Section 20.6. My Resignation and Final Few Months with the Project
20.6. My Resignation and Final Few Months with the ProjectThroughout the governance controversy, I was preparing for my wedding, which took place December 1, 2001. A few days after I arrived back from my honeymoon, I was informed that I should probably start looking for another job, because Bomis had to lay off most of its workers. Bomis had 10 to 12 workers at the end of 2000, and by the beginning of 2002 it was back to its original 4 to 5. My salary was reduced in December and then halved in January. This seemed inevitable because Wikipedia was not bringing in any money at all for Bomis, even if Wikipedia was becoming even more of a publicly recognized, if still modest success. Our first anniversary came just before we announced having 20,000 articles, and I was invited to talk about the project at Stanford[46] on January 16.
I was officially laid off at the beginning of February, which I announced a few weeks later.[47] I had continued on as a volunteer; Wikipedia and Nupedia were, after all, volunteer projects. But I was laboring in the aftermath of the governance controversies of the previous fall and winter, which promised to make the job of a volunteer project leader even more difficult. Moreover, I had to look for a real job. So, throughout the month of February, I considered resigning altogether.
Jimmy had told me the previous December that Bomis would start trying to sell ads on Wikipedia to pay for my job. Even in that horrible market for Internet advertising, there were already enough page views on Wikipedia that advertising proceeds might have provided me a very meager living. We knew that this would be extremely controversial, because so many of the people who are involved in open source and open content projects absolutely hate the idea of advertising on the web pages of free projects, even to support project organizers. In fact, when this advertising plan was announced, in late February of 2002, the Spanish Wikipedia[48] was forked[49] (something I urged them not to do[50]).
Bomis was not successful in selling any ads for Wikipedia anywayearly 2002 was the very bottom of the market for Internet advertising. I also had some hope that we might, finally, set up the project's managing nonprofit, which we had discussed doing for a long time (and which eventually did come into being: Wikimedia[51]). The job of setting up the nonprofit was left to me, but ongoing controversies seemed to eat up any time I had for Wikipedia, and frankly I had no idea where to begin. So, after a month without pay, I announced my general resignation;[52] I completely stayed away from the project for a few months.
Wikipedia's offshoot projectsa dictionary, a textbook project, a quotation project, a public domain book repository, etc.were all started in 2002 or later, and I cannot claim any credit for them. In the spring, a controversy erupted. Caring as I didand as I still doabout the future of free encyclopedias, I felt compelled to get involved. The controversy featured a troll who was putting up huge numbers of screeds on the meta-wiki and on Wikipedia as well. The controversy began with a discussion of what to do about, and how to react to, this particular troll. I maintained that one should not "feed the troll," and that the troll should be "outed" (it was an anonymous user, but it was not hard to use Google to determine the identity of the troll) and shamed. There resulted a broader controversy about how to treat problem users generally. There were, as I recall, two main schools of thought. One, to which I adhered and still adhere, was that bona fide trolls should be "named and shamed" and, if they were unresponsive to shaming, they should be removed from the project (by a fair process) sooner rather than later. We held that a collaborative project requires commitment to ethical standards which areas all ethical standards ultimately aresocially established by pointing out violations of those standards. Hence naming and shaming. A second school of thought held that all Wikipedia contributors, even the most difficult, should be treated respectfully and with so-called WikiLove.[53] Hence trolls were not to be identified as such (since "troll" is a term of abuse), and were to be removed from the project only after a long (and painful) public discussion. I felt at the time that the prevalence of the second school entailed rejection of both objective standards and rules-based authority. It is impossible to explain why one is removing some partisan screeds from the wiki without, in some way, identifying it as a partisan screed, and pointing out that such productions are inconsistent with the neutrality policy. This will necessarily be received as less than respectful and "loving," especially if one must engage the troll himself in a long, drawn-out dispute. In a very long dispute with any trollish type, it is only a matter of time before some epithet gets bandied about. More generally, the very application of rules, or laws, entails a moral judgment, or what for its effectiveness must have the force of a moral judgment. I suppose I agree with those legal theorists who say that there is necessarily, in its core, a moral component to the law. Consequently, the new policy of "WikiLove" handed trolls and other difficult users a very effective weapon for purposes of combating those who attempted to enforce rules. After all, any forthright declaration that a user is doing something that is clearly against established conventionsposting screeds, falsehoods, nonsense, personal opinion, etc.is nearly always going to appear disrespectful, because such a declaration involves a moral accusation. The result is that, on pain of becoming persona non grata in the community, one had to treat brazen, self-conscious violators of basic policy with particular respect. It was a perfect coup for the resident wiki anarchists. I again left the project for several months.
