Something I learned at the W3C was that a document was never done, there are only milestones and the question of whether you have moved on. For example, the XML security specifications received more "peer review" than any other thing I'm ever likely to work on. It surprised me, and felt great, when people from other countries who I never spoke with would send in an interop report based on the specification and test suite. Even so, the specifications continued to receive errata two years after they were published as Recommendations. I still receive questions about them, but I've given that work little thought in well over five years, so I've "moved on" and can answer only the most trivial questions.

I'm about to submit the final copy of my dissertation, successfully defended on March 5, which is a big milestone. And I still do think about it, and the improvements I could make. In fact, I am caught between my desire to make it freely available and a desire (a necessity even, in the academic context) to see it published as a book. So, for the present I am making the first chapter and bibliography publicly available and hope to do more after discussions with publishers. However, I would like to share it with interested colleagues and sources (see acknowledgments and references): I expect more correction, criticism and commentary -- public even, here or elsewhere -- will provide further value to any book that might result.

——

Reagle, J. (2008). In good faith: Wikipedia collaboration and the pursuit of the universal encyclopedia. PhD thesis, New York University, New York, NY. [ http://reagle.org/joseph/2008/03/dsrtn-in-good-faith ]

@phdthesis{Reagle2008, 
   author = {Joseph Reagle}, 
   title = {In good faith: {Wikipedia} collaboration and the pursuit of the universal encyclopedia}, 
   year = {2008}, 
   address = {New York, NY}, 
   url = {http://reagle.org/joseph/2008/03/dsrtn-in-good-faith}, 
   month = {May}, 
   school = {New York University}, 
}

Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit," has caught the attention of the world. Discourse about the efficacy and legitimacy of this collaborative work abound, from the news pages of "The New York Times" to the satire of "The Onion." So how might we understand Wikipedia collaboration? In part 1 I argue that Wikipedia is an heir to a twentieth century vision of universal access and goodwill; an idea advocated by H. G. Wells and Paul Otlet almost a century ago. This vision is inspired by technological innovation -- microfilm and index cards then, digital networks today -- and driven by the encyclopedic compulsion to capture and index everything known. In addition, I place Wikipedia within the history of reference works, focusing on their (often fervent) creators, and the cooperation, competition, and plagiarism encountered in their production. In part 2, I conceptualize Wikipedia as a technologically mediated "open" community; through ethnography I identify the norms, practices and meanings of Wikipedia culture including "Neutral Point of View," good faith, and authorial leadership. In particular, I use the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle to explain the operation of Wikipedia's collaborative culture: "Neutral Point of View" ensures that the scattered pieces of what we think we know can be joined and good faith facilitates the actual practice of fitting them together. Finally, in part 3 I focus on the cultural reception and interpretation of Wikipedia. I argue that in the history of reference works Wikipedia is not alone in serving as a flashpoint for larger social anxieties about technological and social change. I try to make sense of the social unease embodied in and prompted by Wikipedia by way of four themes present throughout the dissertation: collaborative practice, universal vision, encyclopedic impulse, and technological inspiration. I show that the discourse around Wikipedia reveals concerns about how new forms of technologically mediated content production are changing the role and autonomy of the individual, the authority of existing institutions, and the character (and quality) of cultural products.

After a presentation of my chapter on "encyclopedic anxiety" Alice Marwick recommended David Foster Wallace's "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage." I find the essay to be maddeningly frustrating: based on claims I absolutely agree with, he manages to find lines of argumentation that I think are very wrong. My notes from this essay are full of lengthy annotations. I agree that some works such as a usage dictionary or writers guide serve us well by being prescriptive: guiding us as to what is effective and accepted. (I'm slowly working my way through reading all of the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, and enjoying it too! It is informative, pragmatic and useful in helping this writer address difficult questions.) However, this doesn't mean there's no room for descriptive reference works: telling us what is said or thought regardless of whether it is right or wrong according to someone's standard. Wallace is not willing to accept that description and prescription can coexist happily because he fears the Descriptivists then taint the larger culture and deprive SNOOTS such as himself the ability to tell others what is proper. He then makes a complete muddle of science:

If a physics textbook operated on Descriptivist principles, the fact that some Americans believe that electricity flows better downhill (based on the observed fact that power lines tend to run high above the homes they serve) would require the Electricity Flows Better Downhill Theory to be included as a "valid" theory in the textbook -- just as, for Dr. Fries, if some Americans use infer or implied, the use becomes an ipso facto "valid" part of language. Structural linguists like Gove and Fries are not, finally, scientists but census-takers who happen to misconstrue the importance of "the observed facts." It isn't scientific phenomenon they're tabulating but rather a set of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are -- to be blunt -- moronic. (Wallace, p. 11).

