There's been a lot of coverage of the New York Times story "Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia." It's prompted discussion about balancing issues of free speech, safety, and responsibility at the Times and Wikipedia. Within Wikipedia, the discussion has only just begun, but has started off quite constructively as seen in Wikipedian Apoc2400's proposed policy: in the short term, Wikipedia should refrain from spreading information if that information is not widely and reliably sourced, of little public interest, and is "likely to have very severe direct negative consequences."

This year's picnic will be better than ever, as we'll have an unconference to get us started:

The 1st Wiki-Conference New York will be held over the weekend of July 25-26 2009 (confirmed!) at New York University, and hosted by Free Culture @ NYU and Wikimedia New York City.

Sign up on the wiki, propose a lightning talk or breakout topic, or round up some Wikimedians for a panel discussion.

In Noam Cohen's recent New York Times article about "The Wars of Words on Wikipedia's Outskirts" (i.e., the recent ArbCom decision about Scientology edit wars) I note that organizations often develop towards bureaucratic forms (citing Max Weber) but even in their more free-form states communities still have structure, even if informal and implicit (citing Jo Freeman). I believe this means that while we might enjoy the informal and personal touch of working within a small community, if it is successful, that community will likely move towards more bureaucratic forms. Also, this can also have some benefits if the informal/implicit structures were unsavory. (As Mitch Kapor wryly noted, "Inside every working anarchy, there's an Old Boy Network.") As I said to Noam, rather than lament the passing of the good old days, I think it better to ask how to address issues in the present (including the maintenance of earlier values). (And actually, while it has slipped a bit from its original mission/intention, I think the ArbCom is doing a good job.)

Richard James asks if this sentiment is contrary to my focus on informal social norms, particularly in my blog entry about "Morality and the Dilemma" (i.e., Olson, Ostrom, and Hardin). Also, am I not abusing notions of "technical solutions" with institutional governance? To be clear, Wikipedia production might be explained by any number of approaches including: technical features, institutional governance, and social norms. In trying to complete my dissertation, I had lengthy, and sometimes stressful, arguments about to what extent one of these is more important than any other. Granted, all of these are important and to deny otherwise is silly. However, I found the initial focus upon technical features in accounts of FOSS/Wikipedia to be insufficient, and therefore offered a complementary social/cultural account of Wikipedia in response. But I'm not excused from trying to understand how each of these things interrelate and affect one another. My argument is that informal "good faith" social norms (supported by wiki features) are good at dealing with good faith participants, but more formal and autocratic forms of authority are often necessary to deal with those of bad faith or to make decisions as a last resort when no community consensus emerges -- hence the existence of Benevolent Dictators in open content communities. If such leadership or institutional governance persistently fails, the community might then fork.

I recently noted there were some new numbers on the 100,000 feature-quality articles page. In May 2008 (based on a January assessment I believe) there were 2,421 featured articles. Today, based on a February 2009 assessment, there are 2,570. That's a 6% increase -- below the 24% growth rate to 2.7 million total articles. If we assume a similar rate of increase, it would take 62 years to reach the goal of 100,000 articles.

initial = 2570; target = 100000; growth = .06;
years = (log(target)-log(initial))/log(1+growth)

If we relax the goal to have 100,000 good or better articles, that will require 24 years at a 16% growth starting with 11,024 "good" articles. Of course, I don't know to what extent the rate of growth is increasing or decreasing.

The challenge at the heart of collective action is how cooperative behavior emerges when there are apparent reasons for it not to. This is famously demonstrated by the Prisoner's Dilemma in which two co-suspects have compelling cause to defect -- turn informer -- against the other but the consequent of both following such a strategy is worse than had they cooperated and remained silent (Axelrod 1984). That it, if your partner remains silent, you will get six months in jail if you are also silent, but you go free by defecting and saddling your partner with a ten year sentence. If your partner informs on you, and you do the same, you each receive five years unless you're the sucker and get ten. Defecting is the dominant "equilibrium" state regardless of your partner's choice: going free is preferable to six months; five years is preferable to ten. So both players defect, get five year sentences, and wish they had remained silent and gotten off with six months. The dilemma is that the individual's dominant strategy also creates a mutually suboptimal result; in this case, fear of the worst-case scenario inhibits beneficial collective action. Understanding the distance between the lack of cooperation implied by the dominant strategy and the mutual benefits of cooperation has been a central concern of social science since Garrett Hardin's (1968) article "The Tragedy of the Commons." In this scenario, the dominant strategy of a herder is to put as many animals as possible on common land, despite the fact that if everyone were to do the same it would soon be overgrazed. A few years before, in 1965, Mancur Olson (1971) published a book by which he characterized this type of problem as "The Logic of Collective Action."

