As promised, here is one of the places where I thought Wikinomics didn’t quite get it right. On page 190, they state:
In its current incarnation, mashups present a thorny problem—they provide pretty poor long-term incentives for innovators, and most lack protection for data owners. To illustrate, it’s worth taking a closer look at housingmaps.
Housingmaps has two key ingredients: a Google Map and the rental listings from craigslist. When Paul Rademacher mashed these services together he created something new—something neither Google nor craigslist has thought of, yet it was a clever and useful application. What did Rademacher do to leverage this popularity? He stepped back from it and took a job at Google.
When asked why he did not develop the tool further, and perhaps even create his own business, he offered two very salient points: 1) He did not own the data that was powering the application, and 2) The barriers to re-creating such an application were low, since his web site contained little in the way of unique intellectual property or user interface design, apart from a little bit of network code.
The first is a reasonable concern, but as I’ll argue below the fold, it’s silly to consider the second a problem.
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As Doug Lay notes, Jimbo Wales has asked Wikipedia user Essjay to step down. He says he didn’t know he was using his fake credentials in content disputes until yesterday.
Nick Carr acknowledges this development and then proceeds to sneeringly compare contributing to Wikipedia to playing Dungeons and Dragons:
In the byzantine world of Wikipedia, with its arcane language, titles, and rules and its multitude of clans, Essjay wore the robes of a wizard. He was allowed to stand beside – and to serve – Jimbo the White. Together, they would bring “knowledge” to the unenlightened masses. But then the Wizard Essjay tried to slip through the gates of the real. Now the game is up.
I don’t understand why “knowledge” is in scare quotes here. Wikipedia really does make knowledge available to the masses in a way that it’s never been available before. They’re performing a valuable public service for which we should all be grateful. Yet inexplicably, he seems to delight in mocking them. (It’s a little bit ambiguous, but in context he seems to be talking about all Wikipedians, not just Essjay.) I wonder if he’ll next do a series of posts about how people who volunteer in public libraries are losers who can’t get laid.
One more point on the comparison of newspapers and blogs. I definitely think this is backwards:
The other side of the problem can happen with the bloggers doing fact gathering that Lee mentions: their main incentive to be fair and balanced is reputation, but how do you track the reputations of millions of amateur reporters in the field around the world?
I think this is a common problem when thinking about peer-produced institutions like the blogosphere. From the outside, they look totally chaotic, and therefore totally anarchic and unreliable. But the reality is quite different. Yes, there are 10 million bloggers and no one could have even a cursory knowledge of all of them. But any given reader doesn’t read “the blogosphere.” They read 10-100 specific blogs. And they tend to read the same blogs, day in and day out, for months or even years. So every blog with a non-trivial readership does have a significant number of people tracking its reputation.
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Here is an interesting critique of the argument I made yesterday concerning blogs and newspapers. Blogger “False Data” suggests two advantages that newspapers have over blogs:
One point Kuttner seems to make, with which I agree, is that depth is expensive. Most of what I write here is opinion, because opinion is cheap. You won’t find many really in-depth articles because I don’t have the time to research them. If you paid me a salary to do it full time, that might change, but as it is I–like many bloggers–am sharply limited in how much time I can devote to this project. While Lee bridles at the term “amateur,” I am exactly that: blogging doesn’t put food on my dinner table, so I have to budget my time accordingly.
Two other points Kuttner raises are civic-mindedness and, implicitly, journalistic integrity. Journalists take classes on journalistic integrity, though there are some cases where I have to wonder whether they’re universally effective. Blogging is a new enough medium, run by people who generally lack journalist training, that it’s still grappling with issues like disclosure. For example, Joel Spolsky writes about being approached to do product reviews and being allowed to keep the product, raising a potential conflict of interest. It’s possible a popular blog could support its author full-time, but that author may quickly find herself at sea and losing credibility without a commitment to integrity, full disclosure, and balance. Similarly, without that commitment, civic-mindedness can quickly become punditry and nothing more. The other side of the problem can happen with the bloggers doing fact gathering that Lee mentions: their main incentive to be fair and balanced is reputation, but how do you track the reputations of millions of amateur reporters in the field around the world?
I’ll consider each of these below the fold.
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Seth calls me to task for failing to condemn Jordan’s actions. So just to be clear, I think Jordan deserves condemnation for lying about his credentials. But given that Wikipedia has never claimed to vouch for the credibility of its contributors, I don’t see why Jordan’s actions (or Jimmy Wales’s refusal to condemn them) reflect poorly on Wikipedia, as opposed to just reflecting poorly on Jordan personally.
I think it’s important to keep in mind a fundamental difference between Wikipedia and more traditional reference works. What we really care about is the accuracy of the content. That is: if I open a random page, is the information there more likely to be accurate than the comparable information in other reference works?
With a traditional encyclopedia like Britannica, the credibility of the people who edited the encyclopedia is an important factor in judging the likelihood that the content is accurate, because we’re relying on the judgment and expertise of those. But for Wikipedia, the credibility of any one person—including Jimmy Wales—is almost completely irrelevant, because Wikipedia’s editing process does not rely on any individual’s judgment or expertise.
So even if some of the people who run Wikipedia are liars, that isn’t relevant in judging its reliability as a reference work, because Wikipedia doesn’t ask us to take anything its says on trust.
