by Clay Shirky
One of the extreme defensive strategies for Wikipedia is the ability to lock a page, preventing all but a few of the most committed Wikipedians from editing it until passions have cooled. (Pages can be locked in the face of sustained vandalism as well, but at any given time less than half a percent of pages are locked.) In addition there have been crises of validity: in 2005 the journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr., discovered that he had a biography on Wikipedia and that it contained scurrilous and false accusations about his involvement in the Kennedy assassinations. The entry was then fixed, but by that time the false material had been in place for half a year, so much of the damage had been done. Then in 2006 a longtime Wikipedian going by essjay claimed, among other things, that he had a doctorate in theology and worked as a tenured professor at a private university. In fact, he had dropped out of a community college and had no degree or academic job of any sort. Both of these events demonstrated weaknesses in Wikipedia’s methods, and in the aftermath of each one the Wikimedia foundation instituted new rules, including special proposals for handling biographies of the living, as well as restricting the ability of unregistered users to create articles from scratch.
The locking of pages and the restrictions put in place after the Seigenthaler and essjay affairs contrast with Wikipedia’s general goal of openness. The Wikipedians are acutely aware of this conflict and as a result the design philosophy hews to Cunningham’s original work: let the community do as much as they possibly can, but where they can’t do the work on their own, add technological fixes. Wikipedia is predicated on openness not as a theoretical way of working but as a practical one. This pragmatism often comes as a shock to people who hold up Wikipedia as a beacon of pure openness, but the curious fact is that many of Wikipedia’s most vociferous boosters actually don’t know much about its inner workings and want to regard it, wrongly, as an experiment in communal anarchy. The people most enamored of describing Wikipedia as the product of a free-form hive mind don’t understand how Wikipedia actually works. It is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation. The articles grow not from harmonious thought but from constant scrutiny and emendation.
The idea behind Nupedia was that it should be possible to improve on traditional encyclopedias by keeping the process but dropping the commercial aspect. This turned out to be a bad idea, because much of the process for creating a traditional encyclopedia has less do with encyclopedias than with institutional imperatives. Once you dispense with the institutional dilemma, as Wikipedia does, it is possible to dispense with much institutional process as well. Wikipedia invites us to do the following disorienting math: a chaotic process, with unpredictable and wildly uneven contributions, made by nonexpert contributors acting out of variable motivations, is creating a global resource of tremendous daily value. A commercial producer of encyclopedias has to be efficient about finding and fixing mistakes, since things like process and deadlines and salaries are involved. Wikipedia, with none of those things, does not have to be efficient—it merely has to be effective. If enough people see an article, the chance that an error will be caught and fixed improves with time. Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process: if enough people care enough about an article to read it, then enough people will care enough to improve it, and over time this will lead to a large enough body of good enough work to begin to take both availability and quality of articles for granted, and to integrate Wikipedia into daily use by millions.
Love as a Renewable Building Material
The Ise Shrine, a Shinto shrine in Ise, Japan, has occupied its current site for over thirteen hundred years. Despite its advanced age, however, UNESCO, the UN cultural agency, refused to list the shrine in its list of historic places. Why? Because the shrine is made out of wood, never a material prized for millennium-scale structural integrity, and so it can’t be thirteen hundred years old. The Imbe priests who keep the shrine know that too, but they have a solution. They periodically tear the shrine to the ground, and then, using wood cut from the same forest that the original was built from, they rebuild the shrine to the same plan, on an adjacent spot. They do this every couple of decades and have done it sixty-one times in a row. (The next rebuilding will be in 2013.) Because the purpose of the shrine is in part to delineate the difference between sacred and ordinary space, from their point of view they have a thirteen-hundred-year old shrine, built out of renewable materials. This argument didn’t wash with UNESCO; the places they list enjoy the solidity of edifice, not of process. A wrecked castle that has stood unused for five hundred years makes the cut; a shrine that is rebuilt once a generation for a thousand years doesn’t.
Wikipedia is a Shinto shrine; it exists not as an edifice but as an act of love. Like the Ise Shrine, Wikipedia exists because enough people love it and, more important, love one another in its context. This does not mean that the people constructing it always agree, but loving someone doesn’t preclude arguing with them (as your own experience will doubtless confirm). What love does for Wikipedia is provide the motivation both for improvement and for defense. If the company that makes Encyclopaedia Britannica were to go out of business tomorrow, its core product would slowly decay as new knowledge was accrued without being reflected in subsequent editions. This concept, sometimes called the half-life of knowledge (in metaphorical comparison to radioactive decay), would render Britannica obsolete as the years wore on. If the people who love Wikipedia all lost interest at the same time, on the other hand, it would vanish almost instantly. The vandals and special interest groups who are constantly fighting to alter articles fail only because people care about Wikipedia, both article by article and as a whole, and because Wikipedia as a tool provides them with the weapons to fight those groups. Those weapons are taken up only by people who are willing to fight. Were that willingness to fade, the most contentious articles on Wikipedia, the articles on abortion and Islam and evolution, would be gone within hours, and it’s unlikely that the whole enterprise would survive a week.
