 The Berkman Center for Internet and Society presents a conversation with Joseph Regal, the author of Good Faith Collaboration, The Culture of Wikipedia. It is my pleasure to introduce to you Joseph Regal. Joseph is a fellow at the Berkman Center. He studies collaborative cultures. He received his doctorate and was an adjunct faculty member at NYU's Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. As a research engineer at MIT's Lab for Computer Science, he served as a working group chair and author within IETF and W3C on topics including digital security, privacy, and internet policy. And he is the author of this fine book, Good Faith Collaboration, The Culture of Wikipedia, which as you'll see is also set up on the back table. And at the conclusion of this event, Joseph will be pleased to sign books and otherwise see if he can distribute a few copies of them. And it is with pleasure that I introduce you, Joseph. Joseph will talk for 15, 20 minutes. We'll then be open for conversation, which I hope I will be able to effectively moderate. So, Joseph. Thank you, Charlie. Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming. So there are many laws of Wikipedia. These are sometimes referred to as Raul's law because he penned the first half a dozen laws. And these laws basically speak to how Wikipedians see themselves. And having these sorts of laws is actually part of a much larger tradition of people online trying to come to understand what it is that they're doing online and how they interact with one another. And interestingly, this law, J.S. II law, which says, show me an admin who has never been called a Nazi. And I'll show you an admin who is not doing their job. Perhaps coincidentally, maybe not intentionally, refers to the granddaddy of all internet laws, the thing that really started this tradition. And that's Godwin's law. Godwin's law says, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. And Mike Godwin penned this aphorism in the 90s, back on the Usenet. Does anyone know what the Usenet is even anymore? Some people. That was a thing that predated the web. And very long conversations could be had there. Plenty of flame wars and arguments and interesting discussions as well. But nonetheless, Mike Godwin, who is a co-founder of the EFF and coincidentally is now a legal counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, noted that inevitably didn't matter how innocuous a topic you were discussing inevitably would come down to. Well, you're acting like a Hitler, you're censoring me, or somehow otherwise acting like a Nazi. And so my argument about Wikipedia is that Wikipedia must somehow counter this tendency of us as human beings to see the worst in one another. So in the past, I've given lots of talks. I've been working on this for seven years now, as I do in my PhD. I've given lots of specific talks about particular models, theories, and arguments, and historical framing. But today I want to do something a little bit different. I want to go a little bit meta and try to communicate the whole arc of the story, if you will. And I'm going to do that using these Wikipedia laws, as well as some Wikispeak definitions. Now, as an ethnographer, as someone who's interested in collaborative norms and how communities try to make sense of what they do, these are just delightful to me. And Wikispeak in particular is this self-compiled collection of ironic and humorous definitions about being a Wikipedia. And so in this case, we can see the definition of a Wiki in the Wikispeak page says that a model for the creation of enormous, diverse, and constantly updated online libraries of human behavior for the benefit of sociologists and social historians. So that's certainly appropriate to me and many other people, since so many of us now study Wikipedia. But before I get into the substance of the book, I'd like to thank a few people. Another way that Wikipedians relate to one another is through the provisioning of barn stars. And if someone likes what you've been doing or appreciate a contribution you've made online at Wikipedia, they drop a little template on your page, and you can receive a barn star like this. And there's dozens of barn stars for things such as being a diligent editor, help reverting vandalism, being temperate in your approach to interactions with other people. And so I just wanted to thank Amar for helping organize this and the other staff who are participating to make this happen. I'd like to thank Larry Lessig for writing the forward, Charlie for moderating the discussion, Clay for doing an endorsement, as well as Jonathan Zittrain and Nora, my personal friend in the back, who read the earliest, cruftiest draft of everything in there, as well as the final proofs. So to historically frame this, the first thing I'd like to claim is that Wikipedia is part of the larger tradition. Here we can see Denny Diderot writing in 1755 in the encyclopedia about encyclopedias. It wasn't uncommon for early lexicographers and reference work producers to actually editorialize in the stuff that they were actually producing. So in his encyclopedia article, you can find him saying that the aim of an encyclopedia is to collect all the knowledge that now lies scattered over the face of the earth and to transmit it to subsequent generations, such that they may become more virtuous and more happy. And if we look at Wikipedia today, here we can see one of these seminal statements from Jimmy Wales expressing the mission of Wikipedia, which is to say, our mission is to give freely the sum of the world's knowledge to every single person. And I think these sentiments of both Diderot and Wales speak to something I call a universal encyclopedic vision. And that is a technologically inspired aspiration. In the old days, they were quite intrigued and inspired by index cards and microfilm and binders and, say, as computer and network technology. But they felt this would enable us to liberate information and knowledge from the bindings of a book, make it divisible and transportable, and bridge distances and lessen global strife. Indeed, if we look back to early 20th century documentary lists, such as H.G. Welles, who many of you probably have heard of as a science fiction author or fiction author in general, and Paul Outlay, these men were both internationalists and documentalists. And we see these two aspirations witted and mutually supportive, the sharing information to further global accord. Now today, we have computer networks. And I think that has made the possibility, we need look no further than Wikipedia, the possibility of the universal encyclopedia being realized much more likely. And perhaps the naive hope that somehow information technology would bring about world peace has lessened. Even so, very few people would argue that Wikipedia is going to bring about world peace today. But nonetheless, I do argue that Wikipedia collaboration is dependent upon a good faith culture and that can actually give rise to some virtues. And so how do Wikipedians