Note: I wrote this before reading the Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks and Tuesday’s class discussion.
The class agreed that the Internet represents anarchy, a term that conjures images of disorder and chaos. However, I consider the Internet anarchic only in the literal definition: an absence of a ruling authority. Contrary to the preconception that a ruling body is necessary to keep control, the success of user-managed sites shows that self-regulation can produce order, quality, and stability with minimal oversight.
Slashdot, a news technology website (http://slashdot.org), is an example of self-regulation. Although paid editors decide which story submissions appear on the front page, the discussions following each story are moderated exclusively by users. It is these discussions that are the heart of Slashdot. Slashdot subscribers are randomly granted “mod points” which allow them to give a figurative thumbs up or thumbs down to other users’ comments. A score of -1 through 5 is computed for each comment, and readers can choose to only see comments scored at or above a set threshold. Thus, within minutes, insightful and thought-out comments float to the top, whereas pointless and formulaic ones sink into oblivion. While each user’s judgment of worth reflects his personal biases and preferences, the score of a comment averages out to reflect its worth as deemed by the readership as a whole. No central editorial body can replace this collective process. Not only would its judgments fail to reflect the community opinion, but the sheer volume of comments would preclude reading every comment to determine its worth.
Wikipedia, a user-edited encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org), is another bold experiment in digital anarchy. Although the project has bureaucratic bodies such as the administrators and an arbitration committee, most of the project’s stability comes from self-regulation. If a vandal replaces the photo of a political figure with an image of a penis, another user will revert the change. If one user adds information that is factual but uses biased language, another will rephrase the bias while retaining the information. Although some central authority is needed to make decisions in extreme or controversial cases, accepted editing norms and peer feedback encourage helpful contributions subtly guide the project to improvement.
Wikipedia functions by evolution rather than by intelligent design. Instead of central planning, article edits are small mutations, and edits that improve the article remain. While an article may fluctuate unpredictably with additions, changes, and deletions, these edits average out to a gradual improvement of the article and the entire project. We saw this in the time lapse video of the
The regularity of statistics that stabilizes Wikipedia manifests itself in many physical processes. A gas consists of countless erratically bouncing molecules, yet its behavior can be described with remarkable accuracy with macroscopic physical laws (PV=nRT). Or, to steal another metaphor from the book Godel, Escher, Bach, an ant colony, a structure that is stable and evolutionarily fit, consists solely of seemingly mindless ants scurrying around at random.
These ants are the “faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors” in Jaron Lanier’s vision of Wikipedia, and the colony is the body of information formed. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is expected to be neutral, informative, and relatively dry reading, making it a project perfectly suited to design by community. Although an article written by a collective lacks a coherent voice, it gives a fairer and more extensive treatment of a subject that any individual can possibly provide. On the other hand, a Wiki project to collectively create a painting or write a play would surely fail, because such artistic endeavors require the voice and creative genius of a single mind.
The law of averages also fails when the individual biases of users average out to an overall net bias. On Slashdot, moderation often reflects an anti-Microsoft mindset. But this is the predisposition of the readership and readers enjoy an otherwise-unremarkable comment that bashes Microsoft, the moderation accurately reflects the comment’s received value.
On Wikipedia, however, systemic bias is more of a problem, since it is unacceptable for an encyclopedia to be skewed towards covering topics that interest the demographic of Wikipedia editors: young, liberal, computer savvy English-speaking white males. As the reach of the Internet expands and the information gap shrinks, such inequities will gradually disappear.
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