We don’t often talk about love when trying to describe the public world, because love seems too squishy and too private. What has happened, though, and what is still happening in our historical moment, is that love has become a lot less squishy and a lot less private. Love has a half-life too, as well as a radius, and we’re used to both of those being small. We can affect the people we love, but the longevity and social distance of love are both constrained. Or were constrained—now we can do things for strangers who do things for us, at a low enough cost to make that kind of behavior attractive, and those effects can last well beyond our original contribution. Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material. When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love.
CHAPTER 6
COLLECTIVE ACTION AND INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES
Collective action, where a group acts as a whole, is even more complex than collaborative production, but here again new tools give life to new forms of action. This in turn challenges existing institutions, by eroding the institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination.
At the beginning of 2002 the Boston Globe published a two-part series detailing the history of Father John Geoghan, a Catholic priest. Geoghan had worked at various parishes in the Boston archdiocese since the 1960s and during that time had fondled or raped more than a hundred boys. The Globe reporters reviewed documents the church had been forced to submit for the Geoghan case, which revealed accusations against him dating back to the 1960s. The church’s response had been to move him from parish to parish, sometimes with therapeutic stints in between. If these treatments helped, their effect was temporary; the abuse continued over a thirty-five-year period. Cardinal Bernard F. Law, then archbishop of the Boston Diocese, had known about Geoghan’s problems as early as 1984 but continued the pattern of periodic relocation; Geoghan w
as not removed from the priesthood until 1998.
The Globe story ignited a firestorm of controversy among a shocked Catholic laity. A few weeks after the Globe articles appeared, a physician named James Muller hosted a gathering for those determined to channel their shock and anger into some sort of productive change. The group met for the first time on a freezing January night in the basement of a church in the Boston suburb of Wellesley; thirty people showed up. The impetus for the original meeting was to react somehow to the horror of the priestly abuse and the bishops’ failures in handling it, but in talking it over that night, the assembled members of the laity decided to pursue a more coordinated strategy of activism, and a group called Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) was born.
There was nothing terribly new about the founding of VOTF. Small groups of concerned citizens have been meeting in church basements and public libraries for a long time, and Muller, the founder, was no stranger to organizing, having helped found International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in the 1980s. VOTF’s growth, though, was new. After just two months in existence VOTF meetings were attracting large crowds. Muller later wrote of a March meeting, “I was unable to park within four blocks as more than five hundred people overflowed our small meeting rooms.” By the summer of 2002, when VOTF held its first convention, it had 25,000 members, four thousand of whom came to Boston to attend. The organization’s growth was also international: VOTF had members in more than twenty countries in its first year of existence. It’s difficult to convey what a torrid pace of growth this is—to go from thirty people in a church basement to 25,000 is almost a thousandfold increase. To do so in half a year meant doubling the size of the organization every couple of weeks. Groups don’t grow that fast for any sustained period, or rather they didn’t until the barriers to that kind of growth were removed.
VOTF adopted a slogan—“Keep the Faith, Change the Church”—that made it clear that they were not going to be content with expressing simple outrage. They wanted structural change. The boldness of their demands left the church unsure how to react. By April, when it became clear that VOTF was still gaining members, Cardinal Law asked Bishop Walter J. Edyvean, one of his deputies, to arrange a meeting. It did not go well. During that meeting Edyvean said he and Law had “issues” with VOTF and admitted under repeated questioning to having tried to block VOTF meetings from taking place on church property. VOTF members were shocked by the completeness of the opposition, but at the end of the meeting, in the spirit of comity, they agreed to issue a joint statement saying they had had a productive meeting. That was the high-water mark of cordiality between the two groups.
After the meeting came public pronouncements from the church. Edyvean declared that no parish was to allow VOTF to meet on church property, and that any valid lay organization had to operate “exclusively within the parish where it has been established” and be “presided over by the pastor of that parish.” The church’s position was that even the laity were contained by the church’s hierarchical structure; there was to be no lay conversation across parish lines whatsoever. As the year wound down and the scandal did not, there were increasingly broad and public calls for Law to step down. Law refused to consider either engagement with VOTF or resignation from the archdiocese, but his objections proved ineffective on both counts. On November 26, after almost a year of steadfast refusal, Law had his first meeting with VOTF. The meeting was cordial but inconclusive; both sides again said they hoped for a constructive outcome to the dialogue. What no one but perhaps Law knew was that this first meeting would also be his last. He traveled to Rome to offer his resignation to Pope John Paul II, who accepted it on December 13.