Olson, considering production rather than consumption, asks who would contribute to a common public good when they might just as easily defect and "free ride"? Yet, again, should everyone follow this reasoning, no public goods will be produced. Olson provides an extensive taxonomy of group characteristics that affect this logic, including their size and interdependence, the market's demand elasticity, the balance of costs and benefits, and the ability for a group to exclude or penalize those who fail to contribute. (Ultimately, "trust" becomes a central element in such group dynamics and might arise in the context of time and reputation, institutional controls, or group norms.)

Around the same time, Robert Trivers (1971) characterized a related problem in animal behavior. In his article "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism," he defined an "altruistic situation" as one in which "one individual can dispense a benefit to a second greater than the cost of the act to himself" (Trivers 1971) and modeled the conditions under which altruistic behaviors were likely to emerge. (Like Olson, these relate to the character and extent of social interaction.) Of course, as noted by Frans de Waal (2008), "a return-benefits calculation typically remains beyond the animals cognitive horizon" and altruism itself is likely the result of a more proximate evolved behavior: empathy. (This link between empathy and altruism is hypothesized, outside of the evolutionary context, by Daniel Batson (1991).)

Recently, these two threads of political economy and evolution have been combined in the work of Elinor Ostrom. In "Governing the Commons" she makes a slight digression away from a macro-political perspective to note that "communities of individuals have relied on institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time" (Ostrom1990gce). By studying such institutions she recommends that the dilemma of "common pool resources" might be addressed by eight institutional design principles: clearly defined boundaries, congruence between appropriation/provision rules and local conditions, collective-choice arrangements, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict-resolution mechanisms, state recognition of groups' right to self-organize, and the nesting of enterprises in large systems.

More recently, Ostrom makes greater use of the evolutionary approach to focus on the emergence of norms (Ostrom 2000). She takes issue with Olson's (1971) earlier claim that unless the group is small, or there is a way to force individuals to act in their common interest, "rational self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests." She characterizes this as Olson's "zero contribution thesis" and notes that it contradicts everyday experience; the problem of free riding exists, but community governance regimes do emerge and persist (Ostrom 2000). While it might be "irrational" from the egoist perspective, a significant proportion of people will act cooperatively (i.e., 40-60% of people will initially contribute to the public good in a finite-round game). This cooperation is affected by factors such as expectations about others, and the framing and number of interactions between peers. And, in keeping with Olson, people will expend resources to punish those who make below average contributions. Hence Ostrom characterizes norms as those values (e.g., reciprocity, fairness, and trustworthiness) that affect the preference for cooperation. If there is a sufficient proportion of "norm using" players (i.e., conditional cooperators and willing punishers), this "creates an opening for collective action" (Ostrom 2000). This is especially so if there is good information about the trustworthiness of one's peers. If cooperation has been successfully established, new members will likely be appropriately acculturated. Hence, collective action and their supportive social norms can emerge in an evolutionary context: the gap of the cooperative dilemma can be bridged. Indeed, Olson recommends her eight institutional mechanisms (or "principles") to further such outcomes.

Recently, a number of scholars have applied this literature on collective action to Wikipedia. Johnson (2007) uses Ostrom to characterize vandalism and point-of-view (POV) pushing as collective action problems. Viegas, Wattenberg, and Mckeon (2007) argue that Wikipedia's Featured Article process reflects Ostrom's first four principles of locality, collective choice (participation), monitoring (accountability) and conflict resolution. Andrea Forte and Amy Buckman (2008) use all eight of Ostrom's design principles to evaluate Wikipedia governance and its Biography of Living Persons policy; they argue that there is decentralized policy creation, interpretation (i.e., its Arbitration Committee) and enforcement (i.e., administrators) but conclude the biggest lack relative to Ostrom is the uneven enforcement of policy.

However, these works tend to remain focused at an institutional level, focusing on community mechanisms for content and membership policy. (Two exceptions are a quantitative analysis of patterns in Wikipedian references to policies and guidelines from discussion pages (Beschastnikh, Kriplean, and Mcdonald 2008) and a characterization of the type of "utterances" used on Discussion pages (Goldspink 2009).) If, following Ostrom, we can think of norms as those values (e.g., reciprocity, fairness, and trustworthiness) that affect the preference for cooperation, can we find and characterize such norms in Wikipedia culture? I believe we can, and this is the focus of my work on Wikipedia.

