The Register’s Andrew Orlowski finds “encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.” Noting that up to now “criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor,” Orlowski quotes from an October 6 post that Wales made in response to my criticism of Wikipedia’s quality: “I don’t agree with much of this critique … but the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific embarassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.” Although the Internet encyclopedia “appears ill-equipped to respond to the new challenge,” writes Orlowski, “at least Wikipedia is officially out of QD, or the ‘Quality Denial’ stage.”
Other responses to my critique from wikipedians (as I write that word, I am overwhelmed by a vision of very tiny, very cheerful people dressed in green velvet dancing in a dell) point out that some of the encyclopedia’s entries, particularly those on technical or otherwise esoteric subjects, are quite good. That’s true, and it’s worth thinking about. Why are entries on arcane topics generally better than those on more broadly understood topics? I would guess that the reason’s pretty simple: Fewer people contribute to the arcane entries, and the contributors all tend to have some degree of specialized expertise in the field. For general-interest subjects, on the other hand, it’s a free-for-all. Everyone feels qualified to add his two cents, and the entries decay toward, as Wales puts it, “unreadable crap.”
In other words, the example of Wikipedia actually undercuts, rather than supports, the Web 2.0 tenet of “collective intelligence.” It reveals that collectivism and intelligence are actually inversely correlated. Here, then, is what I’ll propose as the Law of the Wiki: Output quality declines as the number of contributors increases. Making matters worse, the best contributors will tend to become more and more alienated as they watch their work get mucked up by the knuckleheads, and they’ll eventually stop contributing altogether, leading to a further fall in quality. As Dave Winer puts it, “No matter how good something is, there are always more idiots and morons to take it down.”
Now, there’s a way around this “collective mediocrity” trap. You can abandon democracy and impose centralized control over the output. That’s one of the things that separates open-source software projects from wikis; they incorporate a rigorous quality-control filter to weed out the crap before it pollutes the product. If Wikipedia wants to achieve it’s goal of being “authoritative,” I think it will have to abandon its current structure, admit that “collective intelligence” makes a pretty buzzphrase but a poor organizational model, and define and impose some kind of hierarchical power structure. But that, of course, would raise a whole other dilemma: Is a wiki still a wiki if it isn’t a pure democracy? Can some wikipedians be more equal than others?
Interessant Wikipedia-diskusjon
Av og til blir jeg så sliten av korte argumenter i norske media.IT-avisen skriver en sak om at Wikipedia er søppel, (jpg) basert på hurtiglesing av en nokså gjennomtenkt artikkel av Andrew Orlowski i The Register, hvor Jimmy &q…
Agree to disagree
I like James Robertson’s take on wikipedia and finding truth .
I’ve been following this as best as I can and I’m not sure that the problem of Wikipedia, or indeed collective intelligence, is restricted to the web in any of its incarnations. As a writer myself, I value the contributions that one or two people can make to a piece. any piece. They may be people with special knowledge but no writing ability, or vice versa, but either way they can often improve something I’ve done. Start to increase the number, though, and the piece rapidly falls apart if I accept all their suggestions.
And that’s the point I think everyone is making. Let the writers and editors write and edit. Let the experts contribute expertise. Let those who can do both be praised throughout the land.
Thanks for a thoughtful blog.
Jeremy
Often a single hand is worse. The entry on Franjo Tudjman, the former Croatian leader was, as someone else pointed out, taken verbatim from a Croatian government handbook. Unfortunately it still is since various insertions of fact, for example, as to his public commitment to the genocide of Orthodox Christians, on God’s command, have, in turn been deleted.
I think that Wiki represents a part of our common future. Hierarchy may or may not be needed, but not to the extent that it has been used in the past. The fact that it needs an editing “function”, does not neccessarily imply a hierarchy. For an example of technology that performs judgement without a central heirarchy, look at any of the predictive markets or idea futures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market .
I am wondering how you could use something like this as a place to “vote” on an article. The voters would be people viewing a Wiki entry and then making a “bet” on whether a given article is going to “survive”. Granted this is just quantitative, but over time more measures can be found and applied.
So this would be using polling to try to replace individual editorship. Wonder if anyone cares to suggest other technologies?
The definition of “irony”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Of_The_Wiki
John: That’s pretty funny. What’s even funnier is that there’s a wikipedia entry for myself and at the moment under “see also” there’s a link to the entry for “Satan.” I’ve arrived.
The problem of too many additions to the articles is compounded by the fact that in wiki it is much more difficult to delete something than to add something. It is somewhere deep in our culture that everyone is entitled to say his opinion on a fact, this is the freedom of speech and democracy. Deleting is like censorship, it is restricting the users right to express his opinion.