SERVAGE
The Definitive Webhost.
ROMANIA
A Strange Country
The Old Bat
Takes a Swing At
ASYLUM
The Great American Novel
EGYPT
Follow the Golden Path.
EGYPT
The Pyramids are Forever. Your life is not.
MEXICO
One Step Closer to Eternal Youth.
TURKEY
Bosphorus, the Water between Three Continents
MEXICO
Even the Boring is Lively.
ROMANIA
Why Donate Blood ? Visit Dracula Castle.
TURKEY
The Magic of The Arabian Nights
COSTA RICA
Other People are Having Fun. Why miss out ?
Forex Trading
The Dollar supports you. Do you support it ?
Advertise here
|
Wikipedia, or The Digital Mafia.
|
I suppose anyone has by now heard of Wikipedia. But to properly understand it, we
need to take a few steps back.
The Internet gave a somewhat material form to a very strange notion. A world
composed entirely of thought has long been the dream of ivory tower dwellers, from
modern day universities to self proclaimed mages thousands of years ago. It was but
a dream, for all this time, and now it is here.
The interesting part of anything material is that it has value. Inasmuch as the
Internet is a material representation of that dream, it must have value. In
principle, it could have fabulous value, and with minimal effort required.
Nowadays on Earth, land belongs to someone, you can't just go around and pick up
fruit and sell them. You can't just go around and dig for shiny stones and sell
them. The Earth is propriety-saturated. Everything is owned.
The Internet, however, isn't. Not much is really owned, in fact it's not even very
clear how ownership on the Internet works. The people who invented ownership of
intangibles back down on Earth, calling it Intellectual Property, would love
nothing more than for their ideas to scale to the Internet. That would allow them
fabulous wealth, and they're willing to spend time and money promoting this best
case scenario.
However, it seems apparent by now that their ideas are wrong. Ownership on the
Internet probably will not work like Intellectual Property on Earth. We don't know
for sure, but it seems improbable. Which brings us to the second problem.
Earth, as we know it, is not only property-saturated, but also law-saturated. For
most possible configurations and evolutions, there exist laws, as arbitrary
agreements between the relevant agents, ensuring predictability. Earth is in fact
so law-saturated, most law makers are equally likely to make a bad law or a good
law. This fact alone is sufficient proof Earth is law saturated.
The Internet however is not even near it. In fact, there's precious little law that
applies. And this is, occasionally, a problem for Earthlings, because it makes
their life difficult.
For instance, a species of Earthlings called investors were seduced, not so long
ago, by the above observations about untold wealth. However, in the absence of
sufficient laws, it's impossible to predict a relationship between effort, value
and wealth. As such, they lost vast amounts of resources in misguided efforts,
which sometimes managed to deliver value, but failed to transform it into wealth,
but as a rule failed even to deliver value. Because value, as understood by
Earthlings, is not necessarily value in the Internet world.
Things are not particularly clear yet, 4 or 5 cycles after the Bubble (on the
Internet, time is measured in cycles. Every cycle, processor power doubles.), but
it would seem ownership on the Internet is decided by visitors. Interest generates
ownership. If for instance three places (called sites by the Earth folk) do the
same thing, they own the deed in proportion to the visitors they attract.
This is a fascinating situation, because entities end up co-owners as a result of a
decision made by third parties. As such, it is unprecedented, and the people of
Earth have serious trouble even grasping the concept.
Furthermore, ownership is not explicit. On Earth, any party interested can pick up
the registry of deeds, and find out who owns what. On the Internet, it's very
difficult to find out who goes where. Therefore, while ownership still exists,
people know a lot less about who owns what and how much of it.
Still, value can be generated, and most success stories revolve around what's
called a "platform". A platform is some sort of tool that allows users to do
something. Inasmuch as there are users wanting to do that, value has been created.
If a way is found to sell their deeds back to them, value can be transformed into
wealth.
The creation of value isn't difficult at all. You need to find something people
want to do, and give them a platform that does it. Getting the word out isn't
particularly difficult, not in the Internet, the world of information. Then all you
have to do is sit back, and watch other people create value, and maybe fine tune
the platform and keep it up to evolving expectations.
That, in itself, is not very useful. However, ways to transform value into wealth
exist, and they are in fact the prime mover of platforms. Originally, advertising
was the only way to go about it. Therefore, all the platform offered were forums.
Here, people can come and post messages. The platform owners can then sell ad
space, and every individual user will be in fact paying for the privilege of
reading all the other user's posts, by looking at those ads.