resist the gravitational pull of Godwin's law? And I argue, basically the core of the book is they have to take two sort of stances or perspectives. They first have to have an open perspective with respect to the knowledge claims. And they need to have an open perspective about contributors. And again, we can see a similarity, perhaps a coincidence across the centuries between Diderot and in another law. And so the first idea, an open perspective of knowledge claims is represented in the Wikipedia norm and policy of neutral point of view. And this Wikispeak definition is kind of ironic, recognizing the difficulties in actually abiding by this policy. And it's also a policy that's frequently misunderstood. When people hear someone talking about encyclopedia and neutrality, they think, oh, this is a bunch of naive fools who think that somehow knowledge can be perfectly objective or neutral. And I think that's a fair misunderstanding, but it is a misunderstanding. Neutral point of view, from my perspective, is really more a behavioral guideline, though it's not classified as such. It's asking Wikipedians to not be overly concerned with what is right and what is wrong and what is true and what is false, but to simply to undertake their efforts such that all notable claims out there in the world that people have made and can be found in a reputable source are represented fairly and proportionately at Wikipedia. Now, that's easier said than done, of course. For example, global climate change, young Earth creationism, those are fairly contentious topics in the real world and at Wikipedia too. But one of the important things at Wikipedia is the norms at least, though in practice sometimes people fail, the goal was not to say that the Earth is 4 billion or 4,000 years old. It's to say that there are groups of people who believe this and there are groups of people that believe this. And if you're writing an encyclopedic article about some sort of controversy, document the controversy, but don't partake of it yourself. That's the epistemic stance. And then the other aspect is the intersubjective stance. And basically, this is saying that even though we're tempted to see the worst in other people, after some interactions, assume they're like Hitler or a Nazi, assume good faith. And so here I note a number of positive virtues that I say are really important and at core of the Wikipedia collaborative culture. And that includes, assume the best, as I've spoken of, patience, civility, and humor. Of course, these things might sound rather myopic and rose-tinted, and particularly since I framed it in the context of some early utopianists. But nonetheless, I think it's important that these norms are there, even if people fail to satisfy them. And we must recognize that despite those early utopian visions, Wikipedia is both real and very messy. So I want to talk about some of the challenges that Wikipedia faces. And of course, the first thing is its openness. Wikipedia is known as the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Of course, that leads us to the interesting question of, is Wikipedia really something that anyone can edit? And I argue that both the very concept of openness and its practice are difficult and challenging things. And so with respect to the idea itself, consider something that Wikipedians are talking about today. And that's pending changes. Just to get us free to the room, how many people know what pending changes is? One, two, three, four. Oh, fair amount. So that's interesting. There are some Wikipedia savvy people. But basically the idea is, how can they implement a system such that for some sensitive pages, they can make it such that, granted, anyone who wants to edit Wikipedia still can, but those edits won't be seen by the public, the world at large, until someone else has reviewed them. So to restate that, if you're an anonymous contributor and you're not logged in and you make an edit to some page that's frequently defamed or has some vandalism on it, your change would go into a queue that must be reviewed before it can be seen by the rest of the world. And of course, that invites fascinating discussions about, is this a failure of Wikipedia? Is Wikipedia becoming more closed? And my point is that openness is not such an easy binary thing to talk about. For example, there are already protection mechanisms at Wikipedia whereby some of these pages are closed, they're protected or locked from anyone being able to contribute to them other than administrators. And so if we substitute this one mechanism for the other mechanism, it's actually a sort of openness. So my argument there is that it's not a simple binary and instead openness needs to be looked at in context. And furthermore, if you thought about, well what happens if Wikipedia removed all the controls and mechanisms it has, unprotected all the pages, what would happen? So I'll take a guess actually, what do people think would happen if you got rid of all the protection mechanisms at Wikipedia? Chaos. I think so too. And then you'd have to ask yourself, well in theory it's certainly seemingly more open, but it would be close to those people that wanna make a good faith, useful contribution to a working encyclopedia. And so that's just to say the whole idea of openness is an important one. I think it's a good thing to aspire to, but it's not as easy as we might think. The other question is decision making. And this is actually one of the things openness makes really hard. When you have a community, a potentially huge community of anonymous, pseudonymous, it may be identifiable members, some of which may have more than one account, they have the notion of a sock puppet, so I could put a sock on my hand and create another account and have it agree with everything I say. It's really difficult to make decisions in such a circumstance. And I look to a couple other communities that are famous for consensus decision making processes and that includes the World Wide Web Consortium and ITF, Internet Engineering Task Force, where I have some experience myself, as well as the Society of Friends or Quakers. And note that even though Wikipedia says they work by consensus, they lack some of the critical things those other communities have. And that includes like a skilled, experienced facilitator or clerk or working group chair from the start. There's questions of scale that are massively different between Wikipedia and these other communities. Communities like the W3C and ITF have milestones and charters that give them some scope to help them to be able to address these issues in a tractable way that are difficult for them. And I explore this in the book by looking at our arbitration case. And it's about a seemingly trivial, though no less bellicose issue facing Wikipedia, as are most of the most interesting debates at Wikipedia. How could anyone care about this? Should potato chips be called potato chips or potato crisps? Huge battle over that. So in this case it was how do they deal with