There are all kinds of role crediting systems out there. Movies have a huge list of credits; television not much so. And CNN, for example, usually has none (that I’ve seen, anyway). But let’s talk writing.

Books get credits right on the front cover, and on the title page. Newspapers have bylines, and a staff section. Magazines have a staff list not too far from the “From the editor” section, and bylines near the article title. Blogs and websites are usually just copyrighted by that individual.

But what about wikis?

Wikipedia has no credit. Of course, they have attribution on their commons materials, but they operate loose and fast often with often no regard to the actual owner.

Citizendium credits images, and signed articles. But in a culture of real names, where does the credit go? In its culture of experts, amateurs, and “average joes” there has not yet been any kind of way to represent yourself—to be able to stand up and say “I did this.” Many people have done it on their user pages; I’ve done it on mine. But how can you tell how much I’ve actually worked on? Of course, you could go to the page history. Let’s look at one I mostly wrote, “Bowling.” Looking through the edits, you can tell that most of them were performed by me, and a lesser amount were done by Hayford Peirce, Ro Thorpe, and Chris Day. But would you know that otherwise? Would you care?

In the wikipedia world, this might be considered “Ownership”: I wrote it, I maintain it, it is *mine*. But that’s where the similarity stops. In Citizendium, I particularly don’t care if someone comes along and adds material, as long as it’s pertinent and relevant. Heck, if they go in there and re-write a lot of my work to make it better, so be it, but I don’t consider it “my property”.

For a second, let’s pretend.

The year is 2018, and I have become the world’s foremost authority on the sport of Bowling. I’m a strikemaster. I annihilate splits. Shoes? My shoes cost 100,000 US Dollars. The laces are diamond-encrusted. My bowling ball has a huge crystal jade core. I dress like Elvis, but with more bling. People all around come to ask me, “How did you get so good? How do you know so much?” I simply tell them: “Citizendium, baby, the C Z. Let’s go get us some drinks, darlin’. I wrote the BOOK on bowling!” I hand out my business card, that proudly displays (in flexible OLED technology, millions of colors) the article I wrote. “Read that, and learn from ‘The King’”.

In this, far-fetched future, I have epitomized the worst-case scenario (in more than one way) that represents the core concern with doling out credit to authors. As ‘King Elvis’ I have simply obliterated any trace of contributions by others on the wiki. But I contend this is a very, very unrealistic scenario.

Let’s look at it from another angle. Academics write papers about their scientific findings and send them off to journals for publishing. Their work is credited to them, and everything is cited. More often than not, their statements of contribution are not false, they understand what is at stake. To be flaunted out in front of the scientific community as a fraud has very deep implications both emotionally and academically. “You will never work in this town again!”

Let’s return back to the reality that is 2008, and the wiki is upon us. Wikis, by definition, are collaborative. There’s just no escaping it. It’s entirely safe to assume that any major article on any wiki out there has been touched by more than one hand. Sure, there are dominant authors who wrote most of the material. But what’s the harm in enabling them, on the page itself (not buried in the history, or on their user page) to say, “Yeah, I did most of the work on this article.” If everything in the article is true, valid, well-written, and relatively unbiased then it only does well to strengthen their reputation in the community as someone who knows a little about that subject. Will it inflate their ego? Probably a little. But the very nature of Citizendium is that people from the same discipline can get together and develop articles around common knowledge.

I think the average person understands what a wiki is about, and recognizes that one sole author isn’t responsible for it all.

By Robert W. King
(Disclosure: I am an active contributor at Citizendium.)

Much like the increase in college tuition rates, how Wikipedia actually manages to function is a mystery to most, I suspect.

Despite all of the trolling, flaming, edit warring, perspective pushing, and political infights, somehow content is still loosely aggregated into some kind of “information source.”

“If it doesn’t work, throw more _____ at it.”

I believe that part of the reason Wikipedia manages this is by some highly twisted version of the Mythical Man Month (by Frederick Brooks) that ultimately presents evidence that ‘adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.’ I imagine that there is some kind of constant revolving door at WP (of variable X), which makes it so you get a baseline of content added all the time, but there’s no standard of quality imposed. It’s kind of like dumping your development staff mid-project (because they’re doing an awful job), and hiring all new staff to recreate or reprogram the product in order to get it right the next time. But that staff fails to deliver, so you create a whole new contract. Many, many project managers are familiar with this self-propagating fallicy of development.

