The Digital Divide

by Mark Bauerlein

  Wikipedia’s decision not to censor its content selectively in order to meet the demands of the Chinese government was easy, since it would be almost impossible to do, anyway. The “encyclopedia that anyone can edit” would have to employ a full-time staff just to remove objectionable content, which could be added back moments later by anyone, anywhere. The diffuse responsibility for the content of Wikipedia protects it from censorship.

  By leaving such a big decision to the community of Chinese Wikipedia users, Wales made good on his boast that he’s “a big supporter of federalism,” not just in politics but in the governance of Wikipedia. Wales tries to let communities of users make their own decisions in every possible case. “It’s not healthy for us if there are certain decisions that are simply removed from the democratic realm and are just ‘the Supreme Court says so,’ ” he argues. “I would even say this about abortion, although I’m a big pro-choice guy. It’s not clear to me that it’s such a great thing to have removed it completely from politics.”

  Politically, Wales cops to various libertarian positions but prefers to call his views “center-right.” By that he means that he sees himself as part of a silent majority of socially liberal, fiscally conservative people who value liberty—“people who vote Republican but who worry about right-wingers.” The Libertarian Party, he says, is full of “lunatics.” But even as he outlines all the reasons why he prefers to stay close to the American political mainstream, Wales delicately parses the various libertarian positions on intellectual property and other points of dispute without breaking a sweat. He swears to have actually read Ludwig von Mises’s ten-pound tome Human Action (which he ultimately found “bombastic and wrong in many ways”). And of course, he credits Hayek with the central insight that made Wikipedia possible.

  Wales’s political philosophy isn’t confined to books. Pulling onto yet another seemingly identical Florida highway during our daylong road trip, Wales blows past the Knight Shooting Sports Indoor Range, lamenting that he hasn’t made it to the range in a long time. “When I lived in San Diego,” he says, “the range was on my way home from work.” Wales used to be preoccupied with gun rights, or the lack thereof. “In California,” he says, “the gun laws irritated me so much that I cared, but then I moved to Florida and I stopped caring because everything is fine here.”

  Wales, whose wife Christine teaches their five-year-old daughter Kira at home, says he is disappointed by the “factory nature” of American education: “There’s something significantly broken about the whole concept of school.” A longtime opponent of mandatory public school attendance, Wales says that part of the allure of Florida, where his Wikimedia Foundation is based, is its relatively laissez-faire attitude toward homeschoolers. This makes it easier for Wales and his wife to let Kira (a tiny genius in her father’s eyes) follow her own interests and travel with her parents when Wales gives one of his many speeches abroad.

  Kira has recently become interested in Ancient Egypt, and a few books on the subject lie on the kitchen counter of their sparse house. When she was younger, Kira was transfixed by digital clocks, staring at one minute after minute, trying to guess which number would be next. “She just needed time to do that,” says Wales. “Once she figured it out, she stopped. Christine and I were a little worried, but we let her do her thing, and it turned out fine.”

  Likewise, Wales says he prefers the users of his encyclopedia to make their own decisions about governance and follow their own peculiar interests wherever possible; things usually turn out fine. “Simply having rules does not change the things that people want to do,” he says. “You have to change incentives.”

  One of the most powerful forces on Wikipedia is reputation. Users rarely identify themselves by their real names, but regular users maintain consistent identities. When a particularly obnoxious edit or egregious error is found, it’s easy to check all of the other changes made by the same user; you just click on his name. Users who catch others at misdeeds are praised, and frequent abusers are abused. Because it’s so easy to get caught in one stupid mistake or prank, every user has an incentive to do the best he can with each entry. The evolution of a praise/shame economy within Wikipedia has been far more effective at keeping most users in line than the addition of formal rules to deal with specific conflicts.