collisions? And in the computer science context, collisions are I have something that's going in this pigeon hole and something else wants to go in that pigeon hole. So how do I deal with that? So at Wikipedia, they might have an article that's named the title of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode and they have a page for that episode. But it turns out there's a movie by the same name and there's a book by the same name. So who gets to have the Wikipedia page with that name? And so at Wikipedia, what they do is they have disambiguation. And so they might have a page that says there's all these other things you can go check out. And all those other things will have something after their name and parentheses, film, TV series, TV episode. And so there was a case of for television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, should all the titles say parentheses TV series? Or should they only include that disambiguating parenthetical when there's a collision with another existing article? Seemingly trivial issue that nonetheless it got rather heated. And there was the consistent group of people and the exceptional group of people and they were worrying back and forth and they could not come to consensus. In fact, there was no consensus about what consensus means. And so they went to the arbitration committee which has kind of become like the Supreme Court of Wikipedia and said, help us, we can't figure this out. And it's a fascinating case, including the fact that like a wiki, they were trying to pull and get a sense of whether they had consensus or not but people were editing the poll while it was happening. And in fact, some people did go a bit off the deep end and there was some sexual harassment for which someone was censored. But in the end, the arbitration committee isn't that satisfying. They said, well, there was consensus and the problem that was that it wasn't, the issue wasn't properly closed. And so in that sense, it was really kind of frustrating for a lot of Wikipedians, I think. But nonetheless, things like openness and consensus, if they don't have easy answers, bright lines and binary toggle switches, doesn't mean they're useless. It's still something you strive towards. But appreciating these differences and understanding that they happen means that sometimes community comes to, they get jammed, they get stuck. And so as Badani's second law says when a building is on fire, a leader will not survey everyone to see what the consensus is about a response. And so one of my concerns is that consensus can be a good thing for an open content community, but they will face interactions between participants of good faith, whereby they can't come to a decision and attacks from outside the community from say those people of bad faith who would take a long time to marshal a response against. And so that case you need some sort of person or maybe a committee, an oligarchy perhaps, a cabal if you wanna use that term, that are able to be a arbiter of last resort and to make quick defensive actions if need be. So at Wikipedia, one of the things, again it's this strange Nazi theme is for a long time, particularly in 2005, there was a lot of concern that Wikipedia was gonna be attacked by a concerted effort by neo-Nazis to take over the system. And Jimmy Wales said, well I won't allow that to happen, we won't have a democratic process and take votes and try to come to consensus about the response would be because they could be overrun by then, rather I'll step in, do what I can, we'll take the time as a community then to figure out what we should do. And so I claim that in communities like this, I say there's typically a person at the top that has this sort of authority, though it's not inexhaustible, they can abuse it certainly. And the goal there is to arbitrary between those of good faith and defend against those of bad faith. And should the community, should that founding author, either as a community or in content, expend all of their merit that they've accumulated in doing something good, the community might then fail or fork or say we need some sort of governance mechanism beyond what we have now because this simply isn't working anymore. So by this point in the book where we stand is, I have made a historical argument that Wikipedia is part of a larger tradition and legacy and I've provided some theories and models of things that can open content community for leadership and for consensus decision making and all of this is widely discussed and has been quite controversial within the community but it's also quite controversial without the outside of the community. And so I wanna talk about some of that criticism. So when we look at open top to busses first law and that's a bit of a mouthful, I think one of the things we notice is that I think most people would say Wikipedia has matured and gotten better over time but nonetheless the expectations of what Wikipedia should be and the quality that it should offer have changed and perhaps just as quickly. And I describe this when I look in this instance and a couple of other instances when you look at technology and how people perceive it as a form of technological vertigo and if you remember from Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo he did this camera trick where he would pull the camera back but zoom in at the same time and it gave you this sense of being stuck but also being displaced at the same time. I think this often happens like when we look at gadgets and we think goodness how could I not have lived with this but you did live with that only a year ago and so when I think about technology I often get that sense of have things really changed but nonetheless I do feel kind of displaced and alienated. So here's an example of some criticism from Michael Gorman former head of the American Library Association and I always liked this one. I'll read the full things it's so neat. He says, Wikipedia's continue to add to an intellectually lazy to use the fundamentally flawed resource much to the chagrin of many professors and school teachers. Many professors have forbidden its use in papers. A professor who encourages the use of Wikipedia is the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything. Now this is actually fairly civil and polite. Other people such as Helprin who is a critic of Wikipedia and published a book recently about digital barbarians talks about Wikipedia being like a baka now where you go and you have anonymous sex with people you don't know and get verneral disease. But again, I find it's fascinating and kind of funny but again I try to historicize it a little bit more and it turns out that Wikipedia is not alone in prompting what I call encyclopedic anxiety. When I look at the history of reference works it turns out that Wikipedia like the French encyclopedia and Webster's third in the 1960s, I don't know how many of you remember they ain't a word controversies I do as a child. I heard that quite a lot. That was from the publication of the