Monday
(0)A couple of years ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece called The collectivist alternative to blogs:
The millions of blogs in existence form a decentralized information source, which interact spontaneously and freely without top-down instruction. Each individual blog is very much private property with an author, or team, who post material. If you want to make an impact on the 'blogosphere', you have to go away and set up your own blog. If it's good, others will link to it.Conversely, wikis represent a form of voluntary collectism. Like blogs, they let information be published on the web very easily. But, unlike blogs, wikis normally let the general public update them without the need for a password or even peer review. It is easy for people, anonymously from an internet cafe, to maliciously delete articles, or publish inaccurate or offensive ones. Using a Wiki is like leaving your front door wide open. Like other collectivist experiments, they have problems.
I still basically agree with what I wrote then. As I said, they have problems. I have doubts that Wikipedia is ever going to keep to the consistent high quality that the Encyclopedia Britannica does. And yet I hardly ever refer to the Britannica and quite often use Wikipedia. On contentious political subjects Wikipedia often suffers from contributors' biases, but on the more mundane, everyday subjects, it is actually quite good. A Washington Post article last autumn said that Wikipedia had 340,000 entries compared with only 75,000 in Britannica.
Having every article in Britannica carefully commissioned and edited costs a lot of money. The Wikipedia approach is a lower-cost approach. Free-marketeers are often critical of governments who try and regulate away lower-cost approaches in order to protect the public. Given the choice, many people prefer to keep their cash and read Wikipedia. Of course, no one is advocating government control, but I merely raise the analogy to remind readers of that free-marketeers are often the people who say that we individuals are clever enough to make choices about how much they can trust a particular solution.
Despite Wikipedia's low-cost approach, I am often surprised at how good many of the entries are on Wikipedia. It would not surprise me to hear, for example that university history lecturers are writing some of the entries. Maybe they are academics, early in their careers who have not built up the prestige to get invited to contribute to the Britannica et al, but nevertheless know their subject.
As regular readers of the GI Blog will know, I have started a wiki. A bit collectivist, you might allege. Well, yes it is. But I'm not against collectivism. I just think it should compete in a marketplace. Like John Lewis department stores.
The GI has scanned in a 1000 page biography of Richard Cobden. We want to encourage the study of Cobden and its works, and as the book is both out of copyright and out of print, it seems logical that we should have it online. So we have put up the scanned images of the book on our site as PDFs. The downside is that scanned images are less easy to read that text, and they cannot be searched or easily quoted from. If all we did was to let people have scanned images, we would get people complaining.
The difficulty is that when you put the pages through an optical character recognition program, there is a fair bit of editing work to do. Not all the words are recognised properly, and any text in the page margins gets mangled in with the rest of the text. I tried to work out how long it would take an intern to correct the text, and all I could work out was that it would take a hell of a long time.
So I decided to look at the problem in a different way. Why should the process be so centralised? If there are people out there who value reading the text, some of them are going to be willing to do some of the work fixing the text. There are going to be other people in other countries who, like me, think that this book should be online.
Thus, I decided that a wiki was the best, most effective way to go.
Project Gutenberg already has a consistently excellent distributed-proofreading system for OCR'd books, and is dedicated to publishing online old out-of-copyright books; perhaps that would be even easier (and even more collectivist :-) ) than a wiki.
http://www.pgdp.net/c/default.php
It's actually quite a lot of fun to do proofing for pg -- I've encountered all sorts of works I'd never have thought to look at before, from utter dreck to oddly compelling.
--G
Posted by Grant Gould at April 25, 2005 04:26 PM
Isn't there all the difference in the world between "collectivist" activity, by definition compulsory, and voluntary, cooperative activity? Isn't the essential genius of a free society that it allows people to organize their collective (there, I said it) effort on a voluntary basis, which allows creativity and the employment of Hayekian local knowledge and all the rest? Can it possibly be libertarian dogma that one is supposed to work alone to not be collectivist? And isn't a wiki a form of voluntary, cooperative enterprise? Or am I missing something?
Posted by Lexington Green at April 25, 2005 09:21 PM
"collectivist" activity, by definition compulsory
Is this really definitional, though? It certainly isn't the definition that I've been used to using.
Collective ownership can frequently be voluntary (indeed, in this world of high transaction costs, it's often quite desireable); if making use of the collective weren't "collectivism," that would just be odd.
Posted by Grant Gould at April 25, 2005 09:34 PM
"...if making use of the collective weren't 'collectivism,' that would just be odd."
It would be "odd" only if one ignored the fact that individuals first and principally decide the value of any given group effort on their own authority. This is not something that happens (it's simply not permitted) in political circumstances to which the term is reasonably applied. An individual who invests in a public stock corporation might be said to be part of a "collective", but it is a categorically different thing from social security. The decisive difference is in the individual's political authority to make up his own mind and act on his conclusion.
Anyone can use the word for anything they want, and they often do. It's just gibberish, however, unless it refers to facts of reality, and I just pointed out the crucial fact which conditions the concept.
"Dogma" or not.
Posted by Billy Beck at April 25, 2005 09:45 PM
Isn't an "ism" an ideology? In any case, the term "collectivism" has, I think, come to mean mandatory collective activity. The word has a long history, it carries baggage.
I concur in Mr. Beck's distinction and examples, the example of share ownership being an example I was thinking of.
Don't you think a voluntary collective activity might better be termed "cooperative", or in the example of stock ownership, possibly "collective" or even "aggregated"? But there is no "ism" in it when it is freely chosen activity. Like a wiki.
I hope this is more than mere semantics. Making clear that libertarian principles do not require us all to go back to 40 acres and a mule, but allow even very large groups to work together voluntarily is an important thing to keep in mind.
Posted by Lexington Green at April 25, 2005 10:22 PM
I am told, but I've not researched the data myself, that there have now been several studies investigating Wikipedia versus conventional data sources in order to establish how accurate it is.
Apparently, generally it's not. I'm not surprised. It's a handy, fast reference but I've always had a hagging doubt about the hard and fastness of the data it gives.
Posted by Daveon at April 26, 2005 04:21 AM
The meaning of "compulsory" is a bit vague, too. Bees create great collective value by their individual efforts, all driven by, what, genes and instincts and hormones? Certainly they don't each freely will their actions. Each bee seems to know what to do, though, and to be driven to do it whether or not another, bigger, bee is standing over it with a stick every minute. Maeterlinck's "Life of a Bee" describes beautifully how many and how complicated tasks bees perform semi-voluntarily, in flawless coordination. Perhaps Wiki-compilers and others are driven by a similar instinct. Open-source software is analogous, though in the case of Linux a head bee (Linus) constantly tests to see that the product is useable.
Posted by Robert Speirs at April 26, 2005 05:23 PM
It seems as strange to me to describe a wiki or blog as having an inherent political context as doing so with a screwdriver versus a hammer.
I work with closed versions of both in business as well as random surfing. Blogs are useful for retaining information that is by its nature sequential. Work logs, ideas, discussion... Wiki's are like the Laplace transform of that information from the time domain to a non-time one. Wiki's are useful for collaborative documentation and knowledge capture. If you need a manual on repairing your basement nuclear reactor, you go to a Wiki where the manufacturer's top people and perhaps some key customers keep an up to the minute readable document for you.
If on the other hand, you are interested in the maintanance history of your reactor, you want a blog.
Posted by Dale Amon at April 27, 2005 01:16 AM
At least someone is making an effort. Keep up the good work mate......Way to go...
Posted by christ at January 18, 2006 01:07 PM
