Wikipedian Sociology
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Yesterday I mistakenly wrote that Wikipedia is outside the realm of open source. I’ve since tracked down a presentation by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and have realised how wrong I was to make that statement.
The video is a fascinating look into the organisational structure and sociology that is Wikipedia and is clearly indicative of a community with strong roots in open source and free software philosophy. There are numerous points and notable quotes from the presentation that support this notion, many of which are listed below:
Organisation
- new methods of organisation - “work by anyone who wants to pitch in”
- servers maintained by volunteer system administrators
- free licensing for all content - including reuse, redistribution, commercial or non-commercial use
- run by “rag-tag band of volunteers”
- repeated references to the Wikipedia community and not the Wikipedia websites
Managing Quality Control
- social policy - neutral point of view policy; social concept of cooperation.
- significant real-time peer review involving notifications of changes via IRC channel, RSS feeds, email announcements, New Page page
Content Creation/Edits
- Only 18% of edits by anonymous users
- 600 to 1000 people make bulk of edits
- Contributors described as semi-professionals who hold themselves to standards that are equal to or higher than professional standards of quality
Social Rules
- Most social rules left completely open-ended in the software. Nothing in software that enforces the rules.
- Democratic “social method” for vetting accuracy of information - votes by text
- Merit-based heirarchy/aristocracy
Governance Model
- “Very confusing but workable mix of consensus…democracy…(merit-based) aristocracy…and monarchy”
- “Free Software World” notion of “Benevolent Dictator” as means to ensuring openness and freedom won’t “undermine the quality of the content”
Final Thoughts
- “Our wiki model is the way we work but we’re not fanatical web anarchists.”
- “The passion of the community is for the quality of the work; not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it.”
What this means then is that one of the key exemplars of vibrant community-driven collaboration I had used to show the possibilities outside of the open source and free software movements is, in fact, as firmly based in the idealism and philosophies as its more technologically-minded brethren, such as Ubuntu or Apache.
Signficantly too is the fact that the wiki engine developed for Wikipedia, MediaWiki, is open source and available as free software, with all content on their site available under a GNU Free Documentation License.
Wales’ depiction of the Wikipedia’s organisational structure and sociology is so similar to other open source projects in fact that all that was missing was a reference to Linus Torvald’s famous quote “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
Indeed Wikipedia has become another example pointing to the possibility that most successful collaborative online endeavours are based in open source or free software idealism.
Thursday, May 1st, 2008