The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 116
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Sanger and Wales developed a rigorous, seven-step process for creating and approving articles, which included assigning topics to proven experts, whose credentials had been vetted, and then putting the drafts through outside expert reviews, public reviews, professional copy editing, and public copy editing. “We wish editors to be true experts in their fields and (with few exceptions) possess Ph.Ds.,” the Nupedia policy guidelines stipulated.92 “Larry’s view was that if we didn’t make it more academic than a traditional encyclopedia, people wouldn’t believe in it and respect it,” Wales explained. “He was wrong, but his view made sense given what we knew at the time.”93 The first article, published in March 2000, was on atonality by a scholar at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.
It was a painfully slow process and, worse yet, not a lot of fun. The whole point of writing for free online, as Justin Hall had shown, was that it produced a jolt of joy. After a year, Nupedia had only about a dozen articles published, making it useless as an encyclopedia, and 150 that were still in draft stage, which indicated how unpleasant the process had become. It had been rigorously engineered not to scale. This hit home to Wales when he decided that he would personally write an article on Robert Merton, an economist who had won the Nobel Prize for creating a mathematical model for markets containing derivatives. Wales had published a paper on option pricing theory, so he was very familiar with Merton’s work. “I started to try to write the article and it was very intimidating, because I knew they were going to send my draft out to the most prestigious finance professors they could find,” Wales said. “Suddenly I felt like I was back in grad school, and it was very stressful. I realized that the way we had set things up was not going to work.”94
That was when Wales and Sanger discovered Ward Cunningham’s wiki software. Like many digital-age innovations, the application of wiki software to Nupedia in order to create Wikipedia—combining two ideas to create an innovation—was a collaborative process involving thoughts that were already in the air. But in this case a very non-wiki-like dispute erupted over who deserved the most credit.
The way Sanger remembered the story, he was having lunch in early January 2001 at a roadside taco stand near San Diego with a friend named Ben Kovitz, a computer engineer. Kovitz had been using Cunningham’s wiki and described it at length. It then dawned on Sanger, he claimed, that a wiki could be used to help solve the problems he was having with Nupedia. “Instantly I was considering whether wiki would work as a more open and simple editorial system for a free, collaborative encyclopedia,” Sanger later recounted. “The more I thought about it, without even having seen a wiki, the more it seemed obviously right.” In his version of the story, he then convinced Wales to try the wiki approach.95
Kovitz, for his part, contended that he was the one who came up with the idea of using wiki software for a crowdsourced encyclopedia and that he had trouble convincing Sanger. “I suggested that instead of just using the wiki with Nupedia’s approved staff, he open it up to the general public and let each edit appear on the site immediately, with no review process,” Kovitz recounted. “My exact words were to allow ‘any fool in the world with Internet access’ to freely modify any page on the site.” Sanger raised some objections: “Couldn’t total idiots put up blatantly false or biased descriptions of things?” Kovitz replied, “Yes, and other idiots could delete those changes or edit them into something better.”96
As for Wales’s version of the story, he later claimed that he had heard about wikis a month before Sanger’s lunch with Kovitz. Wikis had, after all, been around for more than four years and were a topic of discussion among programmers, including one who worked at BOMIS, Jeremy Rosenfeld, a big kid with a bigger grin. “Jeremy showed me Ward’s wiki in December 2000 and said it might solve our problem,” Wales recalled, adding that when Sanger showed him the same thing, he responded, “Oh, yes, wiki, Jeremy showed me this last month.”97 Sanger challenged that recollection, and a nasty crossfire ensued on Wikipedia’s discussion boards. Wales finally tried to de-escalate the sniping with a post telling Sanger, “Gee, settle down,” but Sanger continued his battle against Wales in a variety of forums.98
The dispute presented a classic case of a historian’s challenge when writing about collaborative creativity: each player has a different recollection of who made which contribution, with a natural tendency to inflate his own. We’ve all seen this propensity many times in our friends, and perhaps even once or twice in ourselves. But it is ironic that such a dispute attended the birth of one of history’s most collaborative creations, a site that was founded on the faith that people are willing to contribute without requiring credit.V
More important than determining who deserved credit is appreciating the dynamics that occur when people share ideas. Ben Kovitz, for one, understood this. He was the player who had the most insightful view—call it the “bumblebee at the right time” theory—on the collaborative way that Wikipedia was created. “Some folks, aiming to criticize or belittle Jimmy Wales, have taken to calling me one of the founders of Wikipedia, or even ‘the true founder,’?” he said. “I suggested the idea, but I was not one of the founders. I was only the bumblebee. I had buzzed around the wiki flower for a while, and then pollinated the free-encyclopedia flower. I have talked with many others who had the same idea, just not in times or places where it could take root.”99
That is the way that good ideas often blossom: a bumblebee brings half an idea from one realm, and pollinates another fertile realm filled with half-formed innovations. This is why Web tools are valuable, as are lunches at taco stands.
Cunningham was supportive, indeed delighted when Wales called him up in January 2001 to say he planned to use the wiki software to juice up his encyclopedia project. Cunningham had not sought to patent or copyright either the software or the wiki name, and he was one of those innovators who was happy to see his products become tools that anyone could use or adapt.
At first Wales and Sanger conceived of Wikipedia merely as an adjunct to Nupedia, sort of like a feeder product or farm team. The wiki articles, Sanger assured Nupedia’s expert editors, would be relegated to a separate section of the website and not be listed with the regular Nupedia pages. “If a wiki article got to a high level it could be put into the regular Nupedia editorial process,” he wrote in a post.100 Nevertheless, the Nupedia purists pushed back, insisting that Wikipedia be kept completely segregated, so as not to contaminate the wisdom of the experts. The Nupedia Advisory Board tersely declared on its website, “Please note: the editorial processes and policies of Wikipedia and Nupedia are totally separate; Nupedia editors and peer reviewers do not necessarily endorse the Wikipedia project, and Wikipedia contributors do not necessarily endorse the Nupedia project.”101 Though they didn’t know it, the pedants of the Nupedia priesthood were doing Wikipedia a huge favor by cutting the cord.
Unfettered, Wikipedia took off. It became to Web content what GNU/Linux was to software: a peer-to-peer commons collaboratively created and maintained by volunteers who worked for the civic satisfactions they found. It was a delightful, counterintuitive concept, perfectly suited to the philosophy, attitude, and technology of the Internet. Anyone could edit a page, and the results would show up instantly. You didn’t have to be an expert. You didn’t have to fax in a copy of your diploma. You didn’t have to be authorized by the Powers That Be. You didn’t even have to be registered or use your real name. Sure, that meant vandals could mess up pages. So could idiots or ideologues. But the software kept track of every version. If a bad edit appeared, the community could simply get rid of it by clicking on a “revert” link. “Imagine a wall where it was easier to remove graffiti than add it” is the way the media scholar Clay Shirky explained the process. “The amount of graffiti on such a wall would depend on the commitment of its defenders.”102 In the case of Wikipedia, its defenders were fiercely committed. Wars have been fought with less intensity than the reversion battles on Wikipedia. And somewhat amazingly, the forces of reason regularly triumphed.
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