Might we even characterize prosocial norms as a form of morality, in the sense employed by Bowles and Gintis (1998)? Indeed, despite preceding theorists of collective action by almost two centuries, Kant's (2005) categorical imperative is a moral response to the collective action dilemma: "I ought never to act in such a way that I couldn't also will that the maxim on which I act should be a universal law." Coincidently, the lesser well known subtitle to Hardin's famous "Tragedy of the Commons" article is "the population problem has no technical solution; it requires an extension in morality." Therefore, I do not think it is a stretch to conclude that Wikipedia collaboration is as much a "moral" problem as a technical one.

A brief historical essay is now available at ACM Interactions (or on my site):

"Wikipedia was an accident." I sometimes offer this (admittedly) exaggerated claim in response to those who confuse Wikipedia's current success with its uncertain origins. At the start, it was but the most recent contender in an age-old pursuit of a universal encyclopedia: a dream that the latest technology would provide universal access to world knowledge. Jimmy Wales's and Larry Sanger's first attempt at what would eventually become Wikipedia, the wiki-based encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," was neither of these things. So, by saying that Wikipedia was an accident, I don't mean it was unwelcome—far from it—but that it was a fortuitous turn of events unforeseen by even its founders. Moreover, it was evidence of contingency's role in technological innovation. ...

In my previous entry I commented on one of the articles in the Episteme Wikipedia issue. I thought it would also share my comments on the other two articles that were of interest to me. I read both of these under the influence of Collins and Evans (2008, hereafter "CE:"), which I have also mentioned here.

First, Larry Sanger's piece on The Fate of Expertise after Wikipedia is composed in two parts. First, the author responds to various interpretations of what he calls "The Wikipedia Potential Thesis" (WTP) whereby if Wikipedia fulfills its highest potential in terms of measurable quality, "experts would not need to be granted positions of special authority in order for humanity to have a resource that accurately tracks expert opinion." I think this is a bizarre thesis that no one has actually put forward. After some philosophizing, and given that Wikipedia is dependent upon expert (CE:contributory) knowledge, Sanger concludes this thesis is untenable. I agree. While Wikipedia might be sufficient in providing EC:interactional expertise (knowledge of -- not ability to do -- science) and might threaten other interactional experts (i.e., journalists) it would not obviate EC:contributory expertise. He also argues that Wikipedia is successful not because of anonymity, but because of its freedom -- permitting him to claim Citizendium is just as wiki-like and powerful as Wikipedia, but better in that real-name identities support community, governance, and quality. This is an argument he's made before, and one I largely agree with. Had Wikipedia started with the requirement that people login with an identity that corresponds to some real-world identity -- and this only need be policed in cases of abuse -- I think it would've done just fine.

Second, I most enjoyed P.D. Magnus' On Trusting Wikipedia. After reviewing literature on the reliability of Wikipedia, and arguing that Wikipedia is not like Britannica, the author posits five means by which reliability might be ascertained. The first three means correspond to types of meta-expertise in Evans and Collins: authority (reliable source; EC:local discrimination), plausibility of style (EC:technical connoisseurship), and plausibility of content (EC:ubiquitous discrimination). The second two have no direct corresponding type in Evans and Collins: calibration (testing a subset of the authors claims), and sampling (testing single claim with another expert, i.e., a second opinion). The author concludes that in the case of Wikipedia, none of these indicators are particularly strong. But I find his fault with authority (i.e., check your sources implied by WP:Verifiability) rather weak; he argues sources are unreliable, as are Wikipedia articles, since they are dynamic and can change. That is why one should use the permanent link (dated and versioned) when referring to something on the Web.

I have to agree with Sage Ross on his response to Brad Wray's The Epistemic Cultures of Science and Wikipedia: a Comparison. Wray is right to note that there are differences between scientific knowledge production and Wikipedia production in terms of the knowledge produced, who produces it, and the process. However, Wray's article does not show any cognizance of the actual epistemic basis of Wikipedia: not a word about Neutral Point of View, No Original Research, and Verifiability. Instead, he uses Adam Smith's invisible hand metaphor to argue that if local concern about one's scientific reputation and career yields a global value in the production of knowledge, this cannot be claimed for Wikipedia because no one has a scientific reputation at stake. First, the invisible hand argument is not the only theory for understanding peer-production. Two, as Ross notes scientific reputation is not the only motive that might be operational under the invisible hand model -- many Wikipedians are very much concerned about their peers' opinions. Wray writes "We have very little reason to believe that an invisible hand is at work, ensuring that the truth, and only the truth, is made available" (p. 43). Smith's hand can apply to more than scientific reputation and "truth"!? That's simply barking up the wrong tree.

