Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Wikipedia challenges the assumption that to create good information, someone has to be in charge and it needs certified experts, Mitch says. "The view people have of how the world has to work is just wrong." People think Wikipedia can't work because they assume it's as hard to remove grafitti there as it is in the real world. But, he says, all this is what the attendees here already know. [As always, I am paraphrasing and paying attention to what happens to strike me.]

Now he talks about blogs vs. wikis. "I find blogs, especially political blogs, on the whole to be quite disappointing. To me, they're the talk radio of the Internet." The problem is that they're a series of atomic utterances, one after another. Rather than building on one another, they're like billiard balls. Blogs are about individual expression. They increase partisanship rather than increase thoughtful reflection. [Mitch's got to find himself some new blogs to read.] But, with wikis, people work on the same entry and improve it.

"As a technologist, I had some unlearning to do when I entered the Wikipedia community" because the tools weren't all that good. But, Jimmy Wales taught him that the "secret sauce" isn't technology. It's community. It's the shared values: NPOV, being prepared to be edited, learning to make your opponent's case. To become a Wikipedian is to internalize those values.

In the early years, he says, there were more articles in Wikipedia about Middle Earth than about Africa because the contributors were writing about what they knew about. This is no longer true. He talks about the importance of inclusiveness. But, he says, things could be better. E.g., the UI that shows you what's changed in an article is obscure unless you're pretty deep into it. Wikipedia needs to be easier to edit if it is to be inclusive. It looks ok to those who are already in the tent, but that's a self-selected group. "If we want Wikipedia to succeed in its mission, we must find ways to lower the barriers to participation." He applauds the efforts underway to do this. "I'd make it a major strategic priority for the community."

Mitch recommends An Inconvenient Truth. [Me, too.] Politics as usual is broken. See campaigns.wikia.com to see what Jimmy Wales talked about in his keynote. Democracy as the experiment in enabling people to determine what's best is at risk. "Wikipedia is an existence proof of the power of a decentralized and respectful self-governing community to make an impact." It is an "inspiration for a political movement." The key attributes should include:

Participatory.

Product and process intertwined. The product is a wiki and it uses the wiki to produce itself.

Aspiration to high standard of respectful dialog.

Citizens of equal stature with experts.

To most audiences, this idea would be absurd. Politics generally shuns facts and collaboration. "We need a political movement that does not practice politics as usual just as Wikipedia does not practice Britannica as usual." It's been done before: Gandhi. MLK. Mandela.

But, to succeed, we need an existence proof. We need new tools, especially ones that help us argue better. Argue fairly. That's what the Wikipedia culture is good at. [Good point.]

There are no panaceas. In the real world, sometimes difficult decisions have to be made. Facts aren't enough. The Iraq article in Wikipedia can't conclude that we should or should not withdraw our troops. This political movement has to have core values. Mitch says he does not have an answer.

Q: If Wikipedia is the metaphor for a political movement, consider that Wikipedia doesn't yet address the needs of the visually impaired. We don't have volunteers to do this. How would we get the equivalent problems addressed in the political realm?
A: There are discussions going on about evolving wikis for the visually impaired. "I'm willing to put my oar in the water on that." For the political movement, it's like Wikipedia in 2001. We just need a few crazy people.

Q: How might Second Life support these movements? [Mitch is on the board.]
A: It'll become a fabulous place for collaboration.

Q: Your key attributes are new for the production of knowledge, but they're old hat in politics. At Wikipedia, there are relatively few active participants...
A: If there were lower barriers to editing, there would be more participants.

[Mitch's intuition about a tool for fair argument leading to a movement works better, I think, if we assume there are only a handful of parties. But suppose we're more fragmented than that? A fair argument forum might end as diverse as the blogosphere. They key would be, I think, providing a fair argument platform — an idea I like — that also enables us to come together in movements that accept a range of diversity. Fair arguments don't always resolve, but we need an ethos that also does not see splintering as the alternative.]