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Recently, Slate ran an article titled “The Wisdon of the Chaperones: Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy.” The gist of Chris Wilson’s article reveals that user-generated content sites such as Wikipedia and Digg, touted as democratic entities of collaborative knowledge production, are not really democratic at all. Wilson writes:

Social-media sites are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show.

He may be right, but this is nothing new. And are we surprised? Online communities will initially reflect traditional communities. We shouldn’t think that a dash of web 2.0 will automatically change the way knowledge communities have been constructed and maintained for hundreds of years. But we should recognize that this process is changing–sites like Wikipedia are empowering thousands of new users every week, no matter how much the community still seems to be comprised of a few influential contributors. This is also changing, and will continue to change as Wikipedia grows. New users will be able to contribute, while the big guys can stick around. Maybe this is not so much a revolution as it is a non-rivalrous (and potentially mutually beneficial) inclusive environment.

Wilson’s claims about Wikipedia’s governance and maintenance structure suggests an unregulated free-for-all few would support. He writes:

[Wikipedia] deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.

Is this so unreasonable? Do we really object if vandals and spam are banished?

Wilson references an article titled “Power of the Few vs. Wisdom of the Crowd: Wikipedia and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie,” but fails to accurately represent its conclusions. Sure, 1 percent of Wikipedia users may be responsible for about half of the site’s edits, but as Aaron Swartz points out, content–not number of edits, is what we need to be looking at. Even the authors admit, “by counting each edit instead of the length of each edit, we effectively treat, say, the deletion of a comma as equivalent to the addition of three paragraphs of text.”

If we look at the amount of content changed and not the running edit count, we see a different story. Swartz’s calculations show that the majority of Wikipedia’s content is created by outsiders (those with few edits) while the majority of the cleanup and tweaking is made by insiders (those with lots of edits):

An outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

Wilson continues to discuss the Palo Alto research article:

People who’ve made more than 10,000 edits add nearly twice as many words to Wikipedia as they delete. By contrast, those who’ve made fewer than 100 edits are the only group that deletes more words than it adds. A small number of people are writing the articles, it seems, while less-frequent users are given the tasks of error correction and typo fixing.

I will argue that no one “gives” anyone anything to do on Wikipedia. Furthermore, the reason many less-frequent users may begin with error correction and typo fixing is exactly because they are beginners. Like in any community, newbies progress through a similar process in learning the norms and rules of contributing before becoming an expert.

The aforementioned research paper sums up the changing nature of Wikipedia and contradicts Wilson’s flawed analysis concerning the undemocratic nature of user-generated content sites like Wikipedia and Digg:

We discovered an initial rise and subsequent decline in the influence of “elite” users. This result held true whether elite users were defined by peer-selected groups (administrators) or data-driven groups (high-edit users). We demonstrated that this decline was not due to a decrease in elite user activity or to shifts in user group editing patterns, but instead was driven by marked growth in the population of low-edit users — the rise of the bourgeoisie.

The barriers to participation are low on user-generated content sites like Wikipedia. If we are to fully realize what scholars see as new media’s “participatory revolution” (where traditional consumers of knowledge have become the producers of it) we need to continue support the engagement and education of new users on democratic sites Wikipedia.

Thursday night Larry Sanger of the expert-driven wiki encyclopedia Citizendium spoke at Eastern Michigan University. Larry was a co-founder of Wikipedia, but left the due to ideological differences about how the project should be maintained.

Sanger began by addressing his main concerns that web 2.0 hasn’t solved yet: high quality and high relevance. Even though there are 1.2 billion people online now, he argued that simply increasing the number of people in an online community won’t solve these problems. He claims that Citizendium can work to address these concerns in the following ways:

By finding meaningful roles for experts

Larry says that the intelligent use of experts in collaborative projects like Citizendium can help improve the quality of the output. He says that experts can be chosen online the same way they are chosen offline–through a demonstration of knowledge on a particular subject. He said that in order to get contributions from experts (like we see in really good Wikipedia articles, he admits), we need to make sure experts feel comfortable working within an open system. Finally, he argues that just because great things can be created without expert advice (Wikipedia) doesn’t mean that greater things can’t be created with expert input.

By requiring contributors to use their real-world identities

Sanger says that it is sensible to require real names for membership in some, but not all Internet communities. He does agree that there are legitimate privacy concerns that sometimes require anonymity. However, he argues that attaching real names to contributions (like is done on Citizendium) improves credibility, makes effective rules enforcement possible, and makes people behave better.

By establishing a rule of law by committing contributors to a social contract that makes them full partners in the project

Larry suggests that online communities should adopt constitutions just like offline communities do–he says this might take the form of some sort of online bill of rights. By doing this, he claims that contributors are compelled to agree to the rules as a condition of participation, thus giving them a more tangible and viable stake in its governance.

Sanger ran through the current stats on Citizendium, reporting that the site now has about 2000 authors and 250 expert editors. He says that there are over 5200 articles under development and that 5 million words were added in its first year (which he claims is over 6x larger than Wikipedia after its first year).

I entered the talk a skeptic of Citizendium, and remain one still. I was waiting to hear two things from Larry–of which I only got in scattered pieces: (1) Citizendium works to provide a better and more accurate resource than Wikipedia and (2) the process by which Citizendium is built is better.

I feel that neither of these pieces are particularly well-addressed. Instead, Citizendium seems like a reactionary project that only seems to address the thugs on Wikipedia. Larry says that the Citizendium community is a “friendly open country fair” while the Wikipedia community continues as a “street fight between rival gangs.” Is this really the point to Citizendium–to make collaborative knowledge production more civil? I agree, there are problems on Wikipedia–defacing and deletion of articles, skewed political rants, plain cruft. But these things can and will be worked out. Articles can be flagged for non-neutrality, incompleteness, and spam. As is central to the wiki form, more information and more transparency can work to help solve these problems. While there are some problems to an anonymous system, Sanger also ignores the enormous benefits to an informal system of usernames and identities. Just because I don’t use my real name on Wikipedia doesn’t mean a useful and positive community has not emerged–and one that respects individual users, develops social norms and fosters positive community relationships.

Citizendium attempts to use revolutionary tools like the wiki, but misses the mark because it relies on old frameworks for knowledge production and maintenance. When Larry speaks about his staff reviewing experts’ CVs before they’re accepted as Citizendium contributors, I can’t begin to understand how this process will be neutral, equitable, scalable, or particularly desirable. Sanger doesn’t see this process as carrying an prohibitively high barrier to contribute, but how can we ignore it?

Larry concludes, “Wikipedia will always be disrespectful of expertise.” I do not agree, and I think Wikipedia will continue to lead the way as a truly remarkable, inviting and accurate collaborative knowledge community.