This idea of selling their own value back to them would sound pretty bad back on
Earth. However, since there are not all that many laws on the Internet, and it's a
confusing space even for the brighter humans, let alone the unwashed masses, nobody
seems to notice the immorality of the practice.
However, forum post are ephemeral, and contextual, they don't have any value
except for the people in the discussion, and not outside of it. And even there, not
for very long. Under this pressure, forums are divided and sub-divided to cater to
the individual discussions.
This can be refined however. There must be something individual people can
contribute, something that is of value, and something that has lasting power.
Certainly there is. Knowledge.
And so, wikipedia is born. It allows people to contribute their knowledge, which
then stays there and belongs to the platform owners, who, after having amassed
sufficient value, could probably figure out a way to turn it into wealth. A
perspective made all the more feasible by the fact that they select contribution by
one criteria : does it have staying power ?
Wikipedia is an "open encyclopedia". What that means, however, is not the "freedom"
suggested by the "open source" reference. Wikipedia is not a free encyclopedia, by
any means. In fact, the platform owners make it as plain as they can without making
it also clear. Wikipedia is a clip joint, it's open as long as you're bringing
something, and it's free in the sense you're free to leave without whatever you
brought.
Wikipedia is remarkable, however, not because it's just another scam, but because
of the way it was born. Meet Jimbo Wales.
The idea that a lot of people have of Wikipedia, is that it's some emergent
phenomenon -- the wisdom of mobs, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing --
thousands and thousands of individual users each adding a little bit of content and
out of this emerges a coherent body of work. But, the truth was rather different:
Wikipedia was actually written by a community, a dedicated group of a few hundred
volunteers. I know all of them and they all know each other. It's much like any
traditional organization.
Admire the idiot's candor. He's not telling us anything we don't know. Let's
examine the things he is telling us, to make sure.
1. Wikipedia is much like a traditional organization. Yes, it is. The traditional
organisation operating in a place that's not ruled by law is either the Mob or the
Bureaucracy. In fact, any "traditional" organisation is some graft of the two
models.
2. He is the fall guy. Remember Frank Fitzsimmons ? No, you probably don't. He was
a friend of Nixon's and a frequent guest at the White House. He was also a
respectable face for the Teamster's Pension Fund. He was just the sort of guy the
Syndicate needed.
JimBlow Alles is exactly what his name suggests. A jizz jukebox. He will take it
from anyone, repeatedly, and then sit down and discuss how it made him feel,
connect on a deeper level and doodle.
To sane humans, such a character is bewildering, but let's not forget an important
piece of the puzzle. Jim Blow isn't there for sane humans. He's there for a very
specific category of defective human minds. They call themselves "hackers" or
something like that, and the rest of the world calls them nerds.
Nerd minds are defective in a very particular way. They don't understand
structures of power. This makes them slightly socially dysfunctional, which pushes
them towards the social fringe. This gives them plenty of time to tinker, and one
of the prime things to tinker on is the Internet. Which, incidentally, doesn't use
structures of power that are readily grasped by any other group of humans.
So now, there's a medium in which the nerds' defect is minimized, and as fate
would have it, also a medium which favors their particular inclinations, namely
tinkering. Nerds are by consequence disproportionately powerful on the Internet.
More importantly, they are blinded. They more or less have noticed by now that they
do in fact lack something in the real world, whether they have a name for it or
not. They found the Internet, and noticed that apparently, their lack disappears in
this enchanted land.
What they fail to grasp is that the Internet, like anything, still uses structures
of power. It's just that the particular way in which they work on the Internet,
being significantly different from Earth, has everyone confused. Basically, if you
take some people who can't drive and some people who can, and move them all to
England, it will appear as if the people who can't drive aren't handicapped
anymore. Seemingly, nobody can drive in England.
Obviously, that will only last as long as it takes the people that actually can
drive to figure out how to do it on the wrong side of the road.
Now, Jim Blow is critical for the success of the Wikipedia project because he can
interface with nerds in a way that gains their trust. He's very convincingly one of
them. He would never lie or manipulate for gain, now would he ? That's un-nerdy.
And he seems nerdy. Therefore, he must be. At least, that's how nerds mate.
And for all we know, he may well be, but for your instruction, I have brought back
from the dead the story of Greenspun and ArsDigita (something the two have decided
to bury, apparently, and deleted from any caches and archives they could get their
hands on. Remember, boys, the Internet never forgets.). Do read this piece.
