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Three aphorisms in honor of Wikipedia, greatest encyclopedia in world history, and its 20 years of free knowledge uncorrupted by advertising: * Wikipedia works

Three aphorisms in honor of Wikipedia, greatest encyclopedia in world history, and its 20 years of free knowledge uncorrupted by advertising: * Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory. * Wikipedia is the worst source of information, except for all the others. * Wikipedia: the Internet’s greatest reason to feel a little bit optimistic about human nature.

jessriedel 6y ago
Having looked into it a bit, I've been severely disappointed that we have no good theory of why Wikipedia works. There are lots of putative explanations, but they all predict the successful existence of all sorts of collaborative projects that we don't actually see. Wikipedia is such a treasure, and it would be extremely valuable to know more about how it works so we can replicate aspects of it for other projects.
- Kim_Bruning 6y ago
  http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiHistory http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiHistory Start here. * There's a variant on design patterns which you can call Community Patterns. * Some patterns are software design patterns * Some patterns describe Agile software development. * Some patterns describe how to run a wiki (and why) * Wikipedia originally adopted these patterns and extended them for its own policy. See also: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks If you want a long thoughtful writeup, check this text by Aaron Swartz http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroads http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroads That's some baseline sources off the top of my head. There's a lot more written about this. It seems like there are several concepts working together that a lot of people find un-intuitive. * In the main, human beings are honest. In fact mathematics predicts it must be so. (Game theory) * Humans "automagically" cooperate if their numbers are small (under Dunbar's number), but fail to do so over that number. * If you can keep the number of cooperating people under control, you can take advantage of this. * Conversely, if something needs attention, the ability to rapidly recruit them to the point needing attention is paramount (see eg. smart mobs) Partly by accident, partly by design, wiki engines exploit the above 3 elements. At first approximation, as long as >>51% of users are honest, the wiki will continue to function. The measured value on operational wikis is something like 60-80%.
  - jessriedel 6y ago
    I've read a fair amount about the history of wikipedia. Giving me a dump of facts does not amount to an explanation, and I don't find the theories you give to actually be explanatory.
- kortilla 6y ago
  Sorry if it’s obvious, but why don’t people think Wikipedia should work in theory? Isn’t it just tapping into the need to tell people things you know and feel good about how smart you are? Or is the concern not around how content is submitted but more around how disputes are resolved?
  - bawolff 6y ago
    In the early days most people outside of wikipedia assumed that nobody would contribute to such a project without being compensated, that wikipedia is a communist pipe dream etc. The quote is meant as a play on the quote how communism works in theory but not in practise.
    - kortilla 6y ago
      Why would it be called a communist pipe dream? It’s not mandated by the government and doesn’t use tax revenue. Open source already existed and was thriving so I’m still not getting why there was any doubt. Seems like it would have just been FUD from the encyclopedia industry and people who didn’t know about open source.
      - bawolff 6y ago
        Well for starters some americans think biden is a commie, so its not like logic really comes into play when americans use "communist" as an insult. That said, i dont think tax revenue supported infrastructure is really the definition of communism either.
        kortilla 6y ago
        Communism usually requires social ownership. Wikipedia is not owned by “the people”.
  - goto11 6y ago
    I would have expected it to be destroyed by vandals, marketeers and trolls, and that nutcases and people with alternative facts would have crowded out actually knowledgeable people. For every person with a deep insight in a subject, there are fifty people who think they have a deep insight, and it is hard to tell the difference from the outside. My concern was not that nobody would contribute, but that the wrong people would contribute. Also "neutral point of view" is impossible, as any writer knows. It is surprising and amazing the Wikipedia works so well. Although I'm sure they use a lot of resources on combating trolls and manipulation.