In the conclusion of my dissertation I note how in 2004 a disaffected Wikipedian told me the project had gone downhill. Ironically, a few years later another Wikipedian who began their career in 2004 looked upon that year as the golden age from which Wikipedia had declined. Nostalgia is a fascinating phenomenon in human memory and history. Therefore, it's not surprising to find news stories year after year, since the Seigenthaler incident of 2005, speaking of Wikipedia's doom. These stories are often prompted by an embarrassing vandalism case or a competitor who claims to have righted all that is wrong in Wikipedia. This is yet another instance in a larger history of failed predictions about technologically related phenomena.

Even so, the past few weeks seems particularly pessimistic.

• BCO tallies the "25 Biggest Blunders in Wikipedia History"
• Stephen Foley asks So is Wikipedia cracking up?
• Andrew Lih continues his long-running lament of bureaucracy and deletionism (an issued characterized last year by The Economist as the "Battle for Wikipedia's Soul".) He fears that the lack of a Wikipedia article on MTV's new jackass-type show in which a "diverse bunch of mentally challenged reporters (from Down to Williams syndrome)" become roving street reporters is a sign of decline in Wikipedia's previously unquestioned pop culture coverage.
• Andrew's colleagues on Wikipedia Weekly join him in apocalyptic anxiety because it does not appear that the number of Wikipedia contributors will perpetually grow forever.
• A story entitled "Doomed: Why Wikipedia Will Fail" reports that law professor Eric Goldman believes the end is nigh.

I am concerned about the brittleness that results from the tension of being open to both newcomers and attack. Yet, it also seems unavoidable as Wikipedia became more prominent; I don't think this issue will sink Wikipedia, and hope it is amendable to continued good faith discussion and hard work. I don't subscribe to the perpetual growth theory that seems to be the presumption of many of the participants of Wikipedia Weekly -- and the world markets prior to a year ago. I think Wikipedia will survive even though/if the number of contributors levels off and flag revisions are enabled. The latter feature might prompt a flurry of stories about how Wikipedia is over, but it might stem the flow of future stories about embarrassing vandalism. Wikipedia won't be the same a couple of years from now as it was a couple of years ago, but nothing ever is.

A discussion on wikiEN-l about yet another Wikipedia alternative prompted me to wonder about the status of the GNU Free Documentation (GFDL 1.3) to Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0) license transition -- its FAQ is handy too. Because voting for the proposal is supposed to happen in two weeks, I thought I might as well make my considered decision now.

In general, I think it is a great idea: GFDL is inappropriate for a number of reasons, and this will further the flow of content between Wikipedia and other projects. I have two hesitations, if I understand the proposal correctly.

First, the dual licensing provision (where all Wikipedia developed content continues to be available under the GFDL, but imported CC-BY-SA content is not) is complex as it places an obligation upon the user of content to investigate if CC-BY-SA-only content was ever used; the FAQ recommends such information be placed in "the article footer or the version history." It would be useful to me to see a couple "screw cases" and their implications. For example, for a user who makes use of Wikipedia content -- including their own derivations -- what happens if they fail to note it is only CC-BY-SA-only content? (What if it was indicated but they fail to notice, or that it was not indicated but is learned of later?) However, evidently this is a compromise necessary for the sensitivities of the parties involved, and I don't think this will massively impact anyone.

Second, one of the benefits of CC-BY-SA is that attribution is specified by the licensor, which can be a URL from which the content was obtained -- instead of listing dozens of authors. But Wikimedia wants an exception: for articles with less than six contributors, those contributors must be listed. This just seems like a hassle. It may be moot, if the percentage of Wikipedia content with less than six contributors is near zero, but if not, I think this will be a headache for those wanting to make use of Wikipedia content. I presume one would count unique IP addresses (for anonymous contributors) and log-in names without concern whether these might be the same people. Even so, the proposal is talking about name attribution for less than six contributors, and by "reference to an online copy of the history page" for more. It is not as if the authors of content with less than six authors are greater auters. Why is this distinction even meaningful? And, the history page is easily accessed from the actual content, which would be referenced anyway, so now we have two URLs for no reason. Whereas one might have easily scraped a selection of Wikipedia (e.g., wget) for printing in developing countries or including it on a mobile gadget, one now needs an application to count contributors and include superfluous URLs.

I'm generally happy and excited about the transition, but I wish the attribution was simplified.