Webster's third and people's perceptions that they thought was given too much attention in that dictionary. Reference works often act as an exemplar and a proxy for larger cultural wars be it about a French Revolution, be it about the diction of hippies or be it about today what people might more unkindly call a hive mind or a malice collective. And so what I do in the final subset of chapter of the book is I try to make sense of this criticism and I do that by looking at four themes that I've kind of touched on already in the presentation so far. And a lot of the criticism about Wikipedia tends to settle upon these four things. One, the universal vision. Sometimes people find the idea of Web 2.0 in Wikipedia to be either a claim for a wonderful utopian or a scary dystopian but people tend to spend a lot of time talking about that. They also tend to be very concerned about this whole idea of collaboration in the Web 2.0 context, liking it to a web mind. Furthermore, what I call the encyclopedic impulse, some of the people that work on Wikipedia can be surprisingly focused and dedicated and both the critics of Wikipedia and the defenders of Wikipedia can be similarly passionate. And sometimes that leads some people to say these people are like a cult. And in the book I list a whole number of instances in which people characterize Wikipedians as being part of a religion, fanboys, or a cult. And then finally there's this question of technological inspiration. Kevin Kelly, who has a new book out too, I think perhaps is maybe most guilty of this, but he gets quite excited about technology and perhaps makes some hyperbolic claims. And some people just say it's all hype. This is just nonsense. This is pundits, people trying to get attention. And I think there's some truth to that but also there's some substantive issues going on that I think merit attention and consideration. So in conclusion, what I'm trying to do is offer my own law of how Wikipedia can work in theory. I'd like to say I was one of the first people that started parodying this, but now anyone that does any Wikipedia research throws that up there too. And that is the problem with Wikipedias that it only works in practice and theory it can never work. So I'm offering my own theory, at least in part of how Wikipedia could work, and that is through this thing that I call good faith collaborative culture, that we need to keep an open perspective about knowledge claims and an open perspective about other contributors on Wikipedia and to assume the best of those people until they prove us wrong to act with patience, civility, and humor. And basically my book is a historically informed ethnography of the people making that undertaking that effort and when actually you think back to H.G. Wells and his concern with scattered knowledge and a jigsaw puzzle of ineffective mental wealth that needs to be solved and brought together and the fact that the Wikipedia logo is in fact an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, that coincidence is quite remarkable to me and I think speaks to how remarkable a tale this is. So thank you very much for coming and I look forward to the discussion. So let me start off with just a question of my own. As soon as your book was published, I went to Amazon to buy a copy and immediately noted that there was one customer review which had one star on it and it led off, I wouldn't think of buying this book based on my complete reading of the freely available first chapter. The entire work says later, regurgitates the tired old public relations pablum that the Wikipedia organization sputters forth on the internet and goes on. So here it seems like someone who hasn't read your book goes on to critique the whole book on the basis of what you'd put up in the first chapter and in a way seems to exemplify a kind of bad faith that undercuts the thesis, at least to some extent, that this Wikipedia environment is a good faith community. How did you react to this bullying tactic and I must say still the only review that's up on Amazon? Right, so it can be quite challenging and I wasn't so much upset with the Amazon review but there is a thread on a website called Wikipedia Review talking about me in the book and there are porn cut-ups and people say they spit on me and they want people to burn in hell. So there is definitely a sort of flip side to the Wikipedia culture and Wikipedia is certainly ripe to be constructively criticized for a lot of things and I think what I portray in the book is a lot of the challenges and how the community have wrestled with it as well as criticism from people like Halperin and Keen and Orlowski and Sanger and a whole number of people but nonetheless in one presentation at some point I had said I do not engage the mean-spirited trolls and that has upset some of these people because they might then imply that I characterize them as being mean-spirited trolls and some of them I do think are mean-spirited trolls but not all of them but I think one of the really important things is you can find boneheads in all types of communities including Wikipedia, you can find anti-social people that mean people but the difference between Wikipedia and say the Wikipedia review community is there are norms at Wikipedia where we say we want to do better than that. When someone posted that porn cut up or someone posts defamation in some of these other places like encyclopedia dramatic is full of that stuff people laugh, they chime in, they don't say I don't really think that's a productive way to engage. So I just think it does speak to some of the differences and I'm not trying to represent Wikipedia as being perfect as being this pastor of harmony in full of angels, not at all but nonetheless you do have this community and it's culture that's trying to do better than what Godwin's law calls us to. The floor is open, Clay. Sorry, you mentioned earlier that Wikipedia doesn't have some of the mechanisms that say a Quaker meeting does or that the IETF does. Do you think that Wikipedia would do well to adopt those norms, that it's own norms are that it's essentially developing alternate norms or that it needs some future unspecified set of norms and tools to deal with the scale issue? The problem to me does seem to be one of scale and that Wikipenians had made a number of efforts to have like a mediation committee and like a conflict management committee. They haven't really succeeded I think because they were voluntary and people could ignore them. Also when you start out on something you just might be involved with one or two or three people and you're, I mean even having a facilitator or something like that might be too much process for that sort of small collaboration and then who of course is setting themselves up to be that facilitator. So I think they could somehow benefit from that stuff but I don't know how the community could realize it. And so what it seems like we're left with is all sorts of different Wikipedians, some people who are very committed, have a