The impoverished "ownership" v. "competition" battle
I'm back from wherever I was, and I'm glad to see that the recent Wikipedia bashing (danah boyd had a great post on this) has been answered in the New York Times today by George Johnson.
Johnson is responding to a recent Nature article that claimed that there were an average of four errors per Wikipedia article (using a sample of 42 articles, and asking experts to assess them) and three errors per Brittanica article. He goes carefully through representative “errors” and find that they're not clearly errors much of the time. And then he sums up, delightfully:
Whatever their shortcomings, neither encyclopedia appears to be as error-prone as one might have inferred from Nature, and if Britannica has an edge in accuracy, Wikipedia seems bound to catch up.
The idea that perfection can be achieved solely through deliberate effort and centralized control has been given the lie in biology with the success of Darwin and in economics with the failure of Marx.
It seems natural that over time, thousands, then millions of inexpert Wikipedians - even with an occasional saboteur in their midst - can produce a better product than a far smaller number of isolated experts ever could.
Meanwhile the competition has some catching up to do. While Wikipedia includes a good, balanced article on the history of Britannica, Britannica has not a word to say about Wikipedia, as it rapidly becomes one of the most significant phenomena on the Net
Great stuff.
This debate underscores, yet again, the importance of thinking of networks differently. We have this idea that there are only two ways to do anything — either you create and sustain artificial monopolies so that people will have incentives to create (that's the copyright story), or you open the doors so that competition will emerge (that's the market story). But here, in Wikipedia, we have something not driven by market competition (as we usually understand it) or enhanced by artificial property incentives.
Wikipedia, like so many other beloved online resources, is a group-”owned” and created thing. The group has no boundaries except shared interests in particular pages. It's doing very well.
We don't have to constantly choose between security and freedom — we have a third way to do things, and this way involves shared values and collective activities. Only networks that allow groups to form and people to post things can make this new form of governance and action possible.
Now that we have this network, this self-governed resource, it's very apparent that it is a pre-existing ecosystem (like the ocean) that no one can claim to own except the constantly-changing group that created it. This makes cable/telcos into nothing but owners of beachfront property.
In the US, you're not allowed to block people from walking across your beach near the waterline. It's winter here in NY, so I'll post this picture as a reminder.
