(Cross-posted to ElectraPress)
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, spoke today at the Institute for International Economics in Washington DC as part of a lecture series organized by the Center for Global Development. Superficially a summary of Wales's remarks, this post is really intended to engage some of the issues raised by KF in her proposal for ElectraPress. For anyone who has been in this profession for any period of time, it's become abundantly clear that an asteroid has collided with the academic publishing industry--that its dustclouds have begun to extinguish our old systems for producing and distributing scholarship in the humanities. The traditional models are increasingly unsustainable, so the question KF and others are asking is . . . what might replace or supplement them?
Both she and John Holbo have envisioned an electronic imprint of freely licensed content that is managed in a cooperative fashion. Beyond that details are hazy--necessarily so at this stage. What's emerged from conversation thus far is a chimera of sorts: an electronic object or system that is part book, part wiki, part blog. The consensus seems to be that the monograph reconceived should preserve the function of the book but incorporate some of the social aspects of blogs, the self-regulating properties of Wikipedia, and the open-access values of creative commons licensing.
As a way of opening up discussion about what ElectraPress might be, I thought I'd say a few words about Wales' presentation. It was aimed at the generalist, with little technical detail about servers, programmers, funding, day-to-day operations, and the like. Although Wales pitched his talk to the uninitiated, I got the sense that most of us in the audience were already converts. I went with the expectation that I'd hear a lot about bottom-up and distributed knowledge, emergence, and social software. To my surprise, though, Wales took pains to distance Wikipedia from the emergent model (EM) and opted instead to classify it according to what he called the "community model" of production (CM). I'm not sure, but my sense is that he was reacting to parodies of Wikipedia as a pseudo-Darwinian enterprise, one in which only the strongest or fittest or most adaptive content survives. So he's using completely different language to brand Wikipedia: it's a "community of thoughtful users"--a few hundred volunteers at its core, many of whom know each other--rather than an object lesson in swarm intelligence. He noted, for example, that over half of all Wikipedia edits are done by one percent of Wiki users; and 72 percent by just two percent of users. Wales argued that numbers like these make reputation mechanisms like those at Slashdot and Ebay superfluous and unnecessary; reputation on Wikipedia, he said, is a natural outgrowth of human interaction. In the EM, users are tiny and have no power; in the CM, by contrast, users are powerful and must be respected. He illustrated this idea by observing that someone who has been an active volunteer on Wikipedia for many years wields exceptional influence and clout. He or she may, in some instances, override majority decisions by virtue of having acquired authority and respect through long service. Consensus and democracy play their part at Wikipedia, but there is also an acknowledged "aristocracy." Wales pointed out that an individual in whom such power is vested could potentially thwart a group of, say, 40,000 neo-Nazis intent on taking over Wikipedia and deleting content they didn't like or adding biased and erroneous content they did.
Wales iterated the importance of free licensing several times, not only of content, but also of software (Linux, Apache, etc.). He described Wikipedia as a communications platform, thus underscoring the user's dual identity as reader and writer. In closing remarks that compared Wikipedia to traditional encyclopedias such as Britannica, he expressed his wish that one day we would think it odd that anyone would publish content that had been peer-reviewed by only two or three readers, as opposed to hundreds or thousands.
Of most interest to me was Wales' effort to temper or modulate the rhetoric of the hive mind. Is the community model (CM) a better one for ElectraPress than the emergent model (EM)? Or is Wales diluting a powerful concept that we would want to preserve? Or are neither one of these really appropriate models for what we're undertaking? I was also surprised to learn that Wales employs only three full-time employees (one of which may, indeed, be himself). Wikipedia is sustained almost entirely through individual donations, averaging between 50 and 100 dollars apiece, and yet surpasses the New York Times in traffic. Not bad for a ragtag army of volunteers.
Posted by karik at December 1, 2005 5:40 PM | TrackBack