lot of time, some people who can Wiki lawyer process and at some point it just gets so horrible it goes up to the arbitration committee. And actually there's been a climate change case pending before the arbitration committee for I think 19 weeks. It's been an issue for years at Wikipedia. It finally closed last week and it's really kind of interesting if you read the decision because what the arbitration committee did is they said these people are provisionally banned and these people are banned and someone actually voluntarily banned themselves from editing certain Wikipedia pages which I thought was really interesting. And it's almost as if the arbitration committee sometimes appoints special masters to check up on people and make sure they're not violating some of the injunctions that have been placed against them. So because the arbitration committee itself is really getting overloaded with a lot of these issues and they aren't scaling very well either. So it's not a simple issue unfortunately. I yell it? What one you need a mic? Mic. Thank you. Well first I'm almost done with the book and I really enjoyed it. So thank you very much. Thank you for the presentation. I was just about to do that. I will just about to do that. I just thought I'm like okay I need to do something. And actually I was wondering in talking about openness and decision making and I was wondering there are a lot of discursive ways to come up with that. You could educate people, you could talk about it. You could have those laws of nature that you discuss like the Goodwin law but it seems to me that according to your book in Wikipedia these things kind of structure around the norms, the actual laws of the community. You have neutral point of view which is a policy. You have the decision making. You have the assumed is good faith. And I was wondering why do you think in this Wikipedia all this discursive and social action actually structures around these policies, these more formal tools to engage the community and not in educational other ways to do that? Well I think part of it is its evolution. I think part of it is human nature. People like to talk and argue about things. A couple of these seminal policy guidelines were put out there at the start. And you're suggesting that there's an alternative to the discussion that there'd be sort of outreach to people to make sure that they're brought up to speed on what the policies are. I would imagine you could have very informal, very social norms-based community that would not try to formalize it into policies and then discuss the policies as you're showing in the book but actually just talk about openness just like generally as we would talk about it. Well I think the problem is when you're facing a problem the natural tendency is to say if we figured out a solution to this problem wouldn't it be nice if we could reuse the solution? And Clay has a wonderful quote. You want to say it? Well it's okay, you have so many wonderful quotes. But the process is an embedded reaction to previous stupidity and you know. Say it again, Joseph. Is that right? Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity. Okay. And so these things just kinda bubble out of the discourse and tend to get reified and then people start referring to them. And one of the criticisms against Wikipedia now is that there's just too much process. It's almost as if you really need a law degree in Wikipedia norms and policies to be able to participate there. And that's a real issue. That's something that Wikipedians are very much concerned about. So there's always this challenge to balance out. Let's take advantage of things we've learned. Let's not have to argue about whether it's potato chips or potato crisps again. But then again when a newbie comes in and does something that's against this now 10 years weight of history and experience let's not blast them with this stuff and scare them off because that's a real big concern. And one of the other norms there is don't bite the newbies. I think that's what they're speaking to. And I talk about it in the book but there's also this rule, one of the first ones which is ignore all rules. And basically it says if you find yourself getting too obsessed with all these rules and norms just ignore them for the time being. Edit a page, try to do a good job and don't give it any more thought. But of course that ends up being this huge argument about what does ignore all rules mean? Does it mean you can be a jerk or you can say you can't tell me what to do? And of course they discuss it forever. So when Tim Armstrong was at Google he often used to say whenever I see someone trying to make a decision I think of replacing them with a market or an auction. He's now running AOL and among the things he seems to be doing is constructing a market in content that could be construed as a kind of market equivalent of Wikipedia. Certainly I think in the vision he has when you do a Google search on a construct what will come up will be a Wikipedia offering and a set of other offerings one of which will be the offering generated by his content mill. And if Google's algorithm is somewhat impartial or neutral there's a possibility that that AOL generated piece of content will rise under the algorithm to something like the rank that the Wikipedia entry has. Now I understand there's a big issue here having to do with what is the currency of the marketplace? And in Wikipedia it's no market, it's a hierarchical structure of governance. In AOL's version of a content farm it's advertising revenue. So the most visited site is the one that generates the most ad revenue which rewards the constructor of that content. But putting the question, the currency aside, I mean how do you see the tension between an administrative system and a market driven system? So I wouldn't actually characterize even though I spoke about the arbitration committee and there are a thousand administrators and a couple other sort of roles up there that have crystallized over time as Wikipedia became more bureaucratic. It is relatively flat, I mean most people won't have to deal with those sort of issues I think in a lot of their interactions. And what people are doing is looking for I think reputation within the community. It's an internal orientation towards the community rather trying to get something outside of it. And like getting a barn star could be quite a thrill to a Wikipedia. Now how Wikipedia will then kind of relate to or measure up to a more market based encyclopedic project I'm not exactly sure. I just will note that people have often talked about the gains that Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation could make if they were to commercialize Wikipedia. If they put an ad banner, a simple very, Google search link on pages they can make hundreds of millions of dollars a number of people have done back of the envelope contributions. But the trick there for Wikipedia is that since most of these people come to these communities and see themselves as