Rav Casley Gera

In a faraway domain, a fragile democracy is fighting for survival. Everyday we watch on our screens it struggles to maintain order amongst chaos and defend its day-to-day operations against dissent and malicious attacks. What? No, not Iraq! I’m talking about Wikipedia.

We think of the internet mostly as consumers - we read sites, use them, buy from them. But the internet started off as a community. The first websites were bulletin boards, designed to let academics share information. They didn’t have staff or managers, and they certainly wouldn’t get sold for millions of dollars. They belonged to the people who use them: they were democratic.

Wikipedia is the biggest democracy on the internet. It’s the 15th most-visited site on the web, and every one of its millions of users can take part in its decisions. Not only can anyone edit pages, but anyone can vote – or stand – in elections to its managing boards. One American academic thinks it might even be “the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration the world has ever known.”

But as Iraq is finding out, it isn’t easy maintaining order in a democracy of equals. Wikipedia has its own insurgents: vandals. It suffers thousands of vandal attacks every day – entries are deleted, defaced, or altered for political or personal reasons. “George W. Bush” is its most frequently edited pages. Politicians have admitted having campaign staff edit their pages to cover up criticism. And workers campaigning for better conditions have been known to alter their employer’s entries to put their points across.

In the early years of the project, such insurgencies plunged Wikipedia into civil war – between its co-founder and “chief organizer,” Larry Sanger, and a mysterious anarchist called “The Cunctator.” Sanger wanted a certain amount of authority to ensure the site’s quality; “Cunc” was in favour of total equality. After months of deleting each other’s edits to pages and sparring in the sites’ talk pages, the war ended with Sanger leaving the project.

Since then, Wikipedia’s reputation has been tested by the consequences of its democratic approach. In 2005, the American journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr. laid into the site, calling it “a flawed and irresponsible research tool,” after taking objection to a paragraph of his biography on the site, that said he had briefly been linked to the murders of John and Robert Kennedy. Siegenthaler almost certainly overreacted - who hasn’t been linked to the Kennedy murders? - but a chorus of political and media concern blew up, alleging that Wikipedia was riddled with errors and unsafe. A study in the Journal Nature later in the year found that Wikipedia’s scientific articles were nearly as accurate as those in the professionally-edited Encyclopaedia Britannica, but Britannica hit back, calling the study “so error-laden that it was completely without merit.” (Nature’s response)

Is Wikipedia laden with errors and lies? It’s hard to tell, but Larry Sanger thinks it might be. And he’s proposing an alternative, Citizendium - a carbon-copy of Wikipedia’s database, but with expert editors who will have some authority to override regular users’ changes. Editors will appoint themselves, but be required to meet certain standards of expertise. And vandals and troublemakers will be barred from the site by “constables.” The aim, Sanger says, is to create a site that “John Siegenthaler could be comfortable with… not only enormous and free, but reliable.”

Sanger’s announcement has generated a mixture of delight and horror, with some Wikipedia users calling it “treason” (hey, if you thought Wikipedia was part of “the emergence of a new kind of person,” you’d take it pretty seriously too). But lovers of Wikipedia’s democratic ethos shouldn’t worry - this is a natural process for democracies to go through. In fact, it’s striking how internet history is mirroring real-world history when it comes to the development of democracy. After all, the first democracies - in Ancient Greece - were small city-states where every citizen - at least, every free male citizen - had a direct say in the affairs of state - not unlike Wikipedia’s founding all-are-equal ethos. As democracies have grown from cities to nations, populations have become too large for direct votes on every issue, and representative democracy has developed, with elected leaders making most decisions. Wikipedia has begun the same process - just like in growing democracies, pressure of numbers of participants has made ways of arbitrating disagreements essential.

As democracies have grown and the issues facing them have become more complex, their governments have needed to find ways to understand their tasks. But if the people won’t always vote for the most expert people, what to do? All democracies create ways of appointing experts to advise and even shape government, even if they’re not elected. In Britain, it’s the House of Lords. Of course, as Government gets further away from the people, the chance increases of people feeling free to disobey its laws. So democracies developed police forces, who are granted authority by the community to act against members of the community in ways regular members can’t.

So with its experts and constables, Citizendium, too, is just responding to the pressures of growth as many democracies have. In time, these safeguards may well see it overtake Wikipedia in popularity. But will self-appointing experts be reliable? Or will Citizendium have its own Cunctator, its own insurgents? There’s also a lot of fuzziness in Wikipedia’s system, with articles “generally recognized” to be reliable or neutral. Will Citizendium develop more specific processes? Will it need to? In real-world democracies, such fuzzy ideas tend to get sharpened by being tested in courts of law - think of phrases such as “cruel and unusual punishment,” incredibly vague at first, but gradually refined by the courts. Will our twin web democracies be forced to go through a similar process, in order to clarify their own procedures?

It’s too soon to tell, of course. But Citizendium needs to be recognised for what it is - not a threat to Wikipedia’s principles of democracy, but a refinement of them, just as real-world democracy has been refined over thousands of years. These kind of changes aren’t a sign of weakness, but of the flexibility needed to survive. Democracy was never easy, after all. Just ask the people of Iraq.

A nice backgrounder to the Wikipedia debate

Citizendium founding essay

UPDATE: eBay is undergoing a similar process.

See other articles about: citizendium, democracy, larry sanger, web 2.0, wikipedia

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