New subject: Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be more like the free software movement

1 Sep 2002

Dear all,

I've been away from active involvement with Wikipedia for many months now,
though I occasionally still lurk on Wikipedia-L and make a casual edit on
the website when I feel so moved.

My distance from the project, and some recent reading about Linux and open
source software, has made something clear to me in the past few days:
there is a profound disanalogy between the development of our free
encyclopedias and the development of free operating systems and software.

In particular, the Wikipedia project has been defined in such a way that
we have few official standards and no virtually requirements for quality
of the rigorous sort that Linux had when it set out to rewrite Unix from
scratch (and later remain compliant with stringent technical standards
like the POSIX standard).  Linus Torvalds' task had well-defined
parameters that absolutely required a lot of genuine expertise.  Our task,
by contrast, is to write a very large, unbiased encyclopedia.  What this
task entails is far more nebulous (though I and others have worked very
hard to settle on and explain what it does involve), and many reasonable
people reasonably think that this doesn't strictly speaking require
genuine expertise.

But it does.  If you think otherwise, you're living in a fantasy world.
The fact that there is no organization like the IEEE staffed by
world-class experts defining a standard that we must follow doesn't mean
that our work doesn't require expertise to finish credibly.  I think
writing *and finishing* a credible draft of an encyclopedia requires more
and a wider range of expertise than the free software movement has.  If
our encyclopedia project doesn't get an infusion of that expertise, the
quality of the result will suffer accordingly, which is a lot.

The problem is that, with several notable exceptions, highly-educated
people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.  It's not surprising why not: I would
like to suggest that this is similar to asking veteran programmers working
on Linux and its applications to work with, supervise, and put up with
rank beginners and script kiddies.  If they had had to do that, I doubt
very much that the free software movement would have come a fraction of
the distance it has.

Please don't misunderstand.  My concern with expertise and knowledgeable
participants does not reflect an overvaluation of formal qualifications,
or academic elitism, by the way.  (If you think I have enormous respect
for someone just on the basis of their academic credentials, you *really*
don't know me.)  If someone without a degree (I can think of a few) can
write and think well and convey what they know in a way that reflects
expert knowledge on the subject, that's great.  May their kind be fruitful
and multiply (among our ranks).  There's no reason for me to suggest
otherwise, just as there's no reason to ask free software developers to
have degrees in computer science before they get their hands dirty working
on open source software.

Consider this.  Eric Raymond might be correct that free software
development is represented as a bazaar.  What is perhaps less often
acknowledged is that it is a bazaar full of extremely highly-qualified,
knowledgeable people.  In this bazaar, the bar to *productive* and
*original* development is set very high.  (Conveniently, it's not people
that set the bar high but instead the facts of reality about how hard it
is to develop software.)  It is also less often acknowledged that there
are necessarily elite groups--elites based on merit, but elites
nonetheless--who are in charge of releasing new versions of important
packages.  That's as it should be.

Wikipedia is quite different.  The bar to contribution is very low, and if
there is any elite in charge, then with all due respect to everyone (and
that's a lot--there are a lot of *extremely* smart and knowledgeable
people here), our elite would seem rather less than impressive compared to
the leading members of the intelligentsia that contribute to the likes of
Britannica.

Along these lines I suggest there's another disanalogy between the free
software movement and our free encyclopedia movement.  The free software
movement is organized and led by world-class computer scientists
associated with industry and academia.  The free encyclopedia movement is
much newer, but (forgive me) it doesn't seem to be travelling in the
direction of being led by world-class thinkers, scholars, and scientists,
as a close analogy would seem to require.  To be quite honest, it was good
to lay me off when economic necessity required; now do the right thing and
ask Jacques Barzun (before he dies), or some other distinguished
intellectual, to head up the project properly.

If we really want to make the best encyclopedia in the world (the original
stated goal of Nupedia, by the way), we must discuss a pressing question
that I suspect very few people on this list are disposed to take very
seriously: how can we arrange for our free encyclopedia movement to be led
by representatives of the creme de la creme among the world's scholars and
scientists?

Now, I would not dream of suggesting that *Wikipedia* change its policies
of openness.  Basically, I don't think Wikipedia should change.  It is
what it is and it has produced a huge number of *great* articles.  It's
amazing that it works as well as it does, and I continue to expect that it
will result in a useful, interesting, huge body of work if we continue on
in the same way we have been.

That said, all of my previous predictions of huge success for the free
encyclopedia movement were based on the assumption that a Nupedia, or some
other quality control mechanism, would eventually mature into something to
inspire confidence among the leaders of different fields, so that
contributions and editing would be of the highest quality.  But if no such
mechanism materializes, I would be much less apt to predict success, in
terms of quality of articles, for Wikipedia.  Wikipedia by itself will
continue to go on to useful things, interesting things--but not great
things.

So I don't propose we touch Wikipedia--but we have Nupedia.  What I hope
is that Nupedia can be changed and rearranged, somehow, to create an elite
board of bona fide experts that is ultimately in charge of "releases" of
free encyclopedia content.

Whatever the specific Nupedia article creation and/or vetting process
might turn out to be--see the Nupedia-L archives for discussion ad
nauseum--one thing is increasingly clear to me.  Namely, unless there is a
dramatic change in how the free encyclopedia movement is organized,
Wikipedia will be stuck with, on balance, mediocrity.

Lest you think yourself insulted, let me offer an example of mediocrity:
my many philosophy articles.  They are full of content, they are basically
correct, many of them (those that have been re-edited from lecture form)
are reasonably well-written--but they are woefully inadequate and
basically mediocre.  I would be ashamed to bill them as anything other
than what they are--very rough first drafts based on lectures to OSU
undergrads, which sit there waiting for some experts to, probably,
completely rework them, or even replace them.

But no expert will want to do that until the whole project is led by
similar experts and therefore, to their mind, there is some guarantee that
the project will not wind up being an enormous waste of time.  Without
that sort of leadership, I fear that my articles, and the many other
fair-to-middling (but basically correct and perfectly contentful)
Wikipedia articles, will never receive the vetting from qualified people
that they really need.

(I acknowledge that an appropriate response to this is: "I agree, but what
are you bothering Wikipedia-L about it for?  Go post to Nupedia-L."
Basically, Wikipedia is the only game left in town as far as the free
encyclopedia movement is concerned.  If enough of you get behind this,
something might happen.  To my mind, Wikipedia shouldn't change but
Nupedia can and should, and Wikipedia might benefit directly.)

Larry