Section 20.3. The Origins of Wikipedia
20.3. The Origins of WikipediaIn the fall of 2000, Jimmy and I were in agreement that Nupedia's slow productivity was probably going to be an ongoing problem and that there needed to be a way, moreover, in which ordinary, uncredentialed people could participate more easily. Uncredentialed people could (and did) participate in Nupedia, particularly as writers and copy editors, but it was challenging for most of them to get articles through the elaborate system. We had a huge pool of talent, motivated to work on an encyclopedia but not motivated enough to work on Nupedia, going to waste. It was my job to solve these problems. I wrote multiple detailed proposals for a simpler, more open editing system and I ran them by Jimmy. His reply to all of them was that it would require too much programming, and he couldn't afford to pay more high-priced programmers. In retrospect, of course, I realize that we could have found a way to enlist volunteers to develop the system. Jimmy and I both probably knew that at the time; unfortunately, we didn't pursue it. While I was thinking hard about how to create a more open system with minimal setup requirements, I had dinner with an old Internet friend of mine, Ben Kovitz. Ben had moved to town for a new job and we were out at a Pacific Beach Mexican restaurant, talking about jobs, tech stuff, and philosophy (Ben, Jimmy, and I all knew each other from those philosophy mailing lists on which we were active). Ben explained the idea of Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb[8] to me. Instantly I was considering whether wiki would work as a more open and simple editorial system for a free, collaborative encyclopedia, and it seemed exactly right. The more I thought about it, without even having seen a wiki, the more it seemed obviously right. Immediately I wrote a proposalunfortunately, lost nowin which I said that this might solve the problem and that we ought to try it. Given that setting up a wiki would be very simple and would not require hiring a programmer, Jimmy could scarcely refuse. He liked the idea but was initially skepticalproperly so, as I was, despite my excitement.
Wiki advocates often point out[9] that Wikipedia is nonstandard as a wiki. This is partly because we began just with the very basic wiki concept and not so much of the culture. Wiki culture is very distinctive. Wiki pages can be started and edited by anyone, but in Thread Mode[10] (as in "the thread of this discussion"), the dialogue becomes complex. In that case, or when consensus is reached, or when positions have hardened, it is considered a good idea to "refactor"[11] pages (a term borrowed from programming)i.e., to rewrite them, taking into account the highlights of the dialog. Then the dialog might be represented in "Document Mode."[12] Opinions are very welcome on a typical wiki. There are many other collective habits that make up typical wiki culture; these are only a few.
However, I denied the necessity of organizing Wikipedia according to these precise principles. To be sure, a few other participants wanted Wikipedia to adopt wiki culture wholesale so that it would be "just another wiki," and they had some small influence over the direction of the project. Still, I viewed wiki software as simply a tool, a way to organize people who want to collaborate. I saw no necessity whatsoever to partake in all aspects of the idiosyncratic culture that happened to be associated with the advent of this very generally applicable tool, since we were engaged in a very specific sort of project with very specific requirements. This caused some consternation among some wiki advocates, who appeared to think that Wikipedia should, or inevitably would, become just another wiki, somehow necessarily partaking of typical wiki culture. Ward Cunningham's prediction,[13] when Jimmy asked him whether wiki software "could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia," was: "Yes, but in the end it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki." As I said in reply: "Wikipedia has a totally different culture from this wiki, because it's pretty single-mindedly aimed at creating an encyclopedia. It's already rather useful as an encyclopedia, and we expect it will only get better."
Typical wiki culture aside, wiki software does encourage, but does not strictly require, extreme openness and decentralization: openness, since page changes are logged and publicly viewable, and pages may be further changed by anyone; and decentralization, because for work to be done, there is no need for a person or body to assign work, but rather, work can proceed as and when people want to do it. Wiki software also discourages the exercise of authority, since work proceeds at will on any page, and on any large, active wiki it would be too much work for any single overseer or limited group of overseers to keep up. These all became features of Wikipedia. My initial idea was that the wiki would be set up as part of Nupedia; it was to be a way for the public to develop a stream of content that could be fed into the Nupedia process. I think I got some of the basic pages writtenhow wikis work, what our general plan was, and so forthover the next few days. I wrote a general proposal for the Nupedia community, and the Nupedia wiki went live January 10. The first encyclopedia articles for what was to become Wikipedia were written then. It turned out, however, that a clear majority of the Nupedia Advisory Board wanted to have nothing to do with a wiki. Again, their commitment was to rigor and reliability, a concern I shared with them and continue to have. They evidently thought a wiki could not resemble an encyclopedia at all, that it would be too informal and unstructured, as the original WikiWikiWeb was, to be associated with Nupedia. They of course were perfectly reasonable to doubt that it would turn into the fantastic source of content that it did. Who could reasonably guess that it would work? But it did work, and now the world knows better. |
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