Over at Catallarchy, Sean Lynch has a tirade against Wikipedia:
Wikipedia is an excellent example of when crowds are not wise; one’s actual knowledge has no correlation whatsoever with how much effort they’re willing to put out to keep Wikipedia accurate, and some of my recent experience there seems to indicate exactly the opposite, that people who know what they’re talking about have better things to do with their time than sit around all day fixing incorrect information in Wikipedia, whereas know-it-alls will spend lots of time “fixing” correct information that they disagree with. The other group who may not be know-it-alls are the rules nazis who care more about form than accuracy. These are the people who show up at all the HOA meetings to complain that your curtains are the wrong color when meanwhile the pipes are leaking and about to burst.
Recently I went back to the Wikipedia page on hydrogen peroxide out of curiosity to see if some fixes I’d made to dangerously inaccurate information on the page had survived. They had not. The same bullshit that I’d originally corrected (bullshit that could kill someone) had been returned. Rather than attempt to fix it again because the bullshit was now scattered throughout the article, I simply added a notation under “hazards” warning people that the article could be edited by anyone and that they should consult a source with actual accountability for safety information. My warning was reverted within minutes, with the notation on the edit referring me to a page entitled “What Wikipedia is Not” and suggesting that I use my knowledge to fix the information on the page. Well, I already had fixed the page, and some moron with far more certainty than knowledge had gone and screwed it up again. In addition, the “What Wikipedia Is Not” page mentions nothing about safety or accountability.
I’ve gone from merely thinking Wikipedia doesn’t live up to its name to believing that it is a complete joke.
I’ve responded to this general argument onseveraloccasions , so I won’t rehash those arguments here. But one of the interesting things about Lynch’s post is the attitude of entitlement it seems to reflect.
Related to my last post, it occurs to me that there are a lot of businesses that drink from one fire hose or another, and then sell the resulting expertise to people who are too busy to drink from the fire hose themselves. Free software firms and college professors are two such examples. It occurs to me that our friends at TechDirt are an example of the same phenomenon.
Their “fire hose” is the the world of tech news. Between formal news sites like CNet and ZDNet and the blogosphere, keeping up with the conversation about technology, business, policy, and the like is more than a full-time job. I spend a couple of hours a day reading blogs that focus on tech policy, and I’m nowhere near keeping up with all the worthwhile tech policy blogs out there. And I don’t even try to keep up with sites that focus on tech business and Silicon Valley gossip. You can get a sense of the size of this particular fire hose by perusing TechMeme, a site that aggregates the most popular stories in the tech blogosphere at any given moment. It would be a full-time job just to read every post that gets linked to from TechMeme.
David Robinson, managing editor of The American, has a great article arguing that soaring spending on higher education is something to celebrate:
Modern academics often liken their work to drinking from a fire hose. Historians, philosophers, and physicists all find it impossible to keep up with every potentially relevant paper or study. It’s not just a matter of catching up to the state of the art–one couldn’t even read the research materials in an academic field as fast as they are being produced. Inevitably, this leads scholars to retreat further and further into sub-specialization, narrowing the horizon of what counts as “relevant,” of what their fields consist in. But the side effect of this constant, fractal division of the range of human knowledge is that more and more scholars are needed to cover the same range of topics. A hundred years ago, a biologist could plausibly aspire to know all the important theories and facts contained within the field of biology. But today, there are people working on genetics, proteomics, virology, ecology, and a host of other fields, each of which is a full-time, fully mind-absorbing pursuit in its own right.
This all makes sense once one recognizes that professors are the conduits carrying our accumulated knowledge into the present. Having access to something that is written in a book is not the same thing as knowing it. In order for knowledge to be available and useful here and now, someone must be practically familiar with it. And the more knowledge there is to “cover,” as it were, with practical familiarity, the greater the number of scholars needed to complete a university. This means both more professors now and a greater number of those honors undergrads, training for the professoriate. A greater throughput of accumulated knowledge among successive generations requires an ever-increasing number of conduits.
I think this observation applies equally well to the software world. As software simultaneously gets more complex and cheaper, getting access to a piece of software will be a less and less important part of the overall cost of using it. That was certainly true when I worked as a webmaster in college–keeping up with all the changes in web technology was a full-time job.