Why 2002? What Changed?
It is understandable that Law resigned, and that the church began to take steps, if halting ones, to publicly reform itself. The bishops had not merely sheltered abusive priests; they had done so in a way that endangered still more of their parishioners. What is not as clear is “Why then?” Given that much of the reported abuse was in the 1960s and 1970s, why was 2002 the year that scandal rocked the church? There are three obvious answers: the abuse had become too extensive to ignore, the existence of abusive priests had become public in a court of law, and a particularly horrific case was getting serious media coverage. The interesting thing about those answers is that none of them really hold water.
In May 1992, a decade before the Geoghan case, another Catholic priest, the Reverend James R. Porter, was accused of sexual abuse of children in three different Boston parishes. (Ninety-nine people eventually came forward with accusations against Porter.) Like Geoghan, Porter had been quietly moved from one parish to the next. The Boston Globe covered that case as well, and Bernard Law, then the local bishop, criticized the coverage as unfair and, from the pulpit, called for divine retribution saying, “By all means we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.” (Law’s prayer was not answered: the Globe went on to publish more than fifty stories and editorials on the Porter case and on priestly abuse in general in that year.)
In 1992 the Porter case offered the same raw material for outraged reaction, in the same diocese, with many of the same actors as the Geoghan case a decade later: horrific abuse had become public in a court of law, accompanied by a flurry of media coverage. Nonetheless in 1992 the outrage dissipated with little change in the church’s behavior in Massachusetts or nationally, no official reaction from the Vatican, no coordinated calls by the laity for Law’s resignation, and no resignation. Law may have been sanguine about refusing to resign in 2002 because he’d been through an eerily similar set of events a decade earlier, and the crisis had abated.
The church’s strategy for both the Porter and the Geoghan cases was to treat the matter as an internal affair; an individual parish might be scandalized for a short period, but with no victims talking and little public record, the sense of scandal could neither spread nor last. In this way the church could avoid major and synchronized outrage. This was a strategy not for ending the abuse but for managing the fallout. Something happened between the Porter case in 1992 and the Geoghan case in 2002, something that destroyed the effectiveness of the church’s strategy. In 1992 Law relied on two facts: ordinary Catholics couldn’t easily share information about the scandal with one another, and they couldn’t readily coordinate their response. By 2002 those two facts had ceased to be facts.
New Forms of Sharing Take Hold
The old limits on sharing information were the first thing to change. This change is essential, and not just for the abuse scandal. The impulse to share important information is a basic one, but its manifestations have often been clunky. Consider the Globe’s story on Porter in 1992—even the seemingly minor difficulties of clipping and mailing a newspaper article were significant enough to greatly limit the frequency of that kind of forwarding. The cumulative effects of those difficulties were even stronger—to clip an article and share it with a group, you would have to copy it first, adding a step and thus reducing the attractiveness of sending it in the first place. Similarly, the recipient of a mailed clipping can’t both forward it and keep it without reincurring all the difficulties of the original sender. As a result of these difficulties, the readership for any given newspaper story was a subset of the readership for the paper generally.
By 2002 those difficulties had vanished. The Globe was online in the form of Boston.com, its readers had e-mail, and some even had weblogs. The act of forwarding a story to friends and colleagues had gone from tedious to all but effortless. Even more important, forwarding the story to a group was as easy as forwarding it to an individual, and any of the recipients could forward it to others as easily as the original sender had done. Whereas a newspaper relies on an asymmetry of production versus consumption—readers don’t own printing presses—any recipient of e-mail can also be a sender, by definition. Now the readership for a particular story can be larger than the paper’s general audience, as with the Geoghan case or the Times-Picayune’
s coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
The social urge to share information isn’t new. Prior to e-mail and weblogs, we clipped articles and published family newsletters. Recalling these older behaviors, it’s tempting to conclude that our new tools are merely improvements on existing behaviors; this view is both right and wrong. The improvement is there, but it is an improvement so profound that it creates new effects. Philosophers sometimes make a distinction between a difference in degree (more of the same) and a difference in kind (something new). What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. Prior to e-mail and the Web, we could still forward and comment on the news of the day, but the process was beset by numerous small difficulties. The economic effects of even seemingly insignificant hurdles are counterintuitive but remarkable: even the minimal hassle involved in sending a newspaper clipping to a group (xeroxing the article, finding envelopes and stamps, writing addresses) widens the gap between intention and action.