He would also appreciate (and possibly hate) Wikipedia's NPOV which is descriptive in the way that he describes and objects to. In any case, he is confusing the method (i.e., scientific description) with a particular phenomenon (i.e., deterministic laws of physics, or less predictable patterns of human behavior). However, one might take a varied and subjective view of deterministic physical phenomena (e.g., a nonscientific poem about a falling acorn) or a scientific approach to more complex phenomenon (e.g., statistical inferences about human behavior, or complex nondeterministic phenomena).

On his point of stupidity, consider that to maintain that the earth is flat today might be considered moronic, but I don't go to Wikipedia (a largely descriptive undertaking) because it will tell me what is true -- you must look for that elsewhere -- but to understand what is understood about that theory including the contours and history of the flat-eathers. However, this doesn't mean Wikipedians must pretended that the earth is flat just to make some minority happy. Instead, one can also have completely descriptive statements that the theory is no longer supported by scientific authorities via references to authoritative sources. (And, here, Wikipedia does have a prescriptive bias in favoring references to authoritative sources within the materialistic/scientific worldview.) So, his metaphor seems backwards: the descriptive approach seems appropriate, and to some extent necessary, because human language is biased, and not a "law" in the same way that gravity is. To assume that the operation of gravity might reverse a century later violates a fundamental presumption of physics; but there is no such certainty in language use. Therefore, sometimes I might hear a word that I would never use myself for fear of giving offense, but I still might want to know its meaning: there is a role for a balance between prescriptive and descriptive.

The import of the use of reference works in court cases is frequently misunderstood, and in this case Wikipedia is no different. Wikipedia has been used as a source across culture (e.g., in cartoons, on TV), by governments -- for different reasons -- and a lot of attention is given to examples of Wikipedia as a court source. Seemingly, if a court cites a reference work it connotes authority and legitimacy upon the source. However, the legal meaning is quite different: the principle of judicial notice applies to information introduced into the court record that is so commonplace that it cannot be refuted. It is not a case of authoritative or expert evidence being recognized, as it is often misunderstood to be, but closer to a recognition of popular notability.

Britannica was quite famous for its misleading and sentimental advertisements in the 1950s and 60s including an exaggerated claim about the courts, as Harvey Einbinder discusses:

The educational director of the Britannica supplied a good illustration of these dubious claims when he asserted in an advertisement in the Library Journal (November 1, 1954): "It is so universally accepted as an authority that courts of law admits ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA as evidence."... However, it is an elementary legal principle that judicial notice can only be taken of scientific facts or matters that are generally or universally known, and which therefore can be found and encyclopedias, dictionaries or other reference works. These facts must be matters of common knowledge -- and not questions where a difference of opinion exists. Thus the scientific treatise is and encyclopedias may be consulted by judges, but they are not evidence. One reason for this rule is that they cannot be placed under oath and cross-examined. Another is that citations in one book may be contradicted by other books unknown to the court. (Einbinder 1964:314-315)

So, first, Wikipedia is not the first reference work to be used, or misunderstood, in this way. Second, the interesting thing that is happening here is the degree to which a reference work's selections are an appropriate proxy for judicial notability, and a reliance upon Wikipedia perhaps indicates a more up to date, but also much more expansive, scope: print encyclopedias rarely ever exceeded a hundred thousand articles, the English Wikipedia has millions.

In Harvey Einbinder's excellent "The Myth of the Britannica" he includes some of the advertisements used to sell Britannica around 1960 including this one: "HOW CAN YOU EXPRESS THE INEXPRESSIBLE LOVE YOU FEEL FOR YOUR CHILD?" The actual copy, contributed to Dr. D. Alan Walter is not by an eminent child psychologist or educator, but one of the Britannica's salespersons.

