Yochai Benkler. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press, 2006.

June 2, 2006Geoff Swindells

I first heard about this on Lawrence Lessig's blog. The book has its own wiki, where it can be downloaded for free under a Creative Commons License. I also have one of those way cool old-fashioned book thingies if you'd like to borrow it.

It's a big sprawling thing and could have used some editing, and as an amateur political theorist living with a professional political theorist some of the warmed-over liberal theory in here is a bit too old-school (please no more Rawls!), but nevertheless it's helpful in bringing together in one volume a number of ideas that have facinated me for years. Briefly, it's a wide ranging look at the economics and politics occasioned by the shift from "a communications environment that relies on an expensive centralized communicator that broadcasts to a wide audience (e.g., radio, television) to an environment that relies on a multitude of cheap processors with high computing capacity that are interconnected with one another (i.e., the Internet)."

Especially interesting for me was the discussion of a wide variety of non-market, distributed, peer-produced information projects, like Wikipedia and Slashdot, and how they are creating new ways of providing for the authority, relevance, credibility, etc. of the information produced by these projects. In a broadcast economy these functions were performed by experts and other gatekeepers (tenure committees, journalists, librarians, publishers, editors). But "how are we to know that the content produced by widely dispersed individuals is not sheer gobbledygook? Can relevance and accreditation itself be produced on a peer-production model?" The answer, for Benkler, is that "rather than using the full-time effort of professional accreditation experts, the system is designed to permit the aggregation of many small judgments, each of which entails a trivial effort for the contributor, regarding both relevance and accreditation of the materials. The software that mediates the communication among the collaborating peers embeds both the means to facilitate the participation and a variety of mechanisms designed to defend the common effort from poor judgment or defection."

This fits in with my current mania: moving the library away from a broadcast model and building, in a word, a "writeable" library, a library where citizen-users become an integral part of EVERYTHING we do. But that conversation is for another day ...

Stacy Schiff. "Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise?" New Yorker 7-31-2006.

July 25, 2006 Rachel Brekhus

Judy sent this article around by email. Here are the main points I took from it:

Basic Facts About Wikipedia:

Its breadth is huge, its entries are frequently updated or edited, it gets some 14,000 hits per second, its entries earn high Google rankings because of frequent interlinking within the site.

80% of its editors are male. About 3300 people (less than 2% of the total number of registered contributors) is responsible for about 70% of the work done on Wikipedia.

Central Tenets:

• Articles are to be written from a Neutral Point of View (NPOV).
• Articles must be verifiable and based on previously published information.

Evaluative Measures for Contributors:

• You can find out how many edits a contributor has made.
• You can find out how many of the contributor's articles have been judged "outstanding" by community standards.
• You can watch for "barnstars" (units of praise)

Edit Wars and Policing Measures:

Entries can be updated when factual errors are found, but they can also be updated for purely ideological reasons, and anything in between. Some responses by Wikipedia to "bad" editing: (in progress...)