You should check out Ed Felten’s excellent rebuttal of Nick Carr’s contention that sites like MySpace are “sharecropping” their users–enticing them to create valuable content which MySpace then profits from. Felten points out that users in fact get considerable value from their MySpace content. His conclusion:
The most interesting assumption Carr makes is that MySpace is capturing most of the value created by its users’ contributions. Isn’t it possible that MySpace’s profit is small, compared to the value that its users get from using the site?
Underlying all of this, perhaps, is a common but irrational discomfort with transactions where no cash changes hands. It’s the same discomfort we see in some weak critiques of open-source, which look at a free-market transaction involving copyright licenses and somehow see a telltale tinge of socialism, just because no cash changes hands in the transaction. MySpace makes a deal with its users. Based on the users’ behavior, they seem to like the deal.
Chris Anderson has a great twopart series on the future of the Wired website. I thought this snapshot of the evolving conventional wisdom with regards to website design was particularly interesting:
THEN: Bookmarks and habit drive traffic to the home page; site architecture and editorial hierarchy determines where readers goes next. Portals rule.
NOW: Search and blog links drive readers to individual stories; they leave as quickly as they come. “De-portalization” rules.
THEN: Media as Lecture: we create content, you read it.
NOW: Media as Conversation: a total blur between traditional journalism, blogging and user comment/contributions.
The Seattle Times has a fascinating article that nicely illustrates the inefficiencies of central planning:
It’s worth noting just how complex Vista became. BusinessWeek estimates it took 10,000 employees about five years to ship Vista.
In an interview with Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer a few weeks ago, I asked if he had added up how much money it cost to develop Vista. He laughed, “I can’t say I have. It would be impossible to count up. … I’m sure it’s a lot.”
If we assume Microsoft’s costs per employee are about $200,000 a year, the estimated payroll costs alone for Vista hover around $10 billion. That has to be close to the costs of some of the biggest engineering projects ever undertaken, such as the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb during World War II. And while Microsoft toiled on Vista, its stock price stayed flat.
Via Patri Friedman, here’s a video of a very interesting talk Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth gave at Google:
It gives a nice overview of the current state of the Ubuntu community. He makes it clear that emphasis in free software discussions on “community” is not just a rhetorical flourish. His team spends an enormous amount of time and effort communicating and coordinating with the hundreds of different projects that make up the Ubuntu distribution.
Brazil, India and Italy recently joined the Open Document Format parade, according to today’s press release from the ODF Alliance. Brazil will recommend ODF as the government’s preferred
format, India decided to use ODF at its tax office, and
Italy will recognize ODF as national standard. Is this good or bad news for technology liberators (or neither – is it neutral)?
Hard to tell without reading the full details (Brazil’s document is in Portuguese). But if these governments are in effect choosing technology winners and losers, then this is a bad thing.
Now, I understand that the stated mission of the ODF Alliance is, essentially, to ensure that documents are accessible across platforms and applications, even as technologies change. However, I get squirmy when governments approve and select technologies in a way that that appears to be more than government asserting its power as a customer, and is instead catering to an ideology backed by IBM, Sun, and other large companies with interests in non-proprietary software).
How can we ensure that documents are readable and interoperable without governments engaging in file format beauty contests? There has to be a better way…and there is! I’d rather have governments express their goals – long-term access, interoperability, disability access, etc – and let the market determine the best format. After all, ODF will one day be usurped by a better format, but vested interests in the status quo could delay its adoption by governments.
I seem to have been unclear in my previous post about software firms as intermediaries. Don Marti objects:
Software developers have to eat, and the GPL is not just about “join us now and share the software”. Homo economicus writes GPL software, too.
Besides acting as a “codification” of science-like norms on information sharing, the GPL is also about making the code itself a commodity in order to drive up the value of the services–support and maintenance programming–that are complements to it. Think of it as a bar: the code is just dry, salty free pretzels without the cold beer of maintenance and support. When a developer decides to release software under the GPL, he or she is typically making an economically rational decision to invest in himself or herself.
I know people who spent several years of their lives, when they could afford it, as “starving hackers” contributing to GPL software, and who are now “Senior Architect” types at various big IT companies, paid the big bucks to support and continue development of software they invested a lot of time in, and that they’re uniquely qualified, technically and social-network-wise, to continue supporting. The incentive that the GPL provides for creating software value is a powerful alternative to the “will work for options” model.
I entirely agree. When I said that the GPL community is non-commercial, I didn’t in any sense mean that it’s anti-commercial. Certainly, many people participate in the Linux community because they expect it to pay off for them down the road, and that’s certainly not frowned on within the community.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.