An Introduction

Hello worthy readers, my name is Walker, and I'm a philosophy major at Vassar College in droll and drab Poughkeepsie, NY. I was strolling across the quad earlier today when a thought about the current state of affairs on wikipedia, digg, and other social networking sites. I'll write more on that below but I started this blog because I think I would do well to have a place to write down these thoughts as they are fresh on my mind instead of letting them go stale under the constant influx of college-associated poisons (I'll name none). The reason I chose this blog instead of a notebook is that I'd like to share them with the world.

Now, back to the subject at hand. The article linked above cites evidence that suggests that a measly 1% of total wikipedia users are responsible for almost all content on the encyclopedia. From this evidence it suggests that the idea of socially-driven content is really a 'myth' and that the perceived democracy of websites such as 'digg', 'twitter', is really an oligarchy. I do not dispute this claim (it is hard to disagree with empirical evidence, unless you are my childhood hero David Hume). However I dispute the notion that because of the relatively small pool of users determining what gets seen on Digg and Wikipedia these systems are inherently undemocratic. The article acknowledges that it is the people who use these sites who determine who is popular, but it does not pay this point the kind of attention it deserves. If it were not for one of the top 10 submitters on digg, would the site cease to function? I highly doubt this. Someone else would step up to the plate and start submitting popular articles. Similarly, if 1% of users determine the content and objectivity of the articles on Wikipedia it is because they are doing a pretty good job of it (as suggested a few years ago by the study in Nature comparing Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Brittanica).

This leads me to the meat of today's post: Vassar is holding seminars about how to use and contribute to Wikipedia. The thought has crossed my mind to hold a sort of informal seminar on this matter before, and obviously I wasn't the only person to think about this. What Wikipedia must and will accomplish in the next few years is a pluralization of access. Once the ethics and trivialities of Wikipedia culture are ironed out and a suitable open-source editing software for Wikipedia is released, any aversions that the technologically-inclined have to contributing online will vanish. Similarly, when Digg or another "Web 2.0" website successfully balances quality submissions with ease of access for even the newest users, you will begin to see the pluralization of the Web in full force.

This all notwithstanding, the current state of affairs is really not all that bad. Remember Anonymous's War on Scientology? This was not a case of the few duping the masses into participation in a wide-scale protest against an establishment of old. In actuality it was a few enterprising web users channeling the feelings of the whole, which is why it was a success. This article on slate makes the common philosophical mistake of conflating correlation with causation. It isn't that we are given the content to choose from but that we choose the content we want to see (and reward those who are best able to show it to us). More on this next week.