Content by Cory Doctorow (good non fiction books to read .txt) đ
- Author: Cory Doctorow
- Performer: 1892391813
Book online «Content by Cory Doctorow (good non fiction books to read .txt) đ». Author Cory Doctorow
Hence Slashdot, a system of distributed slushreading. Rather than professionalizing the editorship role, Slashdot invites contributors to identify good stuff when they see it, turning editorship into a reward for good behavior.
But as well as Slashdot works, it has this signal failing: nearly every conversation that takes place on Slashdot is shot through with discussion, griping and gaming on the moderation system itself. The core task of Slashdot has become editorship, not the putative subjects of Slashdot posts. The fact that the central task of Slashdot is to rate other Slashdotters creates a tenor of meanness in the discussion. Imagine if the subtext of every discussion you had in the real world was a kind of running, pedantic nitpickery in which every point was explicitly weighed and judged and commented upon. Youâd be an unpleasant, unlikable jerk, the kind of person that is sometimes referred to as a âslashdork.â
As radical as Yahoo!âs conceit was, Slashdotâs was more radical. But as radical as Slashdotâs is, it is still inherently conservative in that it presumes that editorship is necessary, and that it further requires human judgment and intervention.
Googleâs a lot more radical. Instead of editors, it has an algorithm. Not the kind of algorithm that dominated the early search engines like Altavista, in which laughably bad artificial intelligence engines attempted to automatically understand the content, context and value of every page on the Web so that a search for âDogâ would turn up the page more relevant to the query.
Googleâs algorithm is predicated on the idea that people are good at understanding things and computers are good at counting things. Google counts up all the links on the Web and affords more authority to those pages that have been linked to by the most other pages. The rationale is that if a page has been linked to by many web-authors, then they must have seen some merit in that page. This system works remarkably well â so well that itâs nearly inconceivable that any search-engine would order its rankings by any other means. Whatâs more, it doesnât pervert the tenor of the discussions and pages that it catalogs by turning each one into a performance for a group of ranking peers. [fn: Or at least, it didnât. Today, dedicated web-writers, such as bloggers, are keenly aware of the way that Google will interpret their choices about linking and page-structure. One popular sport is âgooglebombing,â in which web-writers collude to link to a given page using a humorous keyword so that the page becomes the top result for that word â which is why, for a time, the top result for âmore evil than Satanâ was Microsoft.com. Likewise, the practice of âblogspamming,â in which unscrupulous spammers post links to their webpages in the message boards on various blogs, so that Google will be tricked into thinking that a wide variety of sites have conferred some authority onto their penis-enlargement page.]
But even Google is conservative in assuming that there is a need for editorship as distinct from composition. Is there a way we can dispense with editorship altogether and just use composition to refine our ideas? Can we merge composition and editorship into a single role, fusing our creative and critical selves?
You betcha.
âWikisâ [fn: Hawaiâian for âfastâ] are websites that can be edited by anyone. They were invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995, and they have become one of the dominant tools for Internet collaboration in the present day. Indeed, there is a sort of Internet geek who throws up a Wiki in the same way that ants make anthills: reflexively, unconsciously.
Hereâs how a Wiki works. You put up a page:
Welcome to my Wiki. It is rad.
There are OtherWikis that inspired me.
Click âpublishâ and bam, the page is live. The word âOtherWikisâ will be underlined, having automatically been turned into a link to a blank page titled âOtherWikisâ (Wiki software recognizes words with capital letters in the middle of them as links to other pages. Wiki people call this âcamel-case,â because the capital letters in the middle of words make them look like humped camels.) At the bottom of it appears this legend: âEdit this page.â
Click on âEdit this pageâ and the text appears in an editable field. Revise the text to your heartâs content and click âPublishâ and your revisions are live. Anyone who visits a Wiki can edit any of its pages, adding to it, improving on it, adding camel-cased links to new subjects, or even defacing or deleting it.
It is authorship without editorship. Or authorship fused with editorship. Whichever, it works, though it requires effort. The Internet, like all human places and things, is fraught with spoilers and vandals who deface whatever they can. Wiki pages are routinely replaced with obscenities, with links to spammersâ websites, with junk and crap and flames.
But Wikis have self-defense mechanisms, too. Anyone can âsubscribeâ to a Wiki page, and be notified when it is updated. Those who create Wiki pages generally opt to act as âgardenersâ for them, ensuring that they are on hand to undo the work of the spoilers.
In this labor, they are aided by another useful Wiki feature: the âhistoryâ link. Every change to every Wiki page is logged and recorded. Anyone can page back through every revision, and anyone can revert the current version to a previous one. That means that vandalism only lasts as long as it takes for a gardener to come by and, with one or two clicks, set things to right.