volunteers take a lot of pride and ownership in the larger Wikipedia because of their contributions they are very not keen on the idea of seeing their work that they feel they did for a voluntary and pro-social reason being commercialized and would object to it very strongly. And there was actually some, number of years ago there was some discussion of whether Jimmy Whales intended to somehow commercialize Wikipedia and that offended the Spanish so much that they created a Spanish work called Encyclopedia Libre. And then I think in part to that response it was made clear that no, we're gonna be a nonprofit foundation and we're never gonna do that sort of thing. So I don't know if that speaks to your concern properly but I will note that as a fundamental difference and also note that the licenses that Wikipedia operates under do not prevent Wikipedia from being bound into a book and sold. Answers.com has been a sponsor for a number of at least the Wikimania meetups and they repurpose as a content in a lot of the Wikipedia context and that is fine both with the community and with the foundation. So I'm glad you brought up the idea of the conflict between academia and Wikipedia primarily because my work is mostly focused on bringing the concepts of openness and collaboration to the academic setting. But I wonder what you think about how the academic setting could bring to bear on the Wikipedia community and vice versa what both communities could learn from one another in terms of structure and how they operate. So I don't know if anyone is advocating that the academic structure brought to Wikipedia. I think that experiment was tried with Wikipedia's progenitor, Newpedia, under the efforts of Larry Sanger who actually did recruit a lot of PhDs and experts to work on Newpedia. That's N-U-P-E-D-I-A. And it was the thing that Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales first started but it moved very slow. They had a burdensome process and only these experts could participate. And as just a little bit of the history then Larry Sanger had a lunch at a taco stand with an old friend of his from the email list, Ben Kovitz and Ben told him about these wikis. And Larry, who was basically the manager of Newpedia, said, wow, maybe we could try this for Wikipedia. We'll create a little scratch pad. People will be able to tool around including the public on this wiki. And then if it's good, we'll port it over to this more academic expert-based encyclopedia. But the thing called wiki, which was just an experiment, took off like mad. And a few months later when Newpedia servers crashed, I didn't even bother to bring it back. So I don't think anyone is looking or advocating for the academic to wiki transference in terms of model. Wikipedians have been reaching out to various cultural institutions like museums to make sure that they can somehow work with them to make sure that museum content is more widely accessible. The Wikimedia Foundation has something to call the Policy Initiative. And they've been working with people here on Harvard's campus as well, such that teachers that wanna make use of developing Wikipedia content as a class or student exercise will have the support there that they want. And some people have certainly argued that the academy needs to be more like wiki. But I don't know how easily that might happen. And I'm sufficiently new to the academy. I don't feel qualified to say, well, do away with tech, cause I was just reading something today actually, and they were like, get rid of tenure, make everything based solely on the number of students you have in your class and that sort of stuff. But I don't know, perhaps things would change, perhaps not. I brought a question with me from SB Johnny. The real name is John McConaughey. He's a bureaucrat on Wikipedia City and also a administrator. And he asks, how can organizations and communities at the Wikimedia Foundation projects overcome the founder effect? So would you be willing to explain the founder effect? Well, as I understand it, it's the notion that there's a kind of a cult that grows up around the founder and the founder has undue influence on the vision and direction. And it's hard to break away from whatever vision the original founder has. So you kinda get tied to the coattails of the founder. Right, so in my book, I present the ability of the founder, like Jimmy Wales, to kind of hang around in a semi-nebulous way to be the arbiter of good faith and a defender against those of bad faith as a potentially good thing. And so if a community felt that the founder, what I call an authorial leader has basically exhausted the credit he accumulated in doing good things at the start, they could fork or they could say we need a new form of governance. And the community has pushed back at Jimmy Wales in a number of ways and a number of people are almost rapidly critical of him. But for example, during some elections where basically it's kind of interesting, the arbitration committee is voted upon by the community and that informs the decisions that Jimmy Wales makes in appointing the arbitration committee. So he still has quite a lot of power there in terms of who he elects to the arbitration committee. And a number of years ago, I think he had access to the polls of who was winning and who was losing. And he started kind of campaigning for a number of people saying, please go out there and vote and vote for good people, people that he likes. Because he doesn't wanna have to stick someone in there that people didn't popularly elect or boot someone out that a large people seem to have supported. And a number of people, I think rightfully so in the community said, this is inappropriate. You should not be involved in this. And after that, some of those processes went out to the software and the public interest organization. So I don't know other than to say, well, if the community is upset, it will either fork or it won't. It's kind of a descriptive approach to it, but that seems to be the way things work. It's fascinated me watching the X community. That's the desktop presentation system for UNIX and Linux systems. And they have forked, I don't know, at least four or five times, particularly over questions of leadership. So it's really just, does the community think they could do it? Can I ask a follow up question? This comes from another person. In fact, this comes from Greg Coase, the one who wrote that review. I don't know, people are aware that about a week or so ago, Jimmy Whales won a $100,000 prize from a Swiss foundation. And so the question is, are there any ethical issues arising from $100,000 Swiss prize being awarded personally to Jimbo? What should he do with the money? Should he give it to the foundation or should he use it to start a new project independently? What do you think are the ethical issues of him getting the $100,000 personally? I don't think I have that much of an informed thought on it. I haven't followed that news item of particular. I focus on the community and the culture, and