Wikipedia in The Journal of American History, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past“, I predicted a large-scale change in the way scholars—humanists in particular—view Wikipedia. Things started slowly; Marshall Poe’s September article in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Hive” was the next major piece, and other interesting viewpoints continued to trickle in until the Middlebury College ban.
But lately, calls for involvement and reports of classroom success have been coming in rapidly. Recommended reading:
I’m working on my own piece for historians of science, and I’m trying to kick the inflammatory rhetoric up a notch. I probably need to come up with a catchy title, though. Unfortunately, garden-variety historians and English professors have already melted the obvious Dr. Strangelove snowclone. (What’s up with that? That’s history of science territory!) Maybe I could go with the other Strangelove snowclone: “We must not allow a Wikipedia gap!”
By the way, any suggests for improving the above article would be greatly appreciated; I’ll be submitting it soon.
I spent this weekend attending the Access to Knowledge (A2K) conference (see wiki). A2K is a would-be social movement that ties together a number of existing intellectual property-related activism issues, ranging from free/libre open source software and copyleft, to copyright reform and fair use, to (abolishing) software patents, to patented crops and gene patents, to access to patented medicines in the developing world, to digital rights and privacy, to media regulation. I got to spend some time with Wikimedia board member and wiki developer Erik Möller, had a wonderful evening with a few friends, and met some interesting new people. And since I was in town for the weekend, I also got a chance to hear a wonderful talk by bad-ass historian of science Lorraine Daston on Enlightenment “observers” (naturalists, microscopists, and all-purpose obsessives) such as Charles Bonnet, who spent days on end (sleeping only occasionally and reluctantly) observing the every move of a single aphid, from birth to death, and on through several generations of parthenogenetic reproduction . Though their observations were considered a waste by their peers, Bonnet and other dedicated observers were consumed by their passion for observations (often sinking inherited fortunes into their projects); they never considered it work.
What, you ask, does A2K have to do with crazy Enlightenment patricians? After Daston’s talk, I was chatting with one of the authority figures in my department and let slip my own occasionally obsessive pastime. When I mentioned the Wikipedia history of biology article I had been working on (which became a Featured Article over the weekend–hooray!), I got a grumbling reply about peer reviewed publications and my C.V. This was the strongest disapproval this good-natured prof can project. He only perked up when I told him I had been invited to submit an opinion piece about Wikipedia and the history of science to the upcoming inaugural edition of Spontaneous Generations, a new open access history and philosophy of science journal. Now that there is an open access journal in the field, I said, I have somewhere to publish future work without feeling guilty. At this point I was reminded of what I already knew: it’s really tough to get humanists fired up about IP issues, even though these things ought to be high on their lists of social/political/cultural priorities (especially given the dreadful state of academic publishing).
The lawyers of the Yale Law School, on the other hand, are on the forefront of IP activism (hence hosting the A2K event). The conference was a mixed bag of interesting talks, old news, and random acts of scholarship. For the most part, the presenters from organizations I already liked (Wikimedia, Creative Commons, Internet Archive, Electronic Frontier Foundation) or should have already liked (Free Press) had the most interesting things to say, though presentations from Microsoft, Google, and Intel were also worth mentioning .
Erik encouraged me to put together a talk proposal for Wikimania 2007; if I can manage the logitistics, it’s an outside possibility.
