Futurismic

Despite continued growth as one of the most-visited sites on the web, Wikipedia has a problem – it’s losing editors faster than it’s gaining new ones. Cue lots of veiled “told you so” from the Wall Street Journal [via /message]:

… as it matures, Wikipedia, one of the world’s largest crowdsourcing initiatives, is becoming less freewheeling and more like the organizations it set out to replace. Today, its rules are spelled out across hundreds of Web pages. Increasingly, newcomers who try to edit are informed that they have unwittingly broken a rule — and find their edits deleted, according to a study by researchers at Xerox Corp.

“People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen,” says Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia and other large online community projects. “Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It’s too many cooks in the kitchen.”

What isn’t clear, at least from this article, is which editors are leaving. A few years ago, all you could find were articles complaining that Wikipedia had too many unskilled and uninformed editors, and that it was hence a valueless project; now that people are being deterred from fiddling because the cost of entry is too high for casual contributions, that’s the problem. C’mon, people; you can’t have it both ways.

Rather than unseating my faith in crowdsourcing, these developments at Wikipedia are pretty much in line with what I had expected to happen. The initial landslide of popularity was like a new frontier, and it inevitably attracted a lot of chancers and grifters – not least, I suspect, because the SEO Google-juice from outbound Wikipedia links is powerful stuff indeed. I’m inclined to see Wikipedia (and a lot of other web-based projects) as an emergent system, and this shedding of casual contributors makes perfect sense; not everyone cares enough to do it properly, and the system self-adjusts to exclude those low-value contributions. [image by mmetchley]

That said, Wikipedia isn’t completely emergent and spontaneous; the Wikimedia Foundation steers and directs it as it sees fit. But even so, it’s still surprisingly reliable by comparison to classically-produced encyclopedias… and those who accuse it of inherent bias have obviously never seen Conservapedia (which I’m not going to do the favour of linking to – just Google it if you fancy horrifying yourself with some ultra-conservative historical revisionism). Sure, it’s not perfect… but what is? I’d be interested to see a catalogue of the errors that a paper like the Wall Street Journal makes in the course of a year for comparison…

That said, there’s one statistic about Wikipedia that is fairly disappointing (though far from surprising):

A survey the foundation conducted last year determined that the average age of an editor is 26.8 years, and that 87% of them are men.

Um. Not so much a greying, after all.

As a poster-child of the Web2.0 success story, Wikipedia has grown from a small but thriving community of volunteers into one of the most well-used online resources there is. But that community-driven character could be Wikipedia’s doom, according to professor of law Eric Goldman – and he thinks the rot has long since set in.

Now, the editors themselves discourage the contributions of others through “xenophobia” toward outsiders; Goldman believes that they see “threats” everywhere and points out that the greater part of all edits made to the site are actually reverted by these editors.

In addition, plenty of political jockeying takes place among editors. And editors have few incentives for their work—no way to make money, no real way even to earn attribution. Together, these problems mean that as editors get burned out by patrolling for spam and vandalism, fewer new people will be interested in stepping up to plug the gap.

Of course, there’s probably plenty of people who would like to slap a whole bunch of [citation needed] links all over Goldman’s theory. But what he’s describing seems to be the same sort of institutional breakdown that can be observed in communities, political movements and any other human group effort.

Perhaps it’s the case that Wikipedia has grown too quickly for its culture to evolve affective coping strategies; maybe smaller subject-specific communities would be more resilient? But then again, maybe they’d just become more cultish more quickly, as has the Church of Darwin.

Then you may want to take a tip from this band. The Wikipedia rules state that everything on the site needs at least one verifiable mention in a reliable external source, otherwise everyone and his dog could have their own page. But you’re not allowed to write your own entry, either…

A member of the band, Killian’s Angels, noticed this when she checked the Wikipedia article about the soundtrack to the Grand Theft Auto IV video game, upon which the band appears. Every other band had a Wikipedia entry, so eventually one of the band’s fans wrote one about them — and it was deleted later that day because the band wasn’t, according to Wikipedia editors, “notable.” Cue the newspaper article…

… which, being a verifiable print publication, met Wikipedia’s notability criteria and allowed the page to go back up.

In other words, if you’re not in Wikipedia yet, get someone to run a story about how you’re not yet in Wikipedia. Ta-daah! I predict phones ringing in local newrooms in five, four, three…

I consider it one of the greatest privileges of my childhood that we had a full Encyclopedia Britannica in the home, and I spent many rainy-day hours just leafing through it and soaking up data about the world. Ah, happy days! [image by Goran Zec]

Had Wikipedia been available back then, I’d have probably developed myopia, RSI and a bad posture far earlier in my life; hyperlinking and universal access are the two “killer apps” of encyclopedias, as anyone who has fallen down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole will know.

Indeed, it appears that even the mighty Encyclopedia Britannica, after years of bitching about Wikipedia’s openness and inaccuracies (the latter complaint, it transpires, being somewhat hypocritical), has realised that locking material away doesn’t work in the new information economy, and they’re granting people the ability to link directly to their content with their WebShare program. [via Phil Bradley]

It’s not quite free yet; they’re granting access to “anyone who publishes material on the web on a regular basis” (bloggers, in other words) and you have to apply for an account (so only bloggers they like), but it’s a step into the Twentyfirst Century for a hidebound institution. Heck, they’ve even got a blog and a Twitter feed.

Google has announced a new wikipedia-like project, entitled ‘knol’. Short for knowledge, the project aims to have an encyclopedia type experience but with more emphasis on the author, rather than anonymous multiple contributors. There will not be editorial contributions from Google, but authors including ads will get revenue.

An example knol has been put up on the Google blog. Google says that the emphasis will be on large numbers of posts, ranked by users and views to encourage quality. Peer review seems to encourage good writers to become better rated and more successful. Added to the potential to earn money, this endeavour could provide a good potential way to create a freelance online writer business model. It looks like Knol will be less comprehensive/consistent across the entire volume of data than Wikipedia, but with better quality at the top end. It’s a similar model to Mahalo, only with the backing of perhaps the biggest internet company out there.

[via boing boing, image is the example of a Google Knol]