- uncomputation 6y ago
  Something that cannot be overstated enough - but is going to be severely underrated - is the community. Wikipedia has countless pages on codes of conduct and its own internal rule system that are actually coming from the editors, from experience, rather than handed down by a lawyer. Wikipedia generally understands and accepts the messier sides of democratic editing: people get emotional, trolls, biases, arguments, etc. and it approaches it all with honesty, straightforwardness, and even humor. You can list all the philosophical, technical, or economic reasons you want (and surely those are important to consider) but in my mind the community of real, living humans with (yes) opinions but that have recourse and clarity to correct those is invaluable. I have never seen a community with such professionalism and due diligence (almost every single troll edit I have seen is immediately reverted) as Wikipedia editors. There is also something to be said about the “culture” where trolling is not rewarded. By and large, vandalizing Wikipedia is not “cool,” people don’t rejoice for it because I think everyone feels at least a little bit of attachment or debt to Wikipedia. It’s helped us all learn more than we probably ever could before and been there through schoolwork, essays, reference reading, and general curiosity. It’s such a special corner of the Internet and I think “replicating aspects of it” won’t work, at least not the way you want. Wikipedia is a holistic being, it’s a community of people, yet also a resource, and even a culture, so any similar project needs to do the genuinely hard, slow, and boring work (something Wikipedia embraces - that most of the process is routine grammatical fixes, meta cleanup, rewriting, etc. over genuinely adding increasingly more information) of cultivating those higher standards and community outreach.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    You're correct that Wikipedia has the blatant vandalism problem more-or-less covered. However, I'm not so enthusiastic about he culture. In a lot of cases, it ends up being "obsessives, fight!" with the weapon of rules-lawyering, which is just exhausting for anyone who isn't an obsessive. The end-result is often OK, but often jumbled and confusing, and it often feels like getting taught a subject by someone who's just a year or two ahead of you. You definitely feel you can learn something, but the person teaching you doesn't necessarily have very good command of the material themselves. It's position in society is also weird. It has authority, but that authority can be abused. I once ran into a Wikipedian who had been busy for several years promoting a religious philosophy in a little neglected corner of Wikipedia, by gluing together little disconnected fragments to make a build up the wiki page for it. It was definitely badly done original research, but he successfully tapped the authority of Wikipedia.
nsajko 6y ago
Here, I'll fix that for you: * Wikipedia works in theory, but not in practice (as soon as you scratch the surface). - The problem is that there are many good pages, but that just lulls one out of the necessary skepticism. * Try the Wikipedia sources that are hopefully on the bottom of each page instead. Also search on Stack Exchange and Reddit for book recommendations. * Wikipedia: the Internet’s greatest reason to feel pessimistic about the state of disinformation and propaganda EDIT: my comment is definitely more substantive and thoughtful than the one it is responding to, so I would appreciate if the downvoters could likewise reply to this comment, in addition to down-voting it.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Its snarky and unrelated to the point the original comment was making.
  - nsajko 6y ago
    Now I see that I indeed was snarky and I'm not happy about it. I should have simply said that all three points are completely unsubstantiated.
- concordDance 6y ago
  Providing a link to further information, particularly on the disinformation, would help.
jl6 6y ago
> Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory. There could be a useful transferable lesson here. Any endeavour which has a really big risk attached to it (here, the risk of vandalism) can still be a success if you deploy sufficient mitigations, countermeasures and vigilance against that risk.