I'm not so... I mean, I certainly talk about the importance of Jimmy Whales and historically establishing the community in terms of his efforts to create some of the norms that you see and that I stress are very important at Wikipedia. But that particular news item and what he should do with his money, I don't really feel qualified to speak on. Perhaps in a future blog, you might comment. So there's a bunch of open source software product that inspired Wikipedia, but it seems like in the non-software space, Wikipedia is the only open organization that has been successful. For example, there's other open content on places like Flickr or something, and there's people who really write Amazon reviews, but that all the stuff is kind of owned and controlled by a corporation. So do you think there's a reason Wikipedia is unique? Do you think it was just sort of they got there first? Like why isn't there another Wikipedia? So to be fair, I mainly focus on the English Wikipedia. So to be fair, I think I have to say there are lots of other language Wikipedia's. There are other projects like Wikidictionary and Commons where they have a lot of source materials, and there have been other competitors. For example, Larry Sanger, once he left the Wikipedia community, he still felt that he could make a go of creating a more expert-friendly based encyclopedic project, and he created something called Citizenium. And it has, I don't know how many active contributors right now, but it's on the scale of hundreds rather than thousands, and they've slowed down apparently in the past few years as has Wikipedia, but at completely different scales. There are also various ideological versions of Wikipedia. There's Metapedia, which is more like a neo-Nazi kind of Wikipedia. There's Conservapedia, which objects to the liberal bias of mass media and Wikipedia in particular. And I will say, I think a lot of the things I talk about are a very kind of Western enlightenment reason sort of approach to thing. It's very materialistic. They say we want verifiable sources from published peer review journals and good magazines and newspapers and things like that. And if you wanna use the Bible or some other work as your source, you're not gonna have a easy time of it at Wikipedia. So there are other scales, but I think Wikipedia certainly does benefit from having a first mover advantage. For example, I think Larry, had they had said at the beginning, everyone that participates at Wikipedia needs to do something to identify themselves. You can't be pseudonymous. I think Wikipedia could have succeeded still, potentially. I mean, it's hard to say this counterfactual history. But a lot of the features of Wikipedia today, I think in a sense were accidental, and they're not gonna go away now, but I think they were accidental sometimes. Do you think stuff like encyclopedias and dictionaries lend themselves more to large user bases creating content than other types of textual work? I think so. And it goes back to this idea of the universal vision in that to the extent that we can talk about facts, this stuff is kind of parsable, and you can kind of pull it apart and make use of it. And the work lends itself to asynchronous work. It's very incremental. People can do some spell checking and someone else can add a sentence. So I think you're right to note that. So you compare the Wikipedia to the Quakers and to standard setting organizations. But maybe another interesting comparison is to self-management of common resources like fisheries or mining camps. What's interesting, if I think about that history a little bit, there are some interesting parallels. So for instance, in the gold rush, the miners originally managed who got the gold claims among themselves and it was a very much a norms-based process. And eventually it became much, over time it became more and more sophisticated. It became a system of property rights and eventually it eventually made its way into the law. So when you talked before about Wikipedia lawyers, it was there are now mineral rights lawyers who are doing what miners themselves used to do. Is there, it raises the question, will Wikipedia necessarily become so formalized and so bureaucratic that it really is very much like a public managed asset? So the lawyering that is happening and the bureaucratization that is happening with Wikipedia is very much internally oriented. And so there are lawyers that are on the arbitration committee, but I don't think necessarily that it's gonna go out into a larger body of law. I don't think it's gonna infect the larger world in that way. I didn't mean necessarily becoming something that's in the law, but something that is that sophisticated and that where average people are then just removed from the process. And there's a level of expertise that's, the threshold of expertise becomes so high that there's really a professionalization. I think you're right. And I think I've spoken to Ayala about this. Some of the PhD law students around, just the arbitration committee seems like such an interesting institution to look at relative to how the legal system works. How are we doing on time? We're doing fine, we've got another 10 minutes. So one of the interesting things about Wikipedia to me is that most of the hard work happens behind the scenes. It's kind of interesting, like you were saying, how this organization sprung up from this like virtual state of nature almost. And I think it's something that a lot of us don't realize you see the public facing page, but you never really click on the discussion. And actually even the collaborative aspect is usually done through email forms and other things. I wonder to that effect what you've learned about how that really organized. I mean, did it just happen spontaneously or were there a few key players who actually did the work early on to bring that structure and organization? So this speaks to the question of the long tail and the power law in the 80, 20. There has been some question of, well, who really contributes to Wikipedia? And is it a small group of people doing a lot of work or is it a lot of people doing little bits of work? And in the book I actually have this massive footnote because that was one of the first things studied where there's this huge trail of literature where people are discussing that. And I think it's safe to say that it's both. There certainly were a lot of people that spent a lot of time that really set the expectations and momentum rolling for what Wikipedia looks like today. But there's also lots of people that are doing little things like I would characterize myself as a wiki gnome. And both of those are actually important when people look at those sort of things. It looks like that a lot of content actually comes in through anonymous contributors and then the established Wikipedians do things like talk about things on talk pages and coordinate and try to organize and create wiki projects. And so, yes, I think a few people did a lot of the work but all the work that