Cole:2007

De Estigmergia

Building a Community of Knowledge - A Conversation with Jimmy Wales

[...]

Cole: Is this built on Eric Raymond’s model of the cathedral and the bazaar?

Wales: A fair amount of my thinking was influenced by Raymond’s model. Before Wikipedia I founded Nupedia. We organized it in a top-down, traditional academic way and essentially built a cathedral and that just didn’t work. It was slow-moving, and it didn’t take advantage of a lot of people who wanted to pitch in and help.

It was very intimidating for people to get involved, and basically it failed because of that.

[...]

Cole: Let us just go back to the cathedral or the bazaar model. Was this idea first the development of codes or software?

Wales: Basically, what Raymond talked about was roughly two different models for software development. One would be to think of it as a cathedral model in the sense that there would be very trusted, learned scholars toiling away more or less in secrecy and privacy, and then, presenting their work to the world.

The bazaar model is more an open marketplace where lots of people are coming and going, and people are buying and selling, and giving and trading. Certainly, the encyclopedia model is where Britannica goes out and finds some esteemed scholars to pen the encyclopedia articles. Their model actually works reasonably well. There is nothing particularly bad about it, but there are some problems with it.

For example, bias is a big problem. You can really see this, if you’d go back and look at the 1911 Britannica which is really a classic edition, but boy, it’s a real piece of work. The bias has become a little more obvious with time—but you do see that even in contemporary articles because they are written by one person.

[...]

Cole: You have many eyes on Wikipedia. Let’s talk about how all this gets done. Somebody gets an article—let’s say about the telephone—and they post it. Is that correct?

Wales: Exactly.

Cole: Then what happens?

Wales: Every change to the Web site is posted to a Recent Changes File monitored by a lot of people. Also, users have their own individual watch list so that they can monitor articles that they’re interested in.

Cole: You can send an e-mail or something like that, because of the change in their watch list.

Wales: When you log in, you just check the Recent Changes in your watch list. Most of those who are really active have their options set so that anything that they touch gets added to their watch list.

There are all kinds of subgroups of people working within Wikipedia. Some people just do spell-checking. We don’t allow people to run robot spell checkers on the site, unless they’re human supervised, because robot spell checkers are really stupid and long. What some people do, they run a script and they just sit there and it shows them words that spell the things that are misspelled, and they say “yes” or “no.” It sounds like a completely tedious job but people enjoy doing it.

Then you have people who are interested in particular subjects: mathematicians who work pretty much exclusively on articles about statistics; people who are drawn to conflict resolution and try to help people run a debate. There are all kinds of specialties and all kinds of different people who are doing those things.

[...]

Cole: I think that’s great. Time says: “Wales is celebrated as a champion of Internet-enabled egalitarianism.” You’re described not as an anti-elitist but an anti-credentialist. That’s the distinction. It means that amateurs can have as much to contribute as professionals and that talent can be found anywhere. It was predicted that mob rule would lead to chaos.

Instead, it has led to what may prove to be the most powerful industrial model of the twenty-first century, peer production.

What does that mean in that larger sense, when Time talks about a powerful industrial model of the twenty-first century?

Wales: Well, it’s rather bold. I’m embarrassed by it, but I definitely think it’s not just starting with Wikipedia but starting with the peer production of open-source software, free software. It is a huge, important model that has become possible because of the dramatic drop in the cost of communications, with the invention of computers and so forth. We are just beginning to see what that’s going to be all about and how that is going to work out for us.

So I guess it could be a very powerful model of production. Certainly, one of the things that’s been interesting for me is, because we are an inherently global project, this incredible interactivity—people from different parts of the world doing business, culture, commerce, having fun on the Internet, talking on the phone, whatever—is one of the defining terms of our age. Obviously, that’s not a unique observation on my part, but it has become very real to me to go and spend time in different places in the world and realize how much people are the same everywhere. I just think we’re going to see a lot more collaboration all around the world.

[...]

(Via Cormac's wiki) URL: http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2007-03/Building_A_Community.htm