Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Wikipedia and Free Culture

The Florida Free Culture group sponsored a speech by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, tonight on campus.

Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers in many languages. It is governed by four basic freedoms:

• Freedom to copy
• Freedom to modify
• Freedom to reproduce
• Freedom to redistribute modified versions

There are over 1 million  articles in the English version with over 5 billion page views each month. There are over 62,000 articles in Chinese even though it is blocked by the mainland Chinese government (The Great Firewall).

What intrigued me most about Wales’ speech was his perspectives on culture, technology, and business.

For Wales, the Internet revolution is not about technical innovation, it’s about social innovation. It’s about the free licensing of information, neutrality, and openness.

He spoke about how Wikipedia works comparing his community model versus an emergent model. He described the emergent model as requiring reputation mechanisms to operate successfully, where the users are “tiny,” and have no power per se. Wikipedia’s community model supports the notion that reputation is a natural outgrowth of human interactions, where users are powerful, and must be respected.

The power laws that govern Wikipedia are not a traditional 80/20 model (where 80% percent of the work is done by 20% of the participants). Instead, the actual numbers that edit Wikipedia are much tighter: More than 50% of all edits are done by 0.7% of all users (615 people). The most active 1.9% (1746 people) have done 72.8% of all the edits.

In terms of Wikipedia’s design principle, Wales argued that community based organizations should allow people the power to do good as opposed to creating a set of apriori controls (i.e., setting controls to prevent people from doing bad). He related this idea to the classic economic/criminology notion of the broken window concept, that is, a neighborhood that appears clean and neat is less likely to be one where crimes will be committed.

Wales also spoke about the notion of love in terms of a business practice not often evoked by technology companies. For Wales, the Wikipedia editorial modus operendi is one that promotes mutual respect among people, where editors are expected to be caring and compassionate until they become needlessly abused or ridiculed by rude and abrasive contributors.

Wikipedia strives for neutrality and reasonability. It strives for openness and trust. It works towards developing a business model of transparent accountability as opposed to a gatekeeper, black box model.

After listening to his speech, I began to reflect on how Siemen’s connectivism model of education or a Warlick Flat Classroom model is similar in nature to what Wales spoke about. All three models espouse the notion of openness, transparency, accountability, and the requisite social nature of learning. Too often schools operate in such a way that students are dangling off the bottom of the curriculum rather than living and working inside of it.

Imagine a school where learning  was governed by a confusing but workable mix of

• Consensus
• Democracy
• Aristocracy
• Monarchy

By this I want to suggest schools serve as a place (as part of a larger, institutional, socioeconomic structure) where knowledge is consensual, where teachers, students, administrators, parents, and politicians can agree to disagree within a culture based on love and trust; where democratic values of informed engagement lead to change and consensus; where aristocracy holds a certain amount of sway such that people who do good work over a long period of time are rewarded with more clout (which leads to a greater sense of responsibility for the entire learning community); where ultimately, at the end of the day, one person needs to be responsible for the entire organization similar to a constitutional monarchy (and not a benevolent dictator).

A radical notion perhaps, but one worth considering.

Finally, I was truly tickled when Wales spoke about quality control at Wikipedia. He cited an example of an entry about a film, Twisted Issues, that caused some debate among the editors. The entry was ultimately verified and now appears provincially in Wikipedia. What makes this particular story endearing to me is that I co-wrote and played guitar on a song that appeared on the soundtrack to this patently obscure psycho-splatter, no-budget, comedy-horror film that was made by a friend, Charles Pinion, back in the late Eighties. Although the audience at tonight’s speech was relatively young, there were a few old-timers in the audience that picked up on the reference. I was left wondering if Wales knew that this film was made here in Gainesville and included it just for us. I guess I’ll write him and find out!