Section 20.5. A Series of Controversies
20.5. A Series of ControversiesSo much for the very early history of Wikipedia; the next phase involved rapid growth and some serious internal controversies over policy and authority. If Wikipedia's basic policy was settled upon in the first nine months, its culture was solidified into something closer to its present form in the nine months after that. The project continued to grow. We had 6,000 articles by July 8; 8,000 by August 7; 11,200 by September 9; and 13,000 by October 4. Consulting the web site logs, we noted a Google effect: each time Google spidered the web site, more pages would be indexed; the greater the number of pages indexed, the more people arrived at the project; the more people involved in the project, the more pages there were to index. In addition to this source of new contributors, Wikipedia was Slashdotted several times and had large influxes of new users, particularly after two articles I wrote for Kuro5hin were posted on Slashdot: "Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias" (July 25, 2001)[24] and "Wikipedia is wide open. Why is it growing so fast? Why isn't it full of nonsense?" (September 24, 2001).[25]
This growth brought difficult challenges. Some of our earliest contributors were academics and other highly qualified people, and it seems to me that they were slowly worn down and driven away by having to deal with difficult people on the project. I hope they will not mind that I mention their names, but the two that stick in my mind are J. Hoffman Kemp[26] and Michael Tinkler,[27] a couple of Ph.D. historians. They helped to set what I think was a good precedent for the project in that they wrote about their own areas of expertise, and they contributed under their own, real names. The latter has the salutary effect of making the contributor more serious and more apt to take responsibility for his contributions. They are also very nice people, but they did not "suffer fools gladly." Consequently, they wound up in some silly disputes that would have driven less patient people away instantly. So, there was a growing problem: persistent and difficult contributors tend to drive away many better, more valuable contributors; Kemp and Tinkler were only two examples. There were many more who quietly came and quietly left. Short of removing the problem contributors altogetherwhich we did only in the very worst casesthere was no easy solution under the system as we had set it up. And I am sorry to have to admit that those aspects of the system that led to this problem were as much my responsibility as anyone else's. Obviously, I would not design the system the same way if given the chance again.
As a result, I grew both more protective of the project and increasingly sensitive to abuse of the system. As I tried to exercise what little authority I claimed, as a corrective to such abuse, many newer arrivals on the scene made great sport of challenging my authority. One of the earliest challenges happened in late summer 2001. The front page of Wikipediathen open to anyone to edit, like any other page on the projectwas occasionally vandalized with infantile graffiti. Someone then tried to make an archive of the vandalism that had been done to the front page of Wikipedia. I maintained that to make such an archive would be to encourage such vandalism, so I deleted the archive. This occasioned much debate. Then a user made the archive a subpage of his own user pageand user pages were generally held to be the bailiwick of the user. Consequently I deleted that subpage, which occasioned a further hue and cry that, perhaps, I was abusing my authority. The vandalism-enshrining user in question proceeded to create a "deleted pages" page, on which the deleted vandalism archives were listed, as if to accuse me of trying to act without public scrutinybut this was, of course, perfectly acceptable to me. At the time, I thought this controversy was just as silly as it will sound to most people reading this. I thought that I needed only to "put my foot down" a little harder and, as had happened for the first six months of the project, participants would fall into line. What I did not realize was that this was to be only the first in a long series of controversies. The ultimate upshot of these was to undermine my own moral authority over the project and to make the project as safe as possible for the most abusive and contentious contributors. Throughout this and other early controversies, much of the debate about project policy was conducted on the wiki itself. Other debates were conducted on mailing lists, Wikipedia-L[28] and then later for the English language project, WikiEN-L.[29] In addition, people had taken to putting their own essays on Wikipedia, as subpages of their user pages. These too were occasioning debate. It seemed to me, and many other contributors, that this debate was distracting the community from our main goal: to create an encyclopedia. Consequently I proposed[30] that we move the debate to another wiki that was to be created specifically for that purposewhat became known as the "meta-wiki."[31] This proposal was very widely supported, so we set it up.