This is a powerful and wildly successful model for collaboration, and there is no better example of this than the Wikipedia, a free, Wiki-based encyclopedia with more than one million entries, which has been translated into 198 languages [fn: That is, one or more Wikipedia entries have been translated into 198 languages; more than 15 languages have 10,000 or more entries translated]
Wikipedia is built entirely out of Wiki pages created by self-appointed experts. Contributors research and write up subjects, or produce articles on subjects that they are familiar with.
This is authorship, but what of editorship? For if there is one thing a Guide or an encyclopedia must have, it is authority. It must be vetted by trustworthy, neutral parties, who present something that is either The Truth or simply A Truth, but truth nevertheless.
The Wikipedia has its skeptics. Al Fasoldt, a writer for the Syracuse Post-Standard, apologized to his readers for having recommended that they consult Wikipedia. A reader of his, a librarian, wrote in and told him that his recommendation had been irresponsible, for Wikipedia articles are often defaced or worse still, rewritten with incorrect information. When another journalist from the Techdirt website wrote to Fasoldt to correct this impression, Fasoldt responded with an increasingly patronizing and hysterical series of messages in which he described Wikipedia as âoutrageous,â ârepugnantâ and âdangerous,â insulting the Techdirt writer and storming off in a huff. [fn: see http://techdirt.com/articles/20040827/0132238[underscore]F.shtml for more]
Spurred on by this exchange, many of Wikipediaâs supporters decided to empirically investigate the accuracy and resilience of the system. Alex Halavais made changes to 13 different pages, ranging from obvious to subtle. Every single change was found and corrected within hours. [fn: see http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=794 for more] Then legendary Princeton engineer Ed Felten ran side-by-side comparisons of Wikipedia entries on areas in which he had deep expertise with their counterparts in the current electronic edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His conclusion? âWikipediaâs advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it werenât for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannicaâs advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries.â [fn: see http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000675.html for more] Not a complete win for Wikipedia, but hardly âoutrageous,â ârepugnantâ and âdangerous.â (Poor Fasoldt â his idiotic hyperbole will surely haunt him through the whole of his career â I mean, ârepugnant?!â)
There has been one very damning and even frightening indictment of Wikipedia, which came from Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of the GeekCorps group, which sends volunteers to poor countries to help establish Internet Service Providers and do other good works through technology.
Zuckerman, a Harvard Berkman Center Fellow, is concerned with the âsystemic biasâ in a collaborative encyclopedia whose contributors must be conversant with technology and in possession of same in order to improve on the work there. Zuckerman reasonably observes that Internet users skew towards wealth, residence in the worldâs richest countries, and a technological bent. This means that the Wikipedia, too, is skewed to subjects of interest to that group â subjects where that group already has expertise and interest.
The result is tragicomical. The entry on the Congo Civil War, the largest military conflict the world has seen since WWII, which has claimed over three million lives, has only a fraction of the verbiage devoted to the War of the Ents, a fictional war fought between sentient trees in JRR Tolkienâs Lord of the Rings.
Zuckerman issued a public call to arms to rectify this, challenging Wikipedia contributors to seek out information on subjects like Africaâs military conflicts, nursing and agriculture and write these subjects up in the same loving detail given over to science fiction novels and contemporary youth culture. His call has been answered well. What remains is to infiltrate the Wikipedia into the academe so that term papers, Masters and Doctoral theses on these subjects find themselves in whole or in part on the Wikipedia. [fn See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xed/CROSSBOW for more on this]
But if Wikipedia is authoritative, how does it get there? What alchemy turns the maunderings of âmouth-breathers with modemsâ into valid, useful encyclopedia entries?
It all comes down to the way that disputes are deliberated over and resolved. Take the entry on Israel. At one point, it characterized Israel as a beleaguered state set upon by terrorists who would drive its citizens into the sea. Not long after, the entry was deleted holus-bolus and replaced with one that described Israel as an illegal state practicing Apartheid on an oppressed ethnic minority.
Back and forth the editors went, each overwriting the otherâs with his or her own doctrine. But eventually, one of them blinked. An editor moderated the doctrine just a little, conceding a single point to the other. And the other responded in kind. In this way, turn by turn, all those with a strong opinion on the matter negotiated a kind of Truth, a collection of statements that everyone could agree represented as neutral a depiction of Israel as was likely to emerge. Whereupon, the joint authors of this marvelous document joined forces and fought back to back to resist the revisions of other doctrinaires who came later, preserving their hard-won peace. [fn: This process was just repeated in microcosm in the Wikipedia entry on the author of this paper, which was replaced by a rather disparaging and untrue entry that characterized his books as critical and commercial failures â there ensued several editorial volleys, culminating in an uneasy peace that couches the anonymous detractorâs skepticism in context and qualifiers that make it clear what the facts are and what is speculation]
Whatâs most fascinating about these entries isnât their âfinalâ text as currently present on Wikipedia. It is the history page for each, blow-by-blow revision lists that make it utterly transparent where the bodies were buried on the way to arriving at whatever Truth has emerged. This is a neat solution to the problem of authority â if you want
Comments (0)