  “It’s always better not to have a rule,” Wales says. “But sometimes you have to say, ‘Don’t be a dick.’ ” On the English Wikipedia, there is a rule that you can’t undo someone else’s changes more than three times. It is formalized, a part of the system. But Wikipedias in other languages have a more casual approach to the same problem. Wales himself sometimes talks to troublemakers. “I try to talk jerks into adopting a three-revert rule as a principle for themselves,” he says.

  Wikipedias in different languages have developed their own policies about practically everything. Only one point is “not negotiable”: the maintenance of a “neutral point of view” in Wikipedia encyclopedia entries. Wikipedia has been uniquely successful in maintaining the neutrality ethos, says Wales, because “text is so flexible and fluid that you can find amongst reasonable people with different perspectives something that is functional.” (“Most people assume the fights are going to be the left vs. the right,” Wales has said, “but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.”)

  The jerks range from the Chinese government to the giant penis guy. But mostly they’re regular contributors who get upset about some hobbyhorse and have to be talked down or even shamed by their communities.

  Although he professes to hate phrases like “swarm intelligence” and “the wisdom of crowds,” Wales’s phenomenal success springs largely from his willingness to trust large aggregations of human beings to produce good outcomes through decentralized, marketlike mechanisms. He is suspicious of a priori planning and centralization, and he places a high value on freedom and independence for individuals. He is also suspicious of mob rule. Most Wikipedia entries, Wales notes, are actually written by two or three people, or reflect decisions made by small groups in the discussion forums on the site. Wales calls himself an “anti-credentialist” but adds that doesn’t mean he’s anti-elitist. He likes elites, he says; they just have to duke it out with the rest of us on Wikipedia and his other projects.

  “Jimmy Wales is a very open person,” says his friend Irene McGee, the host of the radio show No One’s Listening and a former Real World cast member. “He has very genuine intentions and faith in people. He’ll come to San Francisco and come to little Meetups that don’t have anything to do with anything, just to find out what’s going on. He’ll go to meet the kid in this town who writes articles and then meet with people who run countries. He can meet somebody really fancy and he could meet somebody who nobody would recognize and tell the story as if it’s the same.”

  >>> the individualist communitarian

  Rock star status can be fleeting, of course. Whether Jimmy Wales will still be meeting fancy people who run countries five years from now may depend on the success of his new venture, Wikia. Wikipedia is here to stay, but the public has an annoying habit of demanding that its heroes achieve ever more heroic feats. Wikia is an attempt to take the open-source, community-based model to profitability and broader public acceptance.

  Consider, for instance, the astonishing growth and readership at the Wikia site devoted to Muppets. At a little over one year old, the Muppet Wiki has 13,700 articles. Every single one is about Muppets. Interested in an in-depth look at the use of gorilla suits in the Muppet movies? No problem. Just type in “gorilla suits” and enjoy a well-illustrated article that documents, among other things, the names of actors who have worn an ape outfit for Jim Henson. There is a timeline of all things Muppet-related. An entry on China details Big Bird’s reception in the People’s Republic. The site is astonishingly comprehensive and, perhaps more impressive, comprehensible to a Muppet novice.

  This ever-expanding encyclopedia of Muppetry is just a tiny part of Wikia. It is an arguably t
rivial but hugely telling example of the power of open publishing systems to enable professionals and amateurs to work together to aggregate vast amounts of data and conversation on topics and areas ranging from the serious to the sublime. Founded in November 2004, Wikia communities use the same editing and writing structure as Wikipedia. The site provides free bandwidth, storage, blogging software, and other tools to anyone who wants to start an online community or collaborative project. If you don’t care for Kermit the Frog, you can try the Your Subculture Soundtrack, an “interconnecting database of the music scene” with more than 5,600 articles. Many of them are just enormous lists of discographies, lyrics, or guitar tabs. The topics of other Wikis range from Star Wars to polyamory to transhumanism. Wikia also includes collaborative online projects such as the Search Wiki, an effort to create an open-source competitor to Google where a Wikipedia-style universe of users rates websites and sorts the search results instead of relying solely on an algorithm.