In fall of 2002, I had started teaching at a local community college, and with some extra time on my hands, I started editing Wikipedia a little and engaging in mailing list discussions. I think my first new post to Wikipedia-L, from September 1, 2002, was "Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be more like the free software movement."[54] In it I argued that the free software movement is led and dominated by highly qualified programmers, and that the "free encyclopedia movement"that is, Wikipedia, Nupedia, and other newer projectsneeds to move in that direction. I suggested that Nupedia be redesigned to release "approved" versions of Wikipedia articles; Wikipedia itself was not to be touched. This proposal met with a very cool reception. After a few months of discussion, Jimmy himself was "intending to revive Nupedia in the near future"[55] and "thinking very much along the lines of what is being discussed here." Unfortunately, this never happened.
By December, I proposed, and Magnus Manske very helpfully coded, an expert-controlled approval process for Wikipedia that was in fact to be independent of both Nupedia and Wikipedia.[56] It would not have affected the Wikipedia editorial process. It would have lived in a separate namespace or domain, as an independent add-on project for Wikipedia. Without explaining the details, expert reviewers, the recruitment of which I would organize, would examine Wikipedia articles and approve or disapprove of particular versions of those articles. We set up a mailing list, Sifter-L (archives no longer online, apparently), which for several weeks discussed policy issues.
There was not a great deal of support for the proposal on Wikipedia-L. There was little or no excitement that the new project might bring into Wikipedia a fresh crop of subject area specialists. But that was fine as far as I was concerned, since the project was to operate independently of Wikipedia. Still, I had the very distinct sense that any specialists arriving on the scene would not necessarily be met with open armsparticularly if before approving an article they wished to make whatever changes to articles that they felt necessary. There were even a few Wikipedians who made it clear that experts should not expect to be treated any differently than anyone else, even when writing about their areas of expertise. I then considered whether the interaction between Wikipedians and the new reviewers might be a problem after all. Surely, I thought, most specialists would want to edit even very good articles before approving them (in the independent system). This would require that the reviewers interact with Wikipedians. Wikipedia's culture had become such that disrespect of expertise was tolerated, and, again, trolls were merely warned, but very politely (in keeping with the policy of WikiLove), that they please ought to stop their inflammatory behavior. Trolls would certainly find ripe targets in expert reviewers, I thought. I recalled that patient, well-educated Wikipedians like J. Hoffmann Kemp and Michael Tinkler had been driven off the project not only by trolls but also by some of the more abrasive and disrespectful regulars. I then considered: could I in good conscience really ask academics, who are very busy, to engage in this activity that would probably annoy most of them and do nothing to contribute to their academic careers? Recruiting for Nupedia had been easy by comparison and caused me no such pangs of conscience. I believe it was this problem that finally prompted me in January of 2003 to inform Jimmy by private email that I was breaking with the project altogether; the only way he could prevent this, I told him, was that he personally crack down on problem users, and make the project more officially welcoming to experts. I also told him that I did not expect this information to change his mind, and that I did not mean to issue an ultimatum. And in fact our exchange did not change his mind. I concluded that we had a fundamental philosophical disagreement about how the project should be run. I respected and still respect his view. That is where matters ended, and it was then that I broke with Wikipedia altogether. |
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