The Digital Divide

by Mark Bauerlein

  On other occasions, Wales has offered a more erudite account of the site’s origins and purpose. In 1945, in his famous essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” the libertarian economist F. A. Hayek argued that market mechanisms serve “to share and synchronize local and personal knowledge, allowing society’s members to achieve diverse, complicated ends through a principle of spontaneous self-organization.” (These are the words not of the Nobel Prize winner himself but of Wikipedia’s entry on him.) “Hayek’s work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project,” Wales wrote on the blog of the Internet law guru Lawrence Lessig. “One can’t understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek.” Long before socialism crumbled, Hayek saw the perils of centralization. When information is dispersed (as it always is), decisions are best left to those with the most local knowledge. This insight, which undergirds contemporary libertarianism, earned Hayek plaudits from fellow libertarian economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman as the “most important social thinker of the twentieth century.” The question: Will traditional reference works like Encyclopaedia Britannica, that great centralizer of knowledge, fall before Wikipedia the way the Soviet Union fell before the West?

  When Wales founded the site in 2001, his plan was simple yet seemingly insane: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” In case that plan didn’t sound nutty enough on its own, he went on to let every Tom, Dick, and Friedrich write and edit articles for that mystical encyclopedia. “Now it’s obvious that it works,” says Wales, “but then most people couldn’t get it.” And not everyone gets it yet. Wales has his share of enemies, detractors, and doubters. But he also has a growing fan club. Wikipedia, which is run by Wales’s nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, is now almost fully supported by small donations (in addition to a few grants and gifts of servers and hosting), and many of its savviest users consider it the search of first resort, bypassing Google entirely.

  Wikipedia was born as an experiment in aggregating information. But the reason it works isn’t that the world was clamoring for a new kind of encyclopedia. It took off because of the robust, self-policing community it created. Despite its critics, it is transforming our everyday lives; as with Amazon, Google, and eBay, it is almost impossible to remember how much more circumscribed our world was before it existed.

  Hayek’s arguments inspired Wales to take on traditional encyclopedias, and now they’re inspiring Wales’s next big project: Wikia, a for-profit venture that hopes to expand the idea beyond encyclopedias into all kinds of Internet-based communities and collaborative projects. If Wikia succeeds, it will open up this spontaneously ordered, self-governing world to millions more people. Encyclopedias aren’t the only places to gather knowledge, and by making tools available to create other kinds of collaborative communities, Wales is fleshing out and bringing to life Hayek’s insights about the power of decentralized knowledge gathering, the surprising strength of communities bound only by reputation, and the fluidity of self-governance.

  >>> jimbo

  Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1966, the son of a grocery store manager. He was educated at a tiny private school run by his mother, Doris, and grandmother, Erma. His education, which he has described as “a one-room schoolhouse or Abe Lincoln type of thing,” was fairly unstructured. He “spent many, many hours just poring over the World Book Encyclopedia.” Wales received his B.A. in finance from Auburn University, a hotbed of free-market economists, and got his master’s degree in finance from the University of Alabama. He did coursework and taught at Indiana University, but he failed to complete a Ph.D. dissertation—largely, he says, because he “got bored.”

  Wales moved to Chicago and became a futures and options trader. After six years of betting on interest rates and currency fluctuations, he made enough money to pay the mortgage for the rest of his life. In 1998 he moved to San Diego and started a Web portal, Bomis, which featured, among other things, a “guy-oriented search engine” and pictures of scantily clad women. The en déshabillé ladies have since caused trouble for Wales, who regularly fields questions about his former life as a “porn king.” In a typically blunt move, Wales often responds to criticism of his Bomis days by sending reporters links to Yahoo’s midget porn category page. If he was a porn king, he suggests, so is the head of the biggest Web portal in the world.

  Bomis didn’t make it big—it was no Yahoo—but in March 2000 the site hosted Nupedia, Wales’s first attempt to build a free online encyclopedia. Wales hired Larry Sanger, at the time a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Ohio State, to edit encyclopedia articles submitted voluntarily by scholars, and to manage a multistage peer review process. After a slow start, Wales and Sanger decided to try something more radical. In 2001 they bracketed the Nupedia project and started a new venture built on the same foundations. The twist: It would be an open-source encyclopedia. Any user could exercise editorial control, and no one person or group would have ultimate authority.

  Sanger resigned from the project in 2002 and since then has been in an ongoing low-grade war with Wales over who founded Wikipedia. Everyone agrees that Sanger came up with the name while Wales wrote the checks and provided the underlying open-source philosophy. But who thought of powering the site with a wiki?

