Hello Wikimaniacs!
A conference that at times felt more like a fandom event, Wikimania offered three packed days of lectures, panel discussions and workshops. The two obvious themes discussed during the event were based on 1) the current state and future direction of Wikipedia; and 2) the other uses of wiki software. At the same time many sessions addressed issues of general importance to the free culture movement. A host of brilliant keynote speakers addressed the legal, organisational, technical, political and moral aspects of Wikipedia. Listening to them, it became clear to me that we all face the same problems. Issues discussed vigorously by the Creative Commons network are just as salient for Wikimedia contributors.
The Quest for Quality
In his opening speech, Jimmy Wales mentioned two challenges faced by Wikipedia today: the quality of articles and the multilingual aspect of the encyclopedia. Wikipedia has grown fast in the last years and current statistics are very encouraging. English language Wikipedia has expanded by almost 100% in the last year and now includes over 1.2 million articles. Almost 230 different Wikipedias grew at an average rate of 122%, six Wikipedias have over 200,000 articles and another four have passed the 100,000 mark.
According to Wales, the size of major Wikipedias is large enough that attention should be shifted to improving article quality. For example, only 0.02% of the articles in the English language Wikipedia qualify as either ‘good articles’ or ‘featured articles’, and so meet the internal criteria for high quality content.
The announcement of an upcoming ’strong quality initiative’ is significant, as it signals a shift from the commonly held belief that quality improvement occurs ‘naturally’ in commons-based projects like Wikipedia. As Wales has pointed out, attaining a certain level of quality requires additional coordination and support for editing efforts.
The Shadow of Babel
With several large Wikipedias and two hundred much smaller ones, the distribution of content written in different languages is highly uneven.
‘The languages that we are good at, we’re really good at’, observed Wales, adding that progress on other Wikipedias is slow. Ethan Zuckerman from the Global Voices project commented on his blog that ‘[o]f languages with 100 million or more native speakers, the Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Bahasa Indonesia/Bahasa Malaysia, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese and Punjabi wikipedias still need work’.
Describing a possible solution to the problem, Wales once again suggested that spontaneous content production might require institutional support. He proposed that the Wikimania Foundation should fund language coordinators responsible for recruiting new Wikipedians and building communities around particular Wikipedias. Wales also suggested that Wikipedians should be more involved in outreach, training and support for new contributors.
Challenges faced by the multi-lingual Wikipedia were further discussed in a session on ‘Language and cultural barriers and challenges to Wikipedia’. During the session (well summarized by Zuckerman, who was its chairman), the translation of content was mentioned as one of the solutions for increasing the size of small Wikipedias.
Yet translation will only be useful if it accounts for a variety of existing viewpoints. While building Wikipedias we need to remember that ‘the sum of human knowledge’ is both multi-lingual and multi-cultural. This is precisely what has been described as the ‘glocal’ aspect of the commons during this year’s iCommons Summit. So each language’s Wikipedia should be an independently built body of content; articles should be translated in multiple directions, rather than flowing from established Wikipedias to growing ones; and unique contributions to our knowledge from different cultures should be spread over the Wikipedias.
Law, Norms, Architecture, Market
Speakers invited to give keynote talks at Wikimania have collectively offered explanations of Wikipedia’s success, by highlighting a range of important breakthroughs and innovations.
Lawrence Lessig spoke about a ‘read-write culture’ that is unlike the ‘read-only culture’ that dominated the 20th century. It is a culture that allows individuals to regain autonomy as participants and producers. This new culture depends on the technical infrastructure of the internet, but also upon legal tools in the form of open licensing schemes. The legal infrastrucure, Lessig argued, is currently broken because of incompatibility of licenses - for example the GNU FDL under which Wikipedia is licensed on the one hand and Creative Commons licenses on the other. During a panel discussion that followed, Lawrence Lessig and Eben Moglen, General Counsel for the FSF, have outlined a plan that will hopefully soon solve the problem by making the diverse licenses interoperable.
At the end of his speech, Lessig placed the practice of creating Wikipedia in the context of what he called the “ethics of free culture”. Lessig believes that Wikipedia offers an example of an autonomous ‘practice of creating’ opposed to the exercise of hierarchical power. Creating the Wikipedia is much more than writing an encyclopedia - it is a form of civic engagement in a ‘read-write’ culture.
The following day, Yochai Benkler presented findings from his recently published book, ‘The Wealth of Networks’. According to Benkler, Wikipedia is a prime example of a new model for knowledge production, which he calls ‘commons-based peer production’. Such production is decentralized, inclusive and regulated by non-market mechanisms. Benkler believes it is not a fad, but a sustainable and effective model that has been made possible by the internet.
Benkler mentioned one serious challenge to this model: appropriation of the commons and its productive capacities by commercial companies relying on radically new business models. He offered the example of Netscape, the company that recently started employing the most active members of social bookmarking sites, who until now have done their work for free. Benkler believes that this unnecessarily divides the productive community; and that monetary rewards ultimately will not prove successful. Jason Calacanis from Netscape, who was present in the audience, responded that the coexistence of paid and unpaid workers is natural. He gave the example of paid and voluntary firefighters and then mentioned Wikipedia itself, which relies both on a community of contributors and on a small but growing paid staff.
I mention this discussion as it concerns a key issue, in my opinion,that emerged at the iSummit in Rio as well. We still do not know to what extent commons-based peer production requires financial support in order to be sustainable in the long run.
Another part of Wikipedia’s infrastructural puzzle was presented by Brewster Kahle. Kahle’s Internet Archive shares with Wikipedia the goal of providing ‘universal access to all knowledge’. In his fascinating talk, Kahle showed how storing the sum of our knowledge, be it stored in books, audio and video recordings or computer code, is no longer neither technically difficult nor expensive. Instead, the main challenge is to go beyond the idea that ‘Information is Property’, which Kahle called one of the worst ideas of the twentieth century.
Wikimania seemed to have as many nooks and cranies as Wikipedia itself. There were panels on wiki textbooks, wiki travel guides, wiki universities, wiki dictionaries and wiki news. I even heard a happy ‘Wiki hello!’ on the streets of Boston. Wikimania convinced me that Wikipedia is not just an amazing project and a huge body of free knowledge; but that wikis are also a tool of great importance for cultural production. But above all it became clear that the problems that Wikipedia faces are shared by many in the commons community. We should therefore not just admire Wikipedia, but study it, treat as a huge, vibrant laboratory in which ways of building a free culture are being tested in practice.