Update: Luis points out this comment, which changes my perspective a little bit. It appears that Jordan has not only been misrepresenting himself and his credentials, but has been using his supposed expertise to bolster his position in debates over content on the site. I think it does raise more serious questions about the robustness of Wikipedia’s peer production model if people are allowed to continue in positions of authority even after they’re demonstrated to have misused that authority–especially when they pointedly refuse to give a sincere apology.
On the other hand, as Luis notes, there appears to be considerable push-back from other Wikipedians. It will be interesting to see if other users force Wales’ hand in demoting Jordan. If that doesn’t happen, then I think you can make a plausible case that this reflects a serious problem with the site’s governance structure, if one guy has the power to keep people in positions of authority over the objections of the rest of the community.
Via Ezra, Robert Kuttner has a thorough look at the challenges faced by newspapers as they make the transition to the web. The article is packed with interesting information about the economics of print and online journalism, and is worth reading in full.
However, I found the article’s overall thesis kind of puzzling. Here are his contrasting scenarios:
As succeeding generations grow up with the Web and lose the habit of reading print, it seems improbable that newspapers can survive with a cost structure at least 50 percent higher than their nimbler and cheaper Internet competitors. (“No trucks, no trees,” says the former Boston Globe publisher Ben Taylor.) The dire future predicted by the now-classic video, EPIC 2014, in which Google, Amazon, and an army of amateurs eventually drive out even The New York Times, begins to feel like a real risk.
Yet a far more hopeful picture is emerging. In this scenario the mainstream press, though late to the party, figures out how to make serious money from the Internet, uses the Web to enrich traditional journalistic forms, and retains its professionalism—along with a readership that is part print, part Web. Newspapers stay alive as hybrids. The culture and civic mission of daily print journalism endure.
Aside from the semi-pejorative use of “amateur” and “professionalism,” I don’t understand why we’re supposed to consider the first future “dire” and the second one “hopeful.” The premise seems to be that in-depth, civic-minded journalism is something that everybody needs but but no one wants to pay for, and so therefore we need large, bureaucratic organizations like the New York Times to subsidize these activities out of a sense of corporate noblesse oblige.
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Mike Masnick debunks this silly Wikipedia “scandal”:
Stephen Dubner, over at the Freakonomics blog, is pointing out that The New Yorker has issued a correction to an article about Wikipedia from last summer. The article talked to one of Wikipedia’s site administrators and contributors, who goes by the name Essjay. The article claimed that Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at a private university, who had a Ph.D. in theology. However, the correction notes that Essjay is really a 24-year-old who has no advanced degrees and has never taught. This is getting some attention from the usual Wikipedia haters, suggesting that this is somehow proof of the problems with Wikipedia. However, that seems incredibly backwards. It actually highlights the reverse. It shows the fallibility of The New Yorker — a publication known as one of the few media outlets that still does serious fact checking, but apparently was not able to verify the identity of this individual. If anything, this highlights the fact that the so-called “professionals” often make mistakes too. Also, while mistakes in Wikipedia are a lot more easily correctable, it’s a bit of a process to correct this kind of mistake in The New Yorker — which is why it’s now getting attention.
The whole point of the Wikipedia model is that it doesn’t rely on the credibility of any one contributor to get its facts right. If one contributor doesn’t do his homework or outright makes things up, there will be a hundred other users visiting the page, at least one of whom is likely to notice the error. So it’s downright bizarre to fault Wikipedia for failing to engage in the kind of fact-checking that it has always explicitly disclaimed doing.
Cass Sunstein riffs on one of my favorite themes:
Developing one of the most important ideas of the 20th century, Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek attacked socialist planning on the grounds that no planner could possibly obtain the “dispersed bits” of information held by individual members of society. Hayek insisted that the knowledge of individuals, taken as a whole, is far greater than that of any commission or board, however diligent and expert. The magic of the system of prices and of economic markets is that they incorporate a great deal of diffuse knowledge.
Wikipedia’s entries are not exactly prices, but they do aggregate the widely dispersed information of countless volunteer writers and editors. In this respect, Wikipedia is merely one of many experiments in aggregating knowledge and creativity, that have been made possible by new technologies.
I’ve previously covered Tim Wu’s excellent paper making a similar point in greater depth.
Via Richard Bennett, Wonkette reports the following depressing statistics about the newspaper industry:
Net income plunged 6.7%.
Classified advertising dropped 22%.
Overall ad revenue is down 8%.
Circulation is down 2.9% — except for Sunday, which is down 3.2%.
Operating income in the publishing division fell by 24%.
Craigslist’s CEO says this is because U.S. newspapers just plain suck.
There are a number of ways you might interpret these figures. Richard thinks, bizarrely, that the problem is “parasitic web sites” like Craig’s List [Update: Richard says that he was talking about news aggregators, although he didn’t mention those in his original comment]. Craig’s List’s CEO, on the other hand, thinks it’s the newspapers’ fault:
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Jed Harris has a fantastic post about how peer production introduces a fissure between capitalists and entrepreneurs:
Before widespread peer production, the entrepreneur’s and capitalist’s definitions of success were typically congruent, because growing a business required capital, and gaining access to capital required providing a competitive return. So classical profit was usually required to build a self-sustaining business entity.
The change that enables widespread peer production is that today, an entity can become self-sustaining, and even grow explosively, with very small amounts of capital. As a result it doesn’t need to trade ownership for capital, and so it doesn’t need to provide any return on investment.
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