  Wikis are simple software that allow anyone to create or edit a Web page. The first wikis were developed by Ward Cunningham, a programmer who created the WikiWikiWeb, a collaborative software guide, in 1995. (“Wiki wiki” means “quick” in Hawaiian.) Gradually adopted by a variety of companies to facilitate internal collaboration (IBM and Google, for instance, use wikis for project management and document version control), wikis were spreading under the radar until Wikipedia started using the software.

  Wales characterizes the dispute with Sanger as a fight over the “project’s radically open nature” and the question of “whether there was a role for an editor in chief” in the new project. Sanger says he wanted to implement the “commonsense” rules that “experts and specialists should be given some particular respect when writing in their areas of expertise.” (Sanger has since launched a competitor to Wikipedia called Citizendium, with stricter rules about editors’ credentials.) They also differed over whether advertising should be permitted on the site. Not only does Wikipedia allow anyone to write or edit any article, but the site contains no ads. Yet it allows others to use its content to make money. The site Answers. com, for example, is composed almost entirely of Wikipedia content reposted with ads.

  When Nupedia finally shut down for good in 2003, only twenty-four articles had completed its onerous scholarly review process. In contrast, Wikipedia was flourishing, with 20,000 articles by the end of its first year. It now has six million articles, 1.7 million of which are in English. It has become a verb (“What exactly is a quark?” “I don’t know. Did you Wikipedia it?”), a sure sign of Internet success.

  >>> the troublemaker

  An obvious question troubled, and continues to trouble, many: How could an “encyclopedia that anyone can edit” possibly be reliable? Can truth be reached by a consensus of amateurs? Can a community of volunteers aggregate and assimilate knowledge the way a market assimilates price information? Can it do so with consistent accuracy? If markets fail sometimes, shouldn’t the same be true of market-based systems?

  Wikipedia does fail sometimes. The most famous controversy over its accuracy boiled over when John Seigenthaler Sr., a former assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wrote about his own Wikipedia entry in a November 2005 USA Today op-ed. The entry on Seigenthaler included a claim that he had been involved in both Kennedy assassinations. “We live in a universe of new media,” wrote Seigenthaler, “with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research—but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects.”

  The false claim had been added to the entry as a prank i
n May 2005. When Seigenthaler contacted Wikipedia about the error in October, Wales personally took the unusual step of removing the false allegations from the editing history on the page, wiping out the publicly accessible records of the error. After the USA Today story ran, dozens of the site’s contributors (who call themselves “Wikipedians”) visited the page, vastly improving the short blurb that had been put in place after the prank entry was removed. As in a market, when a failure was detected, people rushed in to take advantage of the gap and, in doing so, made things better than they were before. Print outlets couldn’t hope to compete with Wikipedians’ speed in correcting, expanding, and footnoting the new Seigenthaler entry. At best, a traditional encyclopedia would have pasted a correction into a little-consulted annual, mailed out to some users many months after the fact. And even then, it would have been little more than a correction blurb, not a dramatic rethinking and rewriting of the whole entry.

  But well-intentioned Wikipedians weren’t the only ones attracted to Seigenthaler’s Wikipedia entry. Since the article appeared, Seigenthaler says, he has been a constant target for vandals—people whose only goal is to deface an entry. He has been struck by the “vulgarity and mean-spiritedness of the attacks,” which included replacing his picture with photos of Hitler, Himmler, and “an unattractive cross-dresser in a big red wig and a short skirt,” Seigenthaler tells me. “I don’t care what the hell they put up. When you’re eighty years old, there’s not much they can say that hasn’t been said before. But my, they’ve been creative over the last months.”

  Seigenthaler’s primary concern these days is about the history page that accompanies each Wikipedia article. Even though various allegations against Seigenthaler have been removed promptly from the main encyclopedia entry, a record of each change and reversion is stored on the site. Many of the comments, says Seigenthaler, are things he would not want his nine-year-old grandson to see.

  Seigenthaler says he never intended to sue (surprisingly, the site has never been sued), but he worries that Wales will eventually find himself in legal trouble unless he takes more action to control what appears on the site: “I said to Jimmy Wales, ‘You’re going to offend enough members of Congress that you’re going to get more regulation.’ I don’t want more regulation of the media, but once the Congress starts regulating they never stop.” Coverage of the scandal was largely anti-Wikipedia, focusing on the system’s lack of ethical editorial oversight. Sample headline: “There’s No Wikipedia Entry for ‘Moral Responsibility.’”