I recently had the opportunity to catch up on some of my reading including new quantitative analysis of Wikipedia contribution. In particular, the question about the inequality of user contribution is a long-standing one (Wales 2005wew2, Voss 2005mw, Swartz 2006www, Ball2007, Kittur et al. 2007, Viegas et al. 2007, and Priedhorsky et al. 2007.) Jimmy Wales originally noted in December of 2005 that "half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users." Research since 2005, particularly Kittur et al., measuring contribution differently, showed that elite contributions were less powerful relative to the long tail of small contributors, or even that the trend has changed over time. (As those authors put it: Power of the Few Vs. Wisdom of the Crowd: Wikipedia and the Rise of the Bourgeoise.) However, in Quantitative Analysis of the Wikipedia Community of Users Felipe Ortega and Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (2007) conclude that their analysis shows that "approximately 90% of the active editors is responsible altogether for less than 10% of the total number of contributions (Gini coefficient of 0.9360)" (p. 82). So the long tail isn't doing as much as we might think. The authors explain this difference by way of a methodological concern: counting user contribution via total contributions of the life of the user misses those users who are new and active, but have not accumulated a significant total count yet. After segmenting users based on their contributions in specific periods Ortega and Gonzalez-Barahona find that those users with a high number of edits in early months typically continue to make a high number of edits (i.e., stable), and a discrepancy between high contributing and low contributing editors is significant (i.e., unequal).

I met Felipe Ortega at this year's WikiSym and recently asked him about the present state of research today:

The current state of research about the inequality of contributions to the English Wikipedia (also extended to the top ten language editions of Wikipedia) shows that the distribution of contributions to articles (including stubs and redirects, filtering bots) is strongly skewed towards a small core of very active contributors. This is the same well-known effect already identified in libre software development projects. The graphs depicting the contributions from distinct generations of very active users, along with the graphs showing the Gini coefficients of contributions per month, rebate the argument of the "rise of the bourgeoisie" stated by Kittur et al. The inequality level of contributions to the English Wikipedia has remained stable during the past 4 years. Similar inequality levels per month have been found for the other top ten language editions, thus showing a common pattern shared among the biggest Wikipedias. Moreover, we have found that the inequality level in these top-ten language editions is stabilized around a 80%-85% interval for the Gini coefficient, showing a spontaneous autorregulation process that deserves further research.

In my dissertation I make only a passing reference to the "Iron Law of Oligarchy," an expression coined by Robert Michels, an early 20th-century sociologist and student of Max Weber, in his book Political Parties. Much like Weber, a lot of the cases and references are difficult to follow because of its age and issues of translation, but there are still some gems that are relevant to today. In particular, I find his "final considerations" to be worthy of sharing on the Wikipedia question, touching on "adminitus," incumbancy, and evolution:

Leadership is a necessary phenomenon in every form of social life. Consequently it is not the task of science to inquire whether this phenomenon is good or evil, or predominantly one or the other. But there is great scientific value in a demonstration that every system of leadership is incompatible with the most essential postulates of democracy. We are now aware that the law of the historic necessity of oligarchy is primarily based upon a series of facts of experience.... The process which has begun in consequence of the differentiation of functions and the party is completed by a complex of qualities which the leaders acquire through their detachment from the mass. At the outset, leaders arise spontaneously; their functions are accessory and gratuitous. Soon, however, they become professional leaders, and in the second stage of development they are stable and irremovable.... (Michels 2001:240)

It follows that the explanation of the oligarchical phenomenon which thus results as partly psychological; oligarchy derives, that is to say, from the psychical transformations which the leading personalities in the parties undergo in the course of their lives.... The oligarchical structure of the building suffocates the basic democratic principle. That which is oppresses that which ought to be. (Michels 2001:240-241)

The democratic currents of history resemble successive waves. They break ever on the same shoal. They are ever renewed. This enduring spectacle is simultaneously encouraging and depressing. When democracies have gained a certain stage of development, they undergo a gradual transformation, adopting the aristocratic spirit, and in many cases also the aristocratic forms, against which at the outset they struggled so fiercely. Now new accusers arise to denounce the traitors; after an era of glorious combats and of inglorious power, they end up by fusing the old dominant classes; whereupon once more they are in their turn attacked by fresh opponents who appealed to the name of democracy. It is probable that this cruel game will continue without end. (Michels 2001:245)

I often compare the "peer production" of Wikipedia to that of the OED, which was also built with the contributions of hundreds of people from all walks of life. I just finished Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything: the Story of the Oxford English Dictionary -- an excellent complement to his earlier The Professor and the Madman -- and note that the following could perhaps be said of Wikipedians as well:

... but we do not really know why so many people gave so much of their time for so little apparent reward. And this is the abiding and most marvelous mystery of the enormously democratic process that was the Dictionary -- that hundreds upon hundreds of people, for motives known and unknown, for reasons both stated and left unsaid, helped to chronicle the immense complexities of the language that was their own, and that they dedicated in many cases -- such as the Thompson sisters did -- years upon years of labour to a project of which they all, believed by some set of unfathomable and optimistic notions, insisted on becoming a part. (Winchester 2003:215)

Previously, I've explained what openness means relative to a community rather than the license governing its content. In short an open content community, as I specify it, has five normative features: open products, transparency, integrity, nondiscrimination, and noninterference. It also has an important descriptive feature: some level of structure/closure (which I believe is unavoidable, see "The Tyranny of Structurelessness") and consequent discussion about how this can be reconciled with the larger egalitarian ethos. In the dissertation I pose Wikipedia in light of this criteria and explore three challenging cases: can anyone really edit?, office actions and oversight, and the female only WikiChix list.