jessriedel 6y ago

Having looked into it a bit, I've been severely disappointed that we have no good theory of why Wikipedia works. There are lots of putative explanations, but they all predict the successful existence of all sorts of collaborative projects that we don't actually see. Wikipedia is such a treasure, and it would be extremely valuable to know more about how it works so we can replicate aspects of it for other projects.

Kim_Bruning 6y ago
http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiHistory http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiHistory Start here. * There's a variant on design patterns which you can call Community Patterns. * Some patterns are software design patterns * Some patterns describe Agile software development. * Some patterns describe how to run a wiki (and why) * Wikipedia originally adopted these patterns and extended them for its own policy. See also: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks If you want a long thoughtful writeup, check this text by Aaron Swartz http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroads http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroads That's some baseline sources off the top of my head. There's a lot more written about this. It seems like there are several concepts working together that a lot of people find un-intuitive. * In the main, human beings are honest. In fact mathematics predicts it must be so. (Game theory) * Humans "automagically" cooperate if their numbers are small (under Dunbar's number), but fail to do so over that number. * If you can keep the number of cooperating people under control, you can take advantage of this. * Conversely, if something needs attention, the ability to rapidly recruit them to the point needing attention is paramount (see eg. smart mobs) Partly by accident, partly by design, wiki engines exploit the above 3 elements. At first approximation, as long as >>51% of users are honest, the wiki will continue to function. The measured value on operational wikis is something like 60-80%.
- jessriedel 6y ago
  I've read a fair amount about the history of wikipedia. Giving me a dump of facts does not amount to an explanation, and I don't find the theories you give to actually be explanatory.
kortilla 6y ago
Sorry if it’s obvious, but why don’t people think Wikipedia should work in theory? Isn’t it just tapping into the need to tell people things you know and feel good about how smart you are? Or is the concern not around how content is submitted but more around how disputes are resolved?
- bawolff 6y ago
  In the early days most people outside of wikipedia assumed that nobody would contribute to such a project without being compensated, that wikipedia is a communist pipe dream etc. The quote is meant as a play on the quote how communism works in theory but not in practise.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Why would it be called a communist pipe dream? It’s not mandated by the government and doesn’t use tax revenue. Open source already existed and was thriving so I’m still not getting why there was any doubt. Seems like it would have just been FUD from the encyclopedia industry and people who didn’t know about open source.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      Well for starters some americans think biden is a commie, so its not like logic really comes into play when americans use "communist" as an insult. That said, i dont think tax revenue supported infrastructure is really the definition of communism either.
      - kortilla 6y ago
        Communism usually requires social ownership. Wikipedia is not owned by “the people”.
- goto11 6y ago
  I would have expected it to be destroyed by vandals, marketeers and trolls, and that nutcases and people with alternative facts would have crowded out actually knowledgeable people. For every person with a deep insight in a subject, there are fifty people who think they have a deep insight, and it is hard to tell the difference from the outside. My concern was not that nobody would contribute, but that the wrong people would contribute. Also "neutral point of view" is impossible, as any writer knows. It is surprising and amazing the Wikipedia works so well. Although I'm sure they use a lot of resources on combating trolls and manipulation.
uncomputation 6y ago
Something that cannot be overstated enough - but is going to be severely underrated - is the community. Wikipedia has countless pages on codes of conduct and its own internal rule system that are actually coming from the editors, from experience, rather than handed down by a lawyer. Wikipedia generally understands and accepts the messier sides of democratic editing: people get emotional, trolls, biases, arguments, etc. and it approaches it all with honesty, straightforwardness, and even humor. You can list all the philosophical, technical, or economic reasons you want (and surely those are important to consider) but in my mind the community of real, living humans with (yes) opinions but that have recourse and clarity to correct those is invaluable. I have never seen a community with such professionalism and due diligence (almost every single troll edit I have seen is immediately reverted) as Wikipedia editors. There is also something to be said about the “culture” where trolling is not rewarded. By and large, vandalizing Wikipedia is not “cool,” people don’t rejoice for it because I think everyone feels at least a little bit of attachment or debt to Wikipedia. It’s helped us all learn more than we probably ever could before and been there through schoolwork, essays, reference reading, and general curiosity. It’s such a special corner of the Internet and I think “replicating aspects of it” won’t work, at least not the way you want. Wikipedia is a holistic being, it’s a community of people, yet also a resource, and even a culture, so any similar project needs to do the genuinely hard, slow, and boring work (something Wikipedia embraces - that most of the process is routine grammatical fixes, meta cleanup, rewriting, etc. over genuinely adding increasingly more information) of cultivating those higher standards and community outreach.
- ardy42 6y ago
  You're correct that Wikipedia has the blatant vandalism problem more-or-less covered. However, I'm not so enthusiastic about he culture. In a lot of cases, it ends up being "obsessives, fight!" with the weapon of rules-lawyering, which is just exhausting for anyone who isn't an obsessive. The end-result is often OK, but often jumbled and confusing, and it often feels like getting taught a subject by someone who's just a year or two ahead of you. You definitely feel you can learn something, but the person teaching you doesn't necessarily have very good command of the material themselves. It's position in society is also weird. It has authority, but that authority can be abused. I once ran into a Wikipedian who had been busy for several years promoting a religious philosophy in a little neglected corner of Wikipedia, by gluing together little disconnected fragments to make a build up the wiki page for it. It was definitely badly done original research, but he successfully tapped the authority of Wikipedia.

nsajko 6y ago

Here, I'll fix that for you: * Wikipedia works in theory, but not in practice (as soon as you scratch the surface). - The problem is that there are many good pages, but that just lulls one out of the necessary skepticism. * Try the Wikipedia sources that are hopefully on the bottom of each page instead. Also search on Stack Exchange and Reddit for book recommendations. * Wikipedia: the Internet’s greatest reason to feel pessimistic about the state of disinformation and propaganda EDIT: my comment is definitely more substantive and thoughtful than the one it is responding to, so I would appreciate if the downvoters could likewise reply to this comment, in addition to down-voting it.

bawolff 6y ago
Its snarky and unrelated to the point the original comment was making.
- nsajko 6y ago
  Now I see that I indeed was snarky and I'm not happy about it. I should have simply said that all three points are completely unsubstantiated.
concordDance 6y ago
Providing a link to further information, particularly on the disinformation, would help.

jl6 6y ago

> Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory. There could be a useful transferable lesson here. Any endeavour which has a really big risk attached to it (here, the risk of vandalism) can still be a success if you deploy sufficient mitigations, countermeasures and vigilance against that risk.