  Wikipedia’s flexibility allows anyone who stumbles on an error to correct it quickly. But that’s not enough for some detractors. “There is little evidence to suggest that simply having a lot of people freely editing encyclopedia articles produces more balanced coverage,” the editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica said last year in an online debate hosted by The Wall Street Journal. “On the contrary, it opens the gates to propaganda and seesaw fights between writers.” Another Britannica editor dissed Wikipedia by comparing it to a toilet seat (you don’t know who used it last). A host of academics charged Wikipedia with having too casual a relationship with authority and objectivity. Michael Gorman, former president of the American Library Association, told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006, “The problem with an online encyclopedia created by anybody is that you have no idea whether you are reading an established person in the field or someone with an ax to grind.” Last summer at Wikimania 2006, a gathering of Wikipedians and various hangers-on at the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, university professors expressed concern that their students were treating Wikipedia as an authoritative source. In January the history faculty at Vermont’s Middlebury College voted to ban the use of Wikipedia in bibliographies. Wales has issued statements telling kids to use Wikipedia as a starting point, but not to include it in their bibliographies as a final source. Good Wikipedia articles have links to authoritative sources, he explains; students should take advantage of them.

  Referring to the Seigenthaler controversy during his opening remarks at Wikimania 2006, Wales got one of the biggest laughs of the weekend when he said: “Apparently there was an error in Wikipedia. Who knew?” Wales and the hundreds of Wikipedians could afford a giggle or two because the entry had long since been corrected. This wasn’t a traumatic incident to Wikipedians because they admit error hundreds of times a day. There is no pretense of infallibility at Wikipedia, an attitude that sets it apart from traditional reference works, or even The New York Times; when an error is found it doesn’t undermine the project. Readers who know better than the people who made the error just fix it and move on.

  Wikipedia’s other major scandal hasn’t been quite as easy for Wales to laugh off, because he was the culprit. In 2005 he was caught with his hand on the edit button, taking advantage of Wikipedia’s open editing policy to remove Larry Sanger from the encyclopedia’s official history of itself. There has been an ongoing controversy about Wales’s attempts to edit his own Wikipedia entry, which is permitted but considered extremely bad form. After a round of negative publicity when the edits were discovered, Wales stopped editing his own profile. But in the site’s discussion pages, using the handle “Jimbo Wales,” he can be found trying to persuade others to make changes on this and other topics. If he wanted to, Wales could make these and other changes by fiat, then lock out other editors. But he doesn’t. If the individuals that people Wales’s experiment in free association choose to ignore his pleas, as they occasionally do, he takes a deep breath and lets it happen.

  Wales isn’t the only one who has tried to use Wikipedia to rewrite history. In January 2006, all edits originating with the House of Representatives were briefly blocked after staffers for Rep. Martin Meehan (D-Mass.) were caught systematically replacing unflattering facts in his entry with campaign material; among other things, they removed a reference to his broken promise not to serve more than four terms. In the fall of 2006, officials from the National Institute on Drug Abuse dramatically edited their own entry to remove criticism of the agency. In both cases, the editors got more than they bargained for: Not only was the original material quickly restored, but a section describing the editing scandal was tacked on to each entry.

  Then there are edits that are less ideological but still troublesome. Wales has adopted Hayek’s view that change is handled more smoothly by an interlocking network of diverse individuals than by a central planning authority. One test of the rapid response to change in Wikipedia is how the site deals with vandalism. Fairly often, says Wales, someone comes along and replaces an entry on, say, George W. Bush with a “giant picture of a penis.” Such vandalism tends to be corrected in less than five minutes, and a 2002 study by IBM found that even subtler vandalism rarely lasts more than a few hours. This, Wales argues, is only possible because responsibility for the content of Wikipedia is so widely distributed. Even hundreds of professional editors would struggle to keep six million articles clean day in and day out, but Wikipedia manages it fairly easily by relying on its thousands of volunteer contributors.

  The delicate compromise wording of the entry about abortion is an example of how collaborative editing can succeed. One passage reads: “Most often those in favor of legal prohibition of abortion describe themselves as pro-life while those against legal restrictions on abortion describe themselves as pro-choice.” Imagine the fighting that went into producing these simple words. But the article, as it stands, is not disputed. Discussants have found a middle ground. “It’s fabulous,” says Wales, citing another example, “that our article about Taiwan was written by Mainlanders and Taiwanese who don’t agree.” That said, other entries—such as the page on the Iraq War—host ongoing battles that have not reached equilibrium.

  Skeptics of Wikipedia’s model emphasize that the writers have no authority; there is no way to verify credentials on the site. But Wikipedia seems to be doing okay without letters after its name. In 2005 the journal Nature compared the accuracy of scientific
articles in Wikipedia with that of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Articles were sent to panels of experts in the appropriate field for review. Reviewers found an average of four errors in Wikipedia entries, only slightly higher than Britannica’s average of three errors per entry.

  >>> the federalist

  One way to understand what makes Wikipedia unique is its reaction to the threat of blackout by the Chinese government. When government censors in China blocked the Chinese-language Wikipedia page and demanded that the content be heavily censored before it was unblocked, the site’s Chinese contributors chose to lie low and wait. Wales agreed to let them handle it. Eventually the site was unblocked, although its status is always precarious.