Why Does Wikipedia Work?
When Wikipedia was launched in 2001, many people though that the project could not work. They questioned whether anyone would be interested in writing articles on a volunteer basis, they wondered how giving everyone access could possibly result in accurate information, they worried about vandalism and conflict over contentious issues. Surprisingly, all of these concerns have been dealt with rather well. Wikipedia works, and is now unarguably the best encyclopedia in human history.
But why does it work? I’ve been participating in the Wikipedia community for some time now, writing, mediating disputes, and carefully studying the design of both the software and — just as important — the policies and culture surrounding it. To the best of my understanding so far, these are the basic reasons that Wikipedia works:
Wikipedia makes it extremely easy to contribute. There is an old joke: if you want to get the right information on the internet, just put up the wrong information and someone will be outraged enough to correct you. This applies double to Wikipedia. Any reader of Wikipedia can edit any article with a single click. Adding to humanity’s knowledge now provides instant gratification, which is why Wikipedia has been so successful in recruiting editors.
Articles change until everyone is satisfied. Because of its editable nature, the text of an article could be constantly changing. What happens in practice is that an article gets edited by different people until it seems acceptable to everyone. Then, no one feels the need to edit it very much anymore. At this point consensus has been achieved.
Every editor is both student and teacher. The process of editing an article necessarily involves reading what was there before. This ensures that editors are very well informed. Likewise, it only takes one person to bring an important point to the attention of the entire community.
Wikipedia focuses on fixing mistakes, not preventing them. One of the Wikipedia policies is “be bold,” encouraging enthusiastic users to execute their ideas for articles. This is possible because of the revision tracking system, accessed through the history button on each page. The history features of Wikipedia gives tremendous transparency to the editing process– everyone can easily see what everyone else has done. It also makes it possible to undo vandalism or go back to an earlier version. This allows free experimentation without fear of permanent damage to the article.
Wikipedia has a clear and enlightened editorial policy. The most fundamental of these editorial policies of Wikipedia are that all articles are to be written from a neutral point of view, and all statements must be verifiable.
The Neutral point of view (NPOV) policy states that Wikipedia articles are to describe debates, not join them. An article on a contested issue must not “choose sides” but rather describe fairly all major points of view on the topic. In other words, all sides must feel that the final text fairly represents their point of view – and everyone is encouraged to expand and clarify the text describing their particular position. In this way, although the editors of an article may not be able to achieve consensus on the “right” point of view, everyone can come to an agreement on what each point of view really represents.
The verifiability policy means that, in principle, every statement must be back by a credible external reference (news article, academic publication, published book, company or government website, etc.) Wikipedia provides an extremely easy-to-use footnoting system for this purpose. Crucially, the designers of Wikipedia have attempted to ensure that “verifiability” is not used a a weapon. If someone feels that a statement is not backed by fact, instead of deleting it they are encouraged to add a “citation needed” tag to give other editors a chance to back up the contentious claim.
Wikipedia has sophisticated community-based conflict resolution. When two or more parties disagree violently, they can get into an “edit war” where they are constantly changing each other’s changes. This is discouraged. Instead, a variety of conflict resolution approaches are built into the system. The first level is volunteer mediation, where any other user can offer to mediate the dispute – and Wikipedia of course has user-written training materials on good mediation techniques. The final level of conflict resolution is the Arbitration Committee, staffed by Wikipeda “admins” who have a few special powers. However, these admins are also selected by a consensus process! Crucially, an Arbitration Committee judges conduct not content. They have the power to decide that someone has acted in bad faith or in violation of basic policies, but they do not have the power to define the text of an article.
All Wikipedia policies are continuously evolved by the community. Wikipedia does not have a fixed “constitution” or “rules” as such. Rather, all policies are considered to be constantly up for revision. In fact, all policies are themselves written on user-editable pages. The Wikipedia community fosters an ongoing commitment to evolution and experimentation with the process itself.
Wikipedia is a continually evolving consensus-building tool, a massive, online experiment in collaboration, serving the community of all humankind. And contrary to those who believed that such an approach could never succeed, it works very well. It is a marvelous practical example of decentralized project managment, and represents consensus between hundreds of thousands of active editors. The principles of its design are well worth studying when contemplating the design of other online tools for large scale cooperating and coordination.
March 24th, 2008 at 3:24 am
favorited this one, man
November 12th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
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