  In December, Wikia announced that its first corporate partner, Amazon, had committed $10 million to further development of the project. Amazon’s money added to the $4 million kicked in by angel investors earlier in the year. Amazon and Wikia have not integrated their services, but Wales has not ruled out the possibility of cooperation at a later date, spurring not entirely tongue-in-cheek rumors of a joint Wikipedia-Amazon takeover of the Web. The site plans to make money by showing a few well-targeted, well-placed ads to massive numbers of community members and users.

  Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (a supporter of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine) has spoken enviously of Wikipedia’s collaborative model, expressed his regret that Amazon’s user reviews aren’t more like wikis, and credited Wikipedia with having “cracked the code for user-generated content.” Bezos “really drove this deal personally,” Wales says, adding that he was in the enviable position of vetting potential investors.

  Wales is reluctant to get into more precise detail about what exactly Wikia will do, or what the communities or collaborative projects will produce, since that will be up to the users. This reticence turns out to be, in part, philosophical. Wikia is radically devoted to the idea that if you provide free, flexible tools, people will build interesting things. It’s the same concept that drives Wikipedia, but expanded to nonencyclopedic functions. Like the rest of the cohort sometimes dubbed “Web 2.0”—YouTube, MySpace, Blogger, and other services that emphasize collaboration and user-generated content—Wales is relying on users to make his sites interesting. It isn’t always easy to explain this to investors. “Before Wikipedia, the idea of an encyclopedia on a wiki seemed completely insane,” says Wales. “It’s obvious that it works now, but at the time no one was sure. Now we’re going through the same moment with Wikia.”

  Perhaps because of the indeterminate nature of the final product, Wales has opted for the ’90s approach of “build the site now, make money later.” Industry analyst Peter Cohan thinks Wikia isn’t likely to fall into the same trap as the busted Internet companies of the dot-com era. “Wikia is getting two and a half million page views a day,” he says, “and it’s growing steadily. There are people who are willing to pay for those eyeballs.” (It has been growing at about the same rate as Wikipedia did at this stage of its development.) Still, says Cohan, there will be some hurdles for Wales, who is known only for his nonprofit work. “When you bring money into the picture it might change the incentives for people to participate in this thing,” he says. “When people know that there is no money involved, then ego gets involved and it’s a matter of pride.”

  Wales is banking on strong communities to give Wikia the staying power that flash-in-the-pan Internet sensations or more loosely knit social networking sites lack. Wales is plugged into social networking sites (and has more than a few online friends/fans), but he says he finds the exhibitionism and technical precocity of MySpace somewhat creepy.

  It might sound strange, but Wales’s interest in community dovetails nicely with his interest in individualism. No one is born into the Muppet Wiki community. Everyone who is there chooses to be there, and everyone who participates has a chance to shape its rules and content. People naturally form communities with their own delicate etiquette and expectations, and they jealously guard their own protocols. Each one is different, making Wikia communities fertile ground where thousands of experimental social arrangements can be tried—some with millions of members and some with just two or three. Like the “framework for utopia” described in the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Wikia maximizes the chance that people can work together to get exactly what they want, while still being part of a meaningful community by maximizing freedom and opportunities for voluntary cooperation.

  Wikia boosters contend that many existing online communities would benefit from the kind of curb appeal a wiki offers. The firm hopes to co-opt, buy, or duplicate them. Wikia CEO Gil Penchina, formerly of eBay, is a frequent-flier-miles enthusiast, for example. But most of the sites now haunted by airfare obsessives deal in nitty-gritty details and are useless to the outsider hoping to figure out the best way to get a free ticket by gaming various frequent-flier plans, or by finding fares listed erroneously as $3.75 instead of $375. “This makes it hard to monetize that content,” says Wales. “People just come and look around and don’t find what they want and leave.” Incorporating those same geeks into a wiki community could make their considerable knowledge available to outsiders and make the page more welcoming to advertisers. If lots of outsiders looking for a good price on a specific product can use the site, advertisers will compete (and pay) to grab their attention.

