The New York Times had an article called “Growing Wikipedia Revises Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy“, which I found fairly interesting, but was bothered by some of the quotes I read, especially those of Nicholas Carr.
Ideals always expire in clotted, bureaucratic prose. It distances the killer from the killing.
–Nicholas Carr
Poetic, but has little to do with reality. Wikipedia is not perfect, but I think it’s a bit premature to start claiming the death of the project and it’s supposed abandoned principles, because of the way it’s organizing itself. Wikipedia has had to adapt to very challenging problems and the fact that Wikipedia has become what it is today, is a testament of good leadership, and not lack of ideals. It’s core philosophy has not been abandoned. If anything, it’s principles have been reenforced by it’s adaptability and commitment to collecting human knowledge.
We began with no (or few) policies in particular and said that the community would determine—through a sort of vague consensus, based on its experience working together—what the policies would be.
–Larry Sanger
Like a Wiki, the governance has been flexible from the beginning. We have to remember not to project what we think are the ideals of Wikipedia. A rigid model that does not adapt is certainly destined for failure.
While the Wikipedia brand and domain belong to Jimmy Wales and his foundation, our freedoms are protected by something larger. Wikipedia’s content is released under GNU Free Documentation License. The Wikipedia nay sayers might simply not know the details of how GPL works, but Wikipedia, as a vision, is here to stay, wether Jimmy Wales is running it or not. This is inherent in the license in which Wikipedia is released under. Both the MediaWiki (the actual Wiki application) and the contents of the website are released under GPL. This means that at any point if the public becomes dissatisfied with Wikipedia’s leadership, a new group of people can simply move everything over to a new domain name and brand.
Wikipedia’s license, the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) requires that any derivative of works from Wikipedia must be released under that same license, must state that it is released under that license, and reproduce a complete copy of the license in all copies of the work, and must acknowledge the main authors (which some claim can be accomplished with a link back to that article on Wikipedia)
Right now this might seem inconceivable because of the popular Wikipedia brand, but there have been two very recent examples of very successful open source projects forking and becoming more popular than it’s predecessor.
In 1992, XFree86 became an free implementation X, the Unix Windowing system, and over time grew to become the de-facto X installation on all major Linux and BSD distributions. [1]. But in “February 2004, [XFree86] adopted a license… that the Free Software Foundation considered GPL incompatible.” [2] And as a result developers took the latest license compatible released and moved development onto X.org.
And more recently, the makers of the open source content management system, Mambo, “formed a non-profit foundation with the stated purpose to fund the project and protect it from lawsuits” and “the development team claimed that… the foundation structure… included provisions that violated core Open Source values.” [4] And as a result, over 3000 followers moved over to the new project, started the by developers, called Joomla. Joomla is now one of the most popular content management systems.
I do not think that Wikipedia is infallible and I definitely do not think that only “insiders” should be be involved in the project. But we should all know by now that with maturity comes responsibility, and when building a repository that encompasses all human knowledge, leadership, not philosophical slogans is required. Wikipedia will not stray far from its ideals, and in case it does, Wikipedia – the vision – will continue on course to become the library of the 21st century.
I agree in the sense that Wikipedia is never going away. And in that respect, long live the GPL.
But you cannot say that it is the ultimate repository of human knowledge, as that model of thought requires that the knowledge and information be on the page before it is typed!
What I am saying is that you have one hell of an article here. However, the method of reasoning is somewhat reminiscent of quantum theory.
A base of infinite knowledge cannot be presented in any medium, as the requirements would be physically impossible because the information would need to be presented before it was thought up. The knowledge would in essense become the precursor to the thought itself, which is currently contemporarily inconceivable.
I’m not sure I understand Dylan’s quantum theory reference. The purpose of a Wikipedia (or any encyclopedia) is less so to represent infinite knowledge (as it certainly can’t achieve this!) and more so to provide people with quick answers if possible and deeper ones if necessary. Human knowledge will hopefully always be growing. An encyclopedia like Wikipedia gives a good indicator of the consensus on what is true about a subject from a top level perspective. If all you want is a basic idea of the topic at hand, then you can just read the article. But for a deeper understanding, follow the “see also” links and read the bibliography. A good Wikipedia article will have a bibliography. Thus, you can think of Wikipedia as the gateway to knowledge but you’ll have to go further to find the deeper stuff.