Sunday, May 11, 2008
Jimmy Wales, co-founder of both Nupedia and the Wikipedia project, credits "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Eric Raymond's online essay on the merits of decentralized software design, for prompting the experiment. Like Cunningham before him, Wales says he saw his venture into wiki as a temporary thing, an experiment that needed to be tried if only to satisfy his own "what if?" curiosity.
"Nupedia was very top down," says Wales. "We recruited academics to write the articles. We had a peer review board. After nearly two years of work and an enormous amount of money, I think we had 12 articles to show for it. Wikipedia was totally different. With the wiki software, bam, things just took off. It very quickly became the project."
Inviting the community to participate in such a project has its risks, of course. Thanks to developments outside the Wikipedia community, the project has seen its media profile surge in recent weeks. The episode started when anti-Semitic Internet users pulled off the agitprop technique known as "Google-bombing" -- repeatedly linking the word "Jew" on Web pages to the Web site JewWatch.com, a site that bills itself as "Keeping a Close Watch on Jewish Communities & Organizations Worldwide." When the tactic propelled JewWatch to the top of Google search rankings, outraged bloggers, led by the site Remove JewWatch.com, responded by linking the word "Jew" to the Wikipedia entry.
The resulting flood of visitors has been both a positive and a negative. Izak, a pseudonymous Wikipedia contributor on topics related to Jewish history, has more than once seen 5,000 words of his editorial work replaced by a single one-paragraph anti-Semitic screed.
"Every few days somebody comes in and vandalizes the site," he says. "So many people are watching the page, though, that it doesn't take long before some admin comes in to fix the page."
As one of those admins, Harper describes Wikipedia's vandalism policy as fairly easy to enforce. Most vandals get a two-strikes allowance. On the third offense, administrators block the offending poster's I.P. address, preventing them from accessing the site. Though some find a new way back in, taunting the admins as they do so, most casual vandals get bored and find other places to ply their hatred.
Wales, who inaugurated this "three strikes" policy during the days when his role as Wikipedia's co-creator put him in the self-described role of "god king," sees it as a cornerstone of the site's overall "soft security" policy. The policy is, in many ways, a Darwinian response to the pressures that undermine most open Internet communities. Instead of courting controversy, Wikipedia's culture has evolved an almost religious aversion to it.
"We talk about 'wiki love,'" says Wales. "We say, hey, if you think this is Usenet and you're supposed to flame people you're really out of line. We really don't approve of that as a community."
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