The latest Wikipedia controversy (Mestel 2007) would also be a good case given references to a secret cabal-like email list, as summarized in The Signpost:

A case involving the actions of Durova and Jehochman, and in particular a controversial block by Durova of !! as a sockpuppet, based on evidence she refused to reveal on-wiki, saying that she was concerned that to do so could give puppetmasters too much information on her investigative techniques. This evidence was provided to some administrators, and was later leaked, with some users, including the Arbitration Committee, arguing that the evidence was insufficient for blocking !!. Durova has resigned her adminship, and, in what appears to be an exceptionally quick resolution of the case, remedies have been proposed, admonishing Durova to exercise greater care when issuing blocks, admonishing all participants to act with proper decorum, and noting that Durova must go through normal channels to regain adminship.

The very fact that there may be ancillary structure and closure (what Sunstein calls "enclaves") is alarming to some, particularly when Wales (2007moh) wrote: "*I* am involved in multiple ongoing private discussions with dozens of people. The list in question is being badly misrepresented as some kind of problem. It is a good list, and the purpose of the list is good, and not everyone on the list is perfect (as is always true)." However, with respect to the criteria, I believe it is appropriate -- even unavoidable -- for enclaves to form. If they aren't handled well -- as in this case -- they can come off as rather unseemly. And they can never be relied upon as a source of authority and discussion in the larger community: Arguments and their evidence must be ported into the larger open context or the criteria of transparency and integrity are at risk. Durova's mistake was not only in incorrectly banning someone, but in referring to that list and her secret methods of "sleuthing" sock-puppets as an authority within the larger open discourse. (Silence also had an interesting role to play, as it often does: it appears that while some people on that list did not object, this does not mean they assented.)

However, Durova has apologized for the mistaken administrative action and I presume she now appreciates the illegitimacy (and sensitivity) associated with recourse to closed authority. What I also find interesting in this discourse is the recognition of the dangers of administration -- I saw it referred to as something like "adminitus" but can't find it now. Furthermore, I am intrigued by the common Wikipedia sentiment that administration is comprising, but that encyclopedic work has restorative powers for one's own wiki-soul and relation to the community.

In a parenthetical in my dissertation I note that when I speak of the men in the history of reference works I am being unfortunately literal. Aside from the Suzanne Briet, a French documentalist at the beginning of the 20th century, few women have fallen within the scope of my readings in the secondary literature. (And sadly, Briet doesn't yet have a Wikipedia article about her.) Consequently I've kept my eyes open for such materials when perusing bibliographies. (And as a researcher Wikipedia I've been especially engaged by Milos's Women and Wikimedian projects interviews.) I recently started Gillian Thomas' (1992) A Position to Command Respect: Women and the Eleventh Britannica in which she writes of her father's reverence for his EB11:

As far as he was concerned, whatever he read aloud to us from those finely-printed onion-skinned pages was incontrovertible truth. My mother was more skeptical, and would point out that she would put more trust in an "up-to-date" reference book My father bought his copy of the Britannica as a young man intent on self-improvement, like thousands of others, through its widely-advertised installment system. (Thomas 1992:v)

This then made me think about the authority of Wikipedia. Thomas writes: "The outlay of money had been a considerable sacrifice at the time, which was perhaps another reason why he retained a reverent attitude towards its authority" (p. vi). Paying for something, or undertaking a difficult task, is known to positively influence the construal of that something (Tavris and Aronson 2007:17); therefore perhaps the freeness of free content shades how it is perceived. I can imagine interesting cognitive experiments along these lines. For example, reward subjects for accurately answering a factual question while providing them with access to a free or nonfree version of the same reference material -- the cost would essentially be against the eventual reward. I expect those who paid for access would have greater confidence in their answer and greater sense of authority in the resource than those who did not. And this is but a single experiment among a whole number of interesting construal tasks where the material essentially stays the same but secondary characteristics are varied: how does the perception of confidence in one's own answer or authoritativeness of the reference change relative to cost, media presentation (e.g., print or online), timeliness, the number of contributors etc.