Now, it would seem a brilliant nerd can nonetheless be stupid enough to lose
control over the corporation he founded, and to people too incompetent to run it.
This is, in essence, the bewildering defect of the nerd brain. You can't lose a
woman to someone who isn't good enough to seduce her. You can't have your car
stolen by someone who isn't good enough to drive. Yet Greenspun, and legions of
nerds before and after him, managed and will manage to lose a company they created
to people who weren't good enough to run it. Shocking, isn't it.
With Jim Blow in place to convince the nerds, the Wikipedia platform was good to
go. People started coming in, with their knowledge, and leaving it there. Slowly,
the granary is getting filled.
The problem with Wikipedia users is, however, they fall in two very distinct groups, as Swartz astutely points out :
So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple
study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. "I expected to
find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users,
just because that seems to come up a lot. But it's actually much, much tighter than
that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ...
524 people. ... And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done
73.4% of all the edits." The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from "people who
[are] contributing ... a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix ... or
something like that."
On the other hand,
If you just count edits, it appears the biggest contributors to the Alan Alda
article (7 of the top 10) are registered users who (all but 2) have made thousands
of edits to the site. Indeed, #4 has made over 7,000 edits while #7 has over
25,000. In other words, if you use Wales's methods, you get Wales's results: most
of the content seems to be written by heavy editors.
But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the
contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top
10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly
one edit -- this one! With the more reasonable metric -- indeed, the one Wales
himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study -- the result
completely reverses.
When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to
add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and
reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like
changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only
insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of
the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
Now, here we have a pretty clear picture. The insiders are the Mob.
They are the Johnny Dio (remember him ?), the "Tony Ducks” Corallo, the Vincent
Squillante of Internet, New York. the Angelo Meli, William Bufalino, and Pete
Licavoli of Internet, Detroit; the Babe Triscaro of Internet, Cleveland; the Paul
Ricca and Joey Glimco of Internet, Chicago.
They are the Mob of the Internet.
Not all of it, obviously, just one family. The Wikipedia Crime Family, how does
that sound ?
The outsiders, of course, are the suckers. As always. They bring the in money, and
often enough they look with awe and admiration at the greatly superior beings that
are leading the roaring Internet life.
Jim Blow is just himself. A straw man that goes to Stanford dinners and Oxford
parties and tells the students there about how "I'm not a wiki person who happened
to go into encyclopedias, I'm an encyclopedia person who happened to use a wiki.".
He is however wrong. He's not using anything. He's being used. We are monumentally
unsurprised.
People educated by television will obviously object, along the lines that them 500,
or 1000 or 2000 people aren't mobsters, because they aren't deliberately being
mobsters. They don't wear funny jackets and stripped pants.
Try and understand that the Mob is not a film about the Mob. Lucchese didn't set
out to be a mafioso, just like he saw on TV. He didn't see on TV. He just set out
to make money. Provenzano wasn't trying to be Provenzano. He just was. Himself.
The Internet today, much like America in the 1920, is a place with strong moral
values weakly implemented. As such, Lucchese and Provenzano just spring up
naturally, the way warm surface water in the gulf makes hurricanes. It's nothing
deliberate, it's natural.
In closing, it was said by great minds before that any theory is useless that doesn't offer a prediction. So let us construct a prediction.
Wikipedia has either reached, or is very close to reaching dynamic equilibrium. That means, it's close to a point in it's life where, over any interval of time, the likelihood that knowledge is added equals the likelihood knowledge is subtracted.
For instance, if you set about to catch ants in a box, depending on the size of the box and the relative speeds of you and the ants, there is a maximum number of ants you can catch. Get enough of them in the box, the odds of one running out in the time it takes you to put one in approach 1.
Once in this point, the Mob will no longer want neither the outsiders, nor Mr Blow, the walking talking sucker trap. It will, however, probably want him more than them. But what it will want, most of all, is a way to turn value into wealth. Which, possibly, will mean turning Wikipedia into something that can be sold, in some form. Maybe printing it.
But what it will certainly mean will be an increased distancing from the "open" part and an increased pretense of being "encyclopedic". A repositioning that starts with saying, "I'm not a wiki person who happened to go into encyclopedias, I'm an encyclopedia person who happened to use a wiki."
14
nerds got upset for being called defective and are whining in a corner.
Comment
|
|
copyright 2006 by Zenofeller
|
this page was made using a
bent spoon. anything else is for failures
|