As it happened, the meta-wiki became even more uncontrolled than Wikipedia itself, and for many months was continually infested with contributions by people that can only be called "trolls."[32] That epithet came to be discouraged, however, for reasons soon to be explained. The existence of trolls was a problem we felt we should tolerateand deal with only verbally, not with harsh penaltiesfor the sake of encouraging the broadest amount of participation. In the first years, only the worst trolls were expelled from the project. I do not know whether this policy has been changed as a result of the operation of the much-later installed Arbitration Committee.[33]
There are obvious reasons that the meta-wiki proved harder to control. First, it had no specific purpose, other than to host project debate and essays that do not belong on the main wikiwhich was not enough to make anyone care very much about it. Second, because many people did not care what happened on the meta-wiki, they did not do the very necessary weeding[34] that takes place on Wikipedia. Besides, as the meta-wiki was a repository of opinion, people felt less comfortable editing or deleting what was, after all, only opinion.
What happened was that project policy discussions moved almost exclusively to the project mailing lists.[35] There is a reason why this was a superior solution to having much debate on an uncontrolled, "unmoderated"[36] wiki. On a wiki, contributions exist in perpetuity, as it were, or until they are deleted or radically changed. Consequently, anyone new to a discussion sees the first contribution first. So, whoever starts a new page for discussion also, to a great extent, sets the tone and agenda of the discussion. Moreover, nasty, heated exchanges live on forever on a wiki, festering like an open wound, unless deliberately toned down afterward; if the same exchange takes place on a mailing list, it slips mercifully and quietly into the archives.
At about the same time that we decided to start the meta-wiki, and soon after the vandalism archive affair, I was thinking a great deal about Wikipedia's apparent anarchy, and I wrote an essay titled "Is Wikipedia an experiment in anarchy?"[37] This and the discussion that ensued tended to ossify positions with regard to the authority issue: I and a few others agreed that Jimmy and I should have special authority within the system, to settle policy issues that needed settling. Jimmy was relatively quiet about this issue. This was probably because his authority, unlike mine, was generally accepted. By November or December of 2001, Wikipedia was growing fast, and became the subject of regular news reporting, even by the likes of The New York Times and MIT's Technology Review. After the two major Slashdottings[38] earlier in the year, we knew that large influxes of members could change the nature of the project, and not necessarily for the better. If there were some major news coveragean evening news story in the U.S., for examplethere might be many new people who would need to be taught about Wikipedia's standards and positive cultural aspects. So, I proposed what I thought was a humorously named "Wikipedia Militia"[39] which would manage new (and very welcome) "invasions" by new contributors. By this time, however, there was a small core group of people who were constantly on the watch for anything that smacked the least bit of authoritarianism; consequently, the name, and various aspects of how the proposal was presented, was vigorously debated.[40] Eventually, we switched to "The Wikipedia Welcoming Committee" and finally, the "Volunteer Fire Department"[41]which eventually, it seems, fell into disuse.
20.5.1. The governance challengeAfter the September Slashdotting, I composed a page originally called "Our Replies to Our Critics"[42] (and now called "Replies to Common Objections"[43]), in which I addressed the problem that "cranks and partisans" might abuse the system:
This reflects the conception I had in September 2001 of Wikipedia's culture; the reply in the previous paragraph was as much hopeful and prescriptive as descriptive. But it turned out to be only partly true. As difficult users began to have more of a "run of the place," in late 2001 and 2002, opprobrium was in fact meted out only piecemeal and inconsistently. It seemed that participation in the community was becoming increasingly a struggle over principles, rather than a shared effort toward shared goals. Any attempt to enforce what should have been set policyneutrality, no original research, and no wholesale deletion without explanationwas frequently if not usually met with resistance. It was difficult to claim the moral high ground in a dispute, because the basic project principles were constantly coming under attack. Consequently, Wikipedia's environment was not cooperative but instead competitive, and the competition often concerned what sort of community Wikipedia should be: radically anarchical and uncontrolled, or instead more single-mindedly devoted to building an encyclopedia. Sadly, few among those who would love to work on Wikipedia could thrive in such a protean environment. It is one thing to lack any equivalent to "police" and "courts" that can quickly and effectively eliminate abuse; such enforcement systems were rarely entertained in Wikipedia's early years, because according to the wiki ideal, users can effectively police each other. It is another thing altogether to lack a community ethos that is unified in its commitment to its basic ideals so that the community's champions could claim a moral high ground. So, why was there no such unified community ethos and no uncontroversial "moral high ground"? I think it was a simple consequence of the fact that the community was to be largely self-organizing and to set its own policy by consensus. Any loud minority, even a persistent minority of one person, can remove the appearance of consensus. In fact, I recall that (in October 2002, after I resigned) I felt compelled by ongoing controversies to request[44] that Jimmy declare that certain policies were in fact nonnegotiable, which he did.[45] Unfortunately, this declaration was too little, too late.