people contribute seems to be important. I was just wondering a little more about the role of anonymity that as you say, there's the ability to edit anonymously but at the same time, certain people have been found out through their IP address because it usually logs that, I think, through the system. So for instance, congressional staffers have been editing their members' pages during a campaign or something like that. So in one sense, things are anonymous but in another sense, the nature of the internet allows for investigation of who people are if things become controversial. So maybe just some comment on that kind of balance. In the book, I had to write a little caveat because it is people that edit Wikipedia without logging in are typically called anonymous but as you know, when you do that, you see a little IP number associated with that edit potentially and that can sometimes be sourced back. The provenance can be followed and you realize oh, this is someone in the office of church of Scientology or some congressional staffer and if you really want to be anonymous, it's better to create a pseudonym that will then show instead of the IP address and then should there be a problem or someone wants to figure out who you are, you have to have the check user write which is a fairly high level, not a lot of people have that ability to actually find out the IP address associated with one of the Wikipedia login pseudonyms. So it is, in a sense, a misnomer but I think it speaks to the web in general today. You might think you're being anonymous as we saw the Facebook news this past week even if you've set all your privacy settings to be rather hardcore, nonetheless the applications have been sharing information. So you'd be surprised what people can figure out based on very small amount of information. Joseph, there was tremendous anxiety expressed in your slides at the beginning from libraries and academics about the intrusion of Wikipedia and Wikipedia and thinking on standards and values in academia. Have you seen that dissipate over time and do you see, what would you say the future of those concerns are as Wikipedia goes forward? I think Wikipedia is gonna become a bit more bureaucratic. I think they're gonna be, as they mature they will become more responsive to dealing with issues of defamation and vandalism and biographies of living people. I think the quality will generally improve and I think as is perhaps a truism in history people will begin to take it for granted. One of the scary things is I began this work in 2004 when it was a new and novel seeming thing but now my, when I was teaching last year my students did not know of a world without Wikipedia. So people are gonna begin taking it for granted I suspect and that will also happen in the academy and in education too. And I think people are coming around to a position that I've always believed is that Wikipedia is an opportunity, a learning moment if you will to understand the social construction of knowledge to appreciate that there can be bias out there and to hopefully teach people to be media literate to understand the way these things can be perhaps biased or abused and to check the sources and to see what those sources say. I mean that's one of the interesting things I often say Wikipedia is only as good as its sources and one of the clever ways people can vandalize Wikipedia or bias it at least is to make some sort of preposterous claim and then say here's a source but it's some really rare hard to find imprint only magazine that no one else can verify and those sorts of insertions tend to last for a really long time but nonetheless it's an opportunity to say to students this is why you have to follow up with these things. And I think more people are coming around to that. Thorn, yes. I think students do cite Wikipedia in their coursework. Do you ask them actually to cite the source that is shown on Wikipedia or is it enough for you for them to cite that it was a Wikipedia entry? So my policy that I speak about at the beginning of every course is to say that if I use a definition in a class or I make use of a Wikipedia page I have vetted it and you can cite that if it's on the syllabus but if it's not on the syllabus you can cite it because I don't wanna pretend that students aren't using Wikipedia but not as your primary source. So I explain to them the different ways that people use citations to do things. So you might cite something to say this is just someone I'm talking about. You might cite it to say I'm making an authoritative claim based on the authority of this source. So there's different purposes so I try to explain what citation is as a practice rather than a chore because I think that's how it's most often presented to students. And then I say you can use it. I'm not gonna tell you you can't use it because that would seem silly. And you could even include it in your paper but it can't be the authoritative source. You should have something where you followed the link. And I'll also say just as you should use permanent links and you should use versions that are dated. And I have had instances where even though I stress that to the class for instance when you're a student use the latest version of a page and quoted something that I didn't agree with and I said well you should have used the version that I gave you. You referred to yourself as an ethnographer and I'd be interested in knowing a little bit about the process of your research. So to speak to method a little bit I'm very much influenced by Garfinkel's ethno methodology and ethnography in general. And it's a really rich topic and researchers can talk about it quite a lot but to put it simply I basically filed the community. I dug up lots of email archives from things that had been lost from the net in general including the new media archives. I went to meetups and I participated in some of the conferences. I blogged and I wrote papers and I got feedback from Wikipedians. So basically it was a modest level of engagement and practice as part of the community while being reflective about it and also giving community members opportunities to comment on what I was writing. And I had to develop some software to create these huge mind maps. I have thousands and thousands of primary sources from blogs and news stories and Wikipedia discourse. And so then I used something called Grounded Ethnography where I then tried to figure out categories and categories that categories all the things I was seeing and that then informed my models and from that I would posit theories. Well, Joseph, Wikipedia seems clearly to be one of the most interesting phenomenon of the net provocative in so many ways and I believe you're to be heartily congratulated for doing the first serious study of it. And thank you very much for appearing here and remind me to get to the back of the room and respond to you individually and sign any books that you might like to take. So thank you again, Joseph. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you.