I understand about being a good faith contributor in this or that quiet corner of the steppes, one that the wikipolitburo has not got around to noticing yet. You will be a good faith contributor right up until the Central Committee declares you to be a heretic, because it is they, not you, who decides what is good faith and what is not. Then you will find yourself banished from the land and tried in absentia by a lynch mob of your, um, “peers”.

That is what amounts to “faith” in Wikipedia.

I haven’t been questioning the validity the peer ideal, so far as I understand your understanding of it, but I do begin to be surprised that you think Wikipedia has much if anything to do with it.

If I seek to explain the divergence of perceptions here, my first hypothesis would probably be that we have different levels of experience with the actual workings of Wikipedia itself.

I see in all of us a strong desire to believe in a certain types of social organization, in particular, a learning community that is dedicated to distributing the sum of human knowledge as widely as possible.

There was a time when I imagined that Wikipedia might have been founded for just that purpose, a time when I imagined that the rules of its order might have been reasonably well-suited to achieving that end.

Increasing familiarity with the realities of Wikipedia have taught me that neither imagining has substance.

In our discussions at The Wikipedia Review, I have often referred to the distinction that Argyris and Schön made between espoused values and enacted values. I am sure that everyone recognizes the distinction under one name or another.

But it’s critical to note that not every organization that espouses certain ideals is really determined to enact those ideals, whether this discrepancy occurs through deliberate deception, “bad faith” self-deception, or merely through incompetence.

Whatever the case, it is not really necessary for us to figure out whether a leader is a fool or a liar on order for us to decide that we do not want to follow that leader any further.

tried to fix it.

I wonder then, if what you are putting into question is not the very process of peer production itself, i.e. the volontary contributions, the non-credentialism, the a posteriori selection through collective choice systems? Or are you just rejecting it in the case of producing encyclopedias?

what then is the alternative?

My own view is that producing based on voluntary contributions is sound, a major social innovation bringing many benefits, but that it poses the challenge of selecting for excellence, and that this is the area we have to work on. But I do not question the fundamental innovation of Wikipedia of creating an encyclopedia through voluntary contributions, and making it universally available, and having a participatory process of decision-making (which in this case, seems flawed as it does not select for excellence in a satisfactory manner)

Michel

Zbigniew Lukasiak, 31 Jan 2008

Hey Jon — why are you joining Wikipedia with Citizendium? My understanding is that Citizendium was an attempt to cure the failures of Wikipedia — even if it was not that successful — then applying all Wikipedia critisism to Citizendium without any supportive argumentation is rather unfair.

Zbigniew,

I participated in a couple of the projects that Larry Sanger carried on in the interval between Wikipedia and Citizendium and I participated in the early phases of the Citizendium startup itself.

Based on that experience I would have to express the following evaluations:

Sanger rightly saw the need to fix one of the big problems with Wikipedia, namely, the lack of accountability and responsibility that is engendered by the use of pseudonyms, but he failed to learn almost every other lesson of Wikipedia’s failings, and he is characteristically impervious to any significant criticism of the underlying Wikipedia model, the lion’s share of which he himself crafted.

His feeling appears to be that it was only the implementation of his basic policies that went off track, not the foundation itself that was flawed.

This has resulted in an even more rigid adherence to the fundamental Wikipediot Dogma than we find at Wikipedia itself.

I do not expect anything new to come of that.

that’s the problem between definitions and real life.

Peer production has three aspects: 1) voluntary contributions; 2) participatory processes; 3) commons oriented output.

Clearly, the Wikipedia has one and three, but the participatory process has gone astray.

A different issue, but of course related, is the relations between the commons and the businesses that live from it. What you have here is I think a similar issue to why democracy invented the separation of powers. What you decry is that the group of people that you say are profiting from it, are perhaps also responsible for the degeneration of the participatory process.

This is entirely possible, but I think that it can also degenerate on its own (tyranny of structurelessness), or it is the degeneration that subsequently creastes possibilities of privileged capture.

What I’d like to know is details about how you see that mechanism of exploitation, and how it impacts the process. Are you sure that the deletionists have the same agenda, and are beholden, to the individual business interests of some in the wikimedia foundation?

My provisional sense is that this is not necessarily related.

At the start you said ‘back up a little’.

So let’s do that. Take the difference between stalinism and fascism. Both are despicable totalitarian systems, but they proceeded from entirely different premises. The first was a degeneration of an egalitarian ethos, the second an actual carrying of an inegalitarian ideal. No matter how rotten the first was, it was originally an attempt for an egalitarian society.

The Wikipedia is similary an instantiation of an egalitarian ideal, that has gone astray. However, we have to keep a sense of perspective on these things, it is still a matter of voluntary contribution, and still a matter of universal availability.

The exploitation part seems very relative to me: how much money are Wales et al. actually making of Wikipedia? Unless you know things that I don’t, I don’t see much evidence of it But I’ll keep an open mind for your answer.

Let’s back up a little then.

I have been assuming that the word peer connoted equal. For instance, the word umpire derives by incorrect division from the Middle French nomper for not equal. So I would not call something a peer system unless all of the people in the system had equal status, that is, no umpires. Wikipedia is so remote from being anything like a peer system that it really makes no sense to apply the concept in any positive way.

I view the economics of motivation and reward in somewhat broader terms than the purely monetary, and I have gotten some sense of what rewards, or prospects of reward, motivate various classes or workers in Wikipedia.

But the fact remains that Wikipedia is exactly like some of the most regressive systems that we have seen in the past — where the majority of the monetary rewards are going to classes of people who OWN the means of production and distribution, and who spend their time figuring out how to increase their control and their exploitation of that production, as opposed to producing anything themselves.

This means that reforming Wikipedia to make it into a corporation of paid workers, or a market of freelancers, is not an option, but that it is within that very dynamic of voluntary contributions and universal availability that solutions need to be found, i.e. from dysfunctional to more functional and democratic methods that are more productive in terms of selecting for excellence etc… or failing that, creating alternative projects that do.

Peer production and governance is an actual practice, that carries with it certain potential and ideals, which may or may not be fully realized, and subject to its own problems and dysfunctions, which cannot be understood in terms of previous mode of productions and governance.

That is the point that I’m making.

Michel

Michel

I don’t know what to say. If you believe that Wikipedia exemplifies the ideals of a peer community then I fear to wake you from your dogmatic slumbers — I have seen how grumpy people get on being roused from such a dream as that! Wikipedia has its elite. That elite did not “emerge” from the grass roots of some self-organizing e-lysian field — that elite has been carefully elected and empowered by the ownership of Wikipedia. Wikipedia maintains an Iron Cage like none I’ve ever seen before. Maintain your ideals, but learn to recognize those who would use your ideals against you.