By late 2001, I had gained both friends and detractors. I think I had become, within the project, a symbol of opposition to anarchism, of the enforcement of standards, and consequently of the exercise of authority in a radically open project. But I was still trying to manage the project as I always hadby force of personality and "moral" authority. So, when people arrived who clearly and openly disrespected established policy, I was, in my frustration, very short with them; and when the project continued to try to establish new policies, my role in articulating those policies and actually establishing them (attempting to express a "consensus") was challenged. This undermined what remaining moral authority I had. I felt my job was on the line, and the project continued in turmoil day in and day out. From my point of view, fires were spreading everywhere, and as I had become a somewhat controversial figure, I did not have enough allies to help me put them out. Consequently, I was too peremptory and short with some users. This, however, exacerbated the problem, because the attitude could not be backed up by punishment; harsh words from a leader are empty threats if unenforceable. I thereby handed my antiauthoritarian "wiki-anarchist" opponents an advantage, becauseironicallythey were able to portray me as dictatorial, when I was anything but. I came to the view, finally and belatedly, that it would be better to ignore the trolls. However, this is particularly hard to do on a wiki. Unlike on an email list, trollish contributions do not just disappear into the archives; they sit out in the open, as available as the first day they appeared and festering. Attempts to delete or radically edit such contributions were often met by reposting the earlier, problem version: the ability to do that is a necessary feature of collaboration. Persistent trolls could be a serious problem, particularly if they were able to draw a sympathetic audience. And there was often an audience of sympathizers: contributors who philosophically were opposed to nearly any exercise of authority, but who were not trolls themselves. It is ironic that it was I who initially supported the lack of any enforceable rules in the community. Some legal theorists would maintain that a community that lacks enforceable rules lacks any law at all. In retrospect, it is clear that there was a fundamental problem with my role in the system: to have real authority, I needed to be able to enforce the rules, and for both fairness and the perception of fairness, there needed to be clear rules from the beginning. But, by my own design, I had very early on rejected the label "editor in chief" and much real enforcement authority; a year into the game, it would have been difficult if not impossible to claim enforcement authority over active but problem users. Moreover, I was the author of the "ignore all rules" rule. My early rejection of any enforcement authority, my attempt to portray myself and behave as just another user who happened to have some special moral authority in the project, and my rejection of rulesthese were all clearly mistakes on my part. They did, I think, help the project get off the ground; but I really needed a subtler and more forward-looking understanding of how an extremely open, decentralized project might work. In retrospect, I wish I had taken Teddy Roosevelt's advice: "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Since my "stick" was very small, I suppose I felt compelled to "speak loudly," which I regret. As it turns out, it was Jimmy who spoke softly and carried the big stick; he first exercised "enforcement authority." Since he was relatively silent throughout these controversies, he was the "good cop," and I was the "bad cop": that, in fact, is precisely how he (privately) described our relationship. Eventually, I tired of this arrangement. Because Jimmy had kept a low profile in the early days of the project and showed that he was willing to exercise enforcement authority upon occasion, he was never as ripe for attack as I was. Perhaps the root cause of the governance problem was that we did not realize well enough that a community would form, nor did we think carefully about what this entailed. For months I denied that Wikipedia was a community, claiming that it was, instead, only an encyclopedia project, and that there should not be any serious governance problems if people would simply stick to the task of making an encyclopedia. This was wishful thinking. In fact, Wikipedia was from the beginning both a community and an encyclopedia project. And for a community attempting to achieve something, to be serious, effective, and fair, a charter seems necessary. In short, a collaborative community would do well to think of itself as a polity with everything that that entails: a representative legislative, a competent and fair judiciary, and an effective executive, all defined in advance by a charter. There are special requirements of nearly every serious community, however, best served by relevant experts; and so I think a prominent role for the relevant experts should be written into the charter. I would recommend all of this to anyone launching a serious online community. But indeed, in January 2001, we were in both "uncharted" and "unchartered" territory. The world, I think, will be able to benefit from this and our other initial mistakes. In fairness to ourselves, it was a good idea to allow the community to decide by experience and consensus what article content rules to endorse. This allowed us to generate a very sensible set of article content rules. Yet it was a mistake to apply the same thinking to the organization of the community itself. We should have acknowledged that a community would form, that it would have certain persistent and difficult issues that would need to be solved, and that a lack of any effective founding community charter might result in chaos. |
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