Wikipedia is now so good that we don’t tend to think about how good it is. It’s just there, and it feels as if it’s always been there. “Oh yes, the vast free repository of human knowledge, what about it?” But Wikipedia is remarkable. Astonishing, really. It’s built on a model that exists almost nowhere else online. It’s like nothing else in existence. And it gives us a bit of insight into how we might reform other platforms, even society itself.
First, let’s remember just how “top-down” almost all of the largest web services are. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter. Each a multi-billion dollar company, each run for profit and owned by private investors, each controlled by a powerful CEO. Facebook, Twitter, and Google make money almost entirely through advertising: Companies pay them to put products in front of users’ eyeballs, and the platforms alter the user experience accordingly. Each of these companies operates exactly the way you’d expect of a corporation seeking monopoly power. They crush tiny competitors, they buy politicians (Google and Facebook give more money to Republicans than Democrats), and they are extremely secretive about their internal decision-making process. They do not tell you the algorithms that determine what they will show you, or the experiments they are using to figure out how to manipulate users’ psychology. (Facebook had a brief scandal in 2014 when it was revealed to have tested different ways to mess with people’s emotions, seeing if it could bump users toward happiness or sadness with the display of positive or negative news. Over 700,000 news feeds had been tampered with. It also, even more creepily, kept track of status updates that people had typed and deleted without posting.)
There is nothing even beginning to resemble “democracy” at these companies. Like most corporations, they are dictatorships internally. Amazon workers are infamously mistreated, and Jeff Bezos’ wealth increases by $215 million per day, meaning that he makes the median annual Amazon salary once every nine seconds. Amazon workers have had to fight hard just to reach $15 an hour base pay, which in many places is still far short of a living wage.
Users do not have any voice in company policy. Their only input comes in the form of a binary market choice: Use the service or don’t. If you don’t like the way Facebook’s ads work, go find some other social media network. But because there is no other social media network like Facebook, there is no online shopping portal like Amazon, and there is no bottomless pit of short-form blather like Twitter, it’s not clear where else there is to go. You can get the internet out of your life completely, which might be good for many people’s mental health. But some of us actually rely on these companies for our livelihoods. Current Affairs articles, for instance, are distributed primarily through Facebook and Twitter shares. If these companies were to, say, block our accounts, or even bump our material downward so that fewer users saw it, we’d take a significant hit to our revenue. And if we did incur the ire of one of the tech monoliths, if Amazon stopped selling our books or Google stopped displaying our pages in search results, there would be absolutely nothing we could do about it. They don’t have to give us an appeals process. Nobody votes on it. If Mark Zuckerberg wakes up one day and decides he’d like to put Current Affairs out of business, he could probably do it. We are reliant entirely on maintaining the good will of a benevolent overlord.
Wikipedia is something else. It has no advertisements, it seeks no profits, it has no shareholders. It’s incredible to think of the amount of money Wikipedia has given up by steadfastly refusing to publish even the most unobtrusive promotions. In the early days, when there was still a live debate about whether the site should have ads, even just ads for nonprofits, there were those who thought it insane to insist on keeping the site absolutely pure. And yet the purists won.
Being a nonprofit among the profit-seeking monopolies distinguishes Wikipedia. But what makes it like absolutely nothing else in the world is its governance structure. It’s a genuine democratic platform, its rules controlled by its users. There is nothing else quite like that anywhere.
Let’s consider the radicalism of the Wikipedia model. It’s a “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” as we know. It has well over 5 million articles in English (40 million total in 301 languages), all of which are put together through the collective effort of volunteers. Readers write a paragraph here, fix a date there, add a citation or two, and over time a vast compendium of human knowledge emerges. It has been stunningly successful, and is one of the most visited sites on the web, with over 18 billion page views.
But Wikipedia is not just edited by users. Its policies themselves are stored in wiki pages, and can be modified and updated by user-editors. The governance of the site itself, the processes that determine what you see, are open to revision by the Wikipedia community, a community that anyone can join. Not only that, but every change to Wikipedia is transparent: Its changes, and the debates over them, are fully available in a public record.
One of Wikipedia’s core rules is: “Wikipedia has no firm rules.” That does not mean “anything goes.” It means “the rules are principles, not laws” and they “exist only as rough approximations of their underlying principles.” But the ethic of Wikipedia is that everything is subject to revision, open to discussion, and that anyone can discuss it.
This has meant that Wikipedians have had to, over time, figure out how to govern themselves. Political philosophers have long been infatuated with the concept of the “state of nature,” the condition humankind would find itself in before it had designed governing institutions, and much political theory is concerned with examining how the people in this hypothetical world should construct a state. Or, if humankind suddenly finds itself stranded on a desert island, what procedures ought we to set up to keep everybody from eating each other? The course of Wikipedia’s development has been one of the few real-world examples of such a scenario.
