Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, disillusioned with his Frankenstein's monster, is launching a new project called Citizendium, which he calls a fork of Wikipedia.

His criticisms of the famous Big W are certainly valid, and it will be interesting to see what Citizendium becomes. Hate the name, though.

As a casual onlooker and occasional Wikipedia editor, it seems to me that Sanger doesn't really get the participatory democracy of the W beast, and there's possibly a bit of pique, too, given his longstanding and well-known feud with Jimmy Wales, who insists that LS was never co-founder but an employee.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness
Granted that, Wikipedia does have some problems, one of which was identified within alternative communities in the 1970s and originally labelled in 1970 by feminist Jo Freeman in her famous essay 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness' ('Why organisations need some structure to ensure they are democratic'). Note that this article had a splendid rejoinder by Cathy Levine, 'The Tyranny of Tyranny', which took a more anarchist perspective.

What, in fact, is actually emerging in Wikipedia is excessive structure -- but really the tyranny of structurelessness -- in an environment that was designed as ultimately democratic, even anarchistic. I've been a contributing Wikipedian almost since the beginning, although I only registered a couple of years ago. Since the early days, I've seen it grow from something relatively easy to handle, to a briar patch of non-rules and non-regulations that my poor brain can no longer navigate. Pages like this and this clearly show a design flaw: they remind me of a minutes page from a monthly meeting at the rural commune I lived in during the 1970s -- structurelessness leading to complexity. I was the community secretary, and I would rather poke a fork in my eye than have that job again.

Over time, only the managerial and bureaucratic classes -- in Wikipedia's case those dedicated ones with plenty of time on their hands and a head for bureaucracy -- are able to work the ropes of complex systems. Already I find that apart from simple edits I simply don't know how to be a Wikipedia editor anymore.

Not that traditional modes don't also tend towards complexity, as any local council book of legislation will attest. Nor should we assume that W could possibly be as easy as many of us once dreamed. Of course it must be hard, but must it be this hard? I don't mean entry level -- it's easy to post or edit an article. It's the endless permutations of issues that arise that beat the hell out of someone like me, whose brain is fairly functional but who has little expendable time, and (I admit) a dislike of detail, trivial disputation and contemplation of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

The Wikipedia response would be, "that's OK, someone else will fix things", and that's true, but there, dear reader, is also the rub. That attitude and practice can tend towards the empowerment of mandarins and apparatchiks. Fortunately not dictators, as that's not really a Wikipedia likelihood, but aren't bureaucrats almost as nasty? Especially when they can deflect and filter information through systems only they can comprehend. I have little doubt this is starting to happen and a Brahman caste of dedicated Wikipedians Who Know Best is emerging. Mostly, I'm sure, they're good people. But that is no protection in the long run.

So where should it all go? The Wales way, the Sanger way, or something else? Only people can work out this conundrum. Lots of people. And as we now have lots of people, I'm fairly confident that the cream will rise.

Citizendium at Wikipedia :: Sanger at Wikipedia

Tagged: wikipedia, internet, anarchy, information, anarchism