Jimmy Wales sighs. The co-founder of online reference hub Wikipedia has arrived in Australia to take part in a series of public seminars on education and knowledge. He’s excited to be here, but he’s dismayed at a headline he’s just seen in one of our broadsheets on the evils of MySpace and that wicked World Wide Web.
The article, spawned by the tragic suicide of two young girls who happened to have a MySpace account, expresses some valid concerns about the dangers facing our kids, and a melancholy that they were forced to articulate their woes online, rather than to family. But Wales feels the piece, and others like it, do us all a disservice by scapegoating an easy target. The Internet, after all, is still the new kid on the block, and easy pickins' for the big, bad senior class, (read, old media, socio-political establishment) who are starting to realise their tenure at the top of the totem pole is finite.
“It's unhelpful," he says gently, but you can sense the frustration. "The usual litany of complaints about what's going on online."
Wales has every reason to feel they missed the point. His lifework is living proof that technology is a force for positive change - and that's not just geek spin.
Wikipedia's ascendancy and reach is epic (you can read about its genesis in detail here). Officially born in 2001, it’s the fastest growing reference resource in the world, with the total number of English-language entries clocking in at over 1.6 million. In its pioneering collaborative model, anyone can write or edit an entry (called ‘articles’). Everyone’s knowledge is valued and it’s up to the Wikipedia community of readers and writers to 'course correct' if errors appear. The result is the closest mankind has come to the ‘hive mind’ science fiction authors long ago dreamed up - and that’s perhaps the most fantastical aspect of all.
Superficially, the setup appears doomed to Lord of the Flies chaos. Indeed, every now and then someone will screw up an entry with the wrong information, or deliberate vandalism. But these bumps along the hypertext road are few, and short-lived.
So what prevents renegade users editing each other into oblivion, and Wikipedia from becoming the world’s most unreliable resource?
“It’s really about having a good community, having certain values within that community, and making sure the community has the tools they need to monitor the quality and maintain it over time,” says Wales. “Those are the real keys to what makes it work.”
A little trust goes along way too. “A lot of our core values have been based on trusting each other, respecting each other, and generating a culture where people want to be trustworthy – where that’s valuable to have in that culture. There are lots of ways to start an Internet community with a certain social culture that goes off the rails. We’ve worked hard to avoid that.”
This manifest goodwill is perplexing to pundits who can’t grasp that the Internet can be a Pandora’s Box of possibility, as much as it can a haven for Today Tonight style predators. But it’s at the heart of Wales’ work, and open source philosophy in general. He's become famous for his stated goal of giving "every single person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge", and technology is a fundamental part of that equation.
Still, some social scrutinisers feel that although technological innovations are connecting us in ever expanding and magical ways, it’s in an ironically isolated manner – that we’re becoming individual nodes plugged into a data hub, rather than true, interactive networks. Let's look at some numbers. A study on 'active participation' rates for YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia announced at the recent Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco suggests people are keen to embrace social software, and beyond that, there's something about Wiki.
It found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that overall growth for participatory sites was up 686% in the past year. Yet when the participation rates for these three sites stacked up against one another, guess who came out on top (hint, this one is a surprise).
YouTube, with its massive pool of user content, surely? Flickr - millions of people have uploaded a photo or two? Nope. A mere .16% of visits to YouTube and .2% of visits to Flickr were classed as participation visits, whereas Wikipedia came in at 4.
Venessa Paech Venessa Paech - Editor & Founder. Venessa holds a BFA from NYU. She has done the arts to death, and has been in love with the web since she "discovered" it at a CyberCafe in NYC in '93. She wants to be a podcaster when she grows up.
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Venessa Paech - Editor & Founder. Venessa holds a BFA from NYU. She has done the arts to death, and has been in love with the web since she "discovered" it at a CyberCafe in NYC in '93. She wants to be a podcaster when she grows up.
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