  For now, Wikia makes money solely from Google ads running on its community pages. Wales says this is because they’re “lazy” and because Google ads are a good way to generate a little revenue while they “build communities.” Since its 2004 launch, Wikia has spent exactly $5.74 on advertising—a small fee for Google analytics to track stats on the site. “That makes our ad budget about 25 cents per month,” Wales grins. It’s early yet to expect a big push to generate revenue, but this charming laziness could be troublesome if it persists much longer.

  Wikia now has forty employees, including a handful of Polish programmers—a huge staff compared with the three people it takes to run Wikipedia. With 500,000 articles on 2,000 topics produced by 60,000 registered users in forty-five languages, the network of websites is growing fast. The biggest wikis are dedicated to Star Trek and Star Wars. Wales is partial to the wiki devoted to the TV show Lost. He also admires the Campaign Wiki, which among other projects has neutral voter guides for elections.

  Even as Wikia relies on Google ads for its only revenue at the moment, Wales recently has started to talk publicly about building a search engine using open-source tools, a project Wales casually calls “The Google Killer.” Wales hopes the transparency and flexibility of an open-source model will discourage the gaming of the system that plagues Google. A search for “hotels in Tampa” on Google, a search I tried before my trip into town to interview Wales, yields nothing useful, just a jumble of defunct ratings sites and some ads that aren’t tailored to my needs. By using a community of volunteers who will rerank results and tweak algorithms, Wales hopes to get useful results in categories that are particularly subject to gaming.

  >>> the pathological optimist

  Later that December afternoon, after an excellent Indian lunch in a Florida strip mall, Wales proposes that we hop back into the Hyundai for a stop at the “fancy mall” in the Tampa area. En route to the Apple store, he surveys the bright lights and luxury goods for sale and announces that he is generally pretty pleased with how things are going in the world. In fact, he calls himself a “pathological optimist.” On issue after issue, he pronounces some version of “things aren’t that bad” or “things are getting better.” People are more connected than they used to be (thanks, in part, to Internet communities), the wide availability of ethnic food has made the America
n diet more interesting, bookstore mega-chains are increasing the diversity of media available in America, entertainment is increasing in quality, gun rights are expanding, and so on. Tempted to get involved with free-speech activists, Wales, a self-declared “First Amendment extremist,” says he drew back because real repression doesn’t seem likely. “There’s a lot of hysteria around this,” he says—concerns about censorship that aren’t supported by the facts.

  Wales is optimistic about the Internet, too. “There’s a certain kind of dire anti-market person,” he says, “who assumes that no matter what happens, it’s all driving toward one monopoly—the ominous view that all of these companies are going to consolidate into the Matrix.” His own view is that radical decentralization will win out, to good effect: “If everybody has a gigabit [broadband Internet connection] to their home as their basic $40-a-month connection, anybody can write Wikipedia.”

  Wales’s optimism isn’t without perspective. After reading Tom Standage’s book about the impact of the telegraph, The Victorian Internet, he was “struck by how much of the semi-utopian rhetoric that comes out of people like me sounds just like what people like them said back then.”

  Among Wikipedians, there is constant squabbling about how to characterize Wales’s role in the project. He is often called a “benevolent dictator,” or a “God-King,” or sometimes a “tyrant.” While the 200,000 mere mortals who have contributed articles and edits to the site are circumscribed by rules and elaborate community-enforced norms, Wales has amorphous and wide-ranging powers to block users, delete pages, and lock entries outside of the usual processes. But if Wales is a god, he is like the gods of ancient times (though his is a flat, suburban Olympus), periodically making his presence and preferences known through interventions large and small, but primarily leaving the world he created to chug along according to rules of its own devising.