First, let’s remember just how “top-down” almost all of the largest web services are. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter. Each a multi-billion dollar company, each run for profit and owned by private investors, each controlled by a powerful CEO. Facebook, Twitter, and Google make money almost entirely through advertising: Companies pay them to put products in front of users’ eyeballs, and the platforms alter the user experience accordingly. Each of these companies operates exactly the way you’d expect of a corporation seeking monopoly power. They crush tiny competitors, they buy politicians (Google and Facebook give more money to Republicans than Democrats), and they are extremely secretive about their internal decision-making process. They do not tell you the algorithms that determine what they will show you, or the experiments they are using to figure out how to manipulate users’ psychology. (Facebook had a brief scandal in 2014 when it was revealed to have tested different ways to mess with people’s emotions, seeing if it could bump users toward happiness or sadness with the display of positive or negative news. Over 700,000 news feeds had been tampered with. It also, even more creepily, kept track of status updates that people had typed and deleted without posting.)
There is nothing even beginning to resemble “democracy” at these companies. Like most corporations, they are dictatorships internally. Amazon workers are infamously mistreated, and Jeff Bezos’ wealth increases by $215 million per day, meaning that he makes the median annual Amazon salary once every nine seconds. Amazon workers have had to fight hard just to reach $15 an hour base pay, which in many places is still far short of a living wage.Users do not have any voice in company policy. Their only input comes in the form of a binary market choice: Use the service or don’t. If you don’t like the way Facebook’s ads work, go find some other social media network. But because there is no other social media network like Facebook, there is no online shopping portal like Amazon, and there is no bottomless pit of short-form blather like Twitter, it’s not clear where else there is to go. You can get the internet out of your life completely, which might be good for many people’s mental health. But some of us actually rely on these companies for our livelihoods. Current Affairs articles, for instance, are distributed primarily through Facebook and Twitter shares. If these companies were to, say, block our accounts, or even bump our material downward so that fewer users saw it, we’d take a significant hit to our revenue. And if we did incur the ire of one of the tech monoliths, if Amazon stopped selling our books or Google stopped displaying our pages in search results, there would be absolutely nothing we could do about it. They don’t have to give us an appeals process. Nobody votes on it. If Mark Zuckerberg wakes up one day and decides he’d like to put Current Affairs out of business, he could probably do it. We are reliant entirely on maintaining the good will of a benevolent overlord.
Wikipedia is something else. It has no advertisements, it seeks no profits, it has no shareholders. It’s incredible to think of the amount of money Wikipedia has given up by steadfastly refusing to publish even the most unobtrusive promotions. In the early days, when there was still a live debate about whether the site should have ads, even just ads for nonprofits, there were those who thought it insane to insist on keeping the site absolutely pure. And yet the purists won.
Being a nonprofit among the profit-seeking monopolies distinguishes Wikipedia. But what makes it like absolutely nothing else in the world is its governance structure. It’s a genuine democratic platform, its rules controlled by its users. There is nothing else quite like that anywhere.
Let’s consider the radicalism of the Wikipedia model. It’s a “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” as we know. It has well over 5 million articles in English (40 million total in 301 languages), all of which are put together through the collective effort of volunteers. Readers write a paragraph here, fix a date there, add a citation or two, and over time a vast compendium of human knowledge emerges. It has been stunningly successful, and is one of the most visited sites on the web, with over 18 billion page views.
But Wikipedia is not just edited by users. Its policies themselves are stored in wiki pages, and can be modified and updated by user-editors. The governance of the site itself, the processes that determine what you see, are open to revision by the Wikipedia community, a community that anyone can join. Not only that, but every change to Wikipedia is transparent: Its changes, and the debates over them, are fully available in a public record.
One of Wikipedia’s core rules is: “Wikipedia has no firm rules.” That does not mean “anything goes.” It means “the rules are principles, not laws” and they “exist only as rough approximations of their underlying principles.” But the ethic of Wikipedia is that everything is subject to revision, open to discussion, and that anyone can discuss it.
This has meant that Wikipedians have had to, over time, figure out how to govern themselves. Political philosophers have long been infatuated with the concept of the “state of nature,” the condition humankind would find itself in before it had designed governing institutions, and much political theory is concerned with examining how the people in this hypothetical world should construct a state. Or, if humankind suddenly finds itself stranded on a desert island, what procedures ought we to set up to keep everybody from eating each other? The course of Wikipedia’s development has been one of the few real-world examples of such a scenario.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Naomi Ushiyama