So really, it’s like “to Keep adding manpower to a project that never delivers, only results in a baseline-quality project.” As Wikipedia continues to develop in its very ad-hoc way, I believe those qualified to contribute reasonable information (those designated as “experts”) will continue to withdraw only to be replaced by those not-nearly-qualified (notice I did not say “amateurs”—more on that in a bit).

Even one of WP’s own fairly known members (and also a member at wikback), SwatJester, recognizes that at least in some regard, experts are required.

The Sky is Falling!

God forbid I make a proposal that actually uses the word “rules”, but Wikipedia needs real, enforcable rules. Even as I write this, I can imagine that Wikipedians all over would suddenly double over, cringing, with sour-puckered faces: Rules! How dare he! Don’t start up the flame-dozers yet; there’s no fire here.

Unfortunately one of the major failings of Wikipedia is the pseudogovernance, or lack of. Some might argue “by golly, that’s how wikipedia is so successful! There are no rules, anyone can do anything!” Well, sort of. The ability for anyone to jump right in and contribute is wonderful—the ability for anyone to jump right in and create controversy and cause trouble is not so great. Basically, as it is now all policy is set by “guidelines” with the “guideline” that you should always “assume good faith” regardless of actual intent of the user (you cannot assume good faith for a troll). This is logically bankrupt. Unless you can provide rules that enforce good faith editing upon the project, there is no way to expect 100% of the masses to edit the project under such decree. There is too much variance in the quantity and quality of contributors.

Amateurs vs. Experts

Now, one might argue that amateurs can provide information just as well as experts. Well, not exactly. If we refer back to SwatJester’s argument on wikback that experts largely synthesize the information in the WP:FIREARMS project, while amateurs are able to provide the data, then it works. However, this scenario requires that experts verify their credentials as such in order to remain credible (which Citizendium does, might I add). If all wikipedians were to follow this example, it is possible that the accuracy of WP would go up some order of magnitude.

Simply put: amateurs are able to do research and reguritate their findings, and potentially understand what they are reporting on, but often they are not able to collectively assemble the information into some meaning. Field or Subject Matter Experts are able to do this and present the information in such a way that it is comprehensible. Unfortunately a lot of times amateur and inexperienced Wikipedians are quick to hit the “conflict of interest” bomb and drive experts away.

The poltergeist

I recently signed up on wikback.com, a forum that was created with the intent to discuss various WP issues (see announcement on the signpost). However, and I mean no disrespect to it’s founder, UninvitedCompany (whoever you may be), I believe that it is not going to result in any measure of positive impact on the Wikipedia community. Much of the actual discussion that goes on replicates or is an addendum to that which has already been decided either by the Arbitration Committee, or is an invitation for those banned from the project to push their case in another format. Wikipedia is unable to self-govern and any spurned side project from Wikipedia that has deep roots in the way Wikipedia is run will suffer the same fate.

The consequence

What is the consequences of enforcing rules? Mass exodus, obviously. As soon as there is a standard which has decided to be enforcable, you will get people that leave. That is inevitable. THe only question is, how many people and when do you want it to happen?

In my opinion, it’s in Wikipedia’s best interest to enact governance and rules in some “due time”. The side effects of course will be maintainability, utter conflict, fights, drama, and user arguments; but I suspect they might be surprised. Much like a colonoscopy, or enema, it might be good for the community.

However, if they want to remain the same, then by all means, keep doing whatever it is that you’re doing. If they wish to be the biggest 3rd rate inaccurate reference source or “starting point”, then that’s their choice. It doesn’t matter how many articles they have, or how many contributors they can boast. In the end, quality matters for this trade; not quantity.

It seems like part of the wiki culture is to develop a tolerance for dilapidation. No matter how hard you try, it is simply impossible to totally eliminate “cruft” or to reduce the amount of “staleness” (if I may be allowed to make that word up!).

Part of it I think comes from the design of wikis themselves; they are a constant history-making machine. Everything you do on them is recorded, and what a history it can be! For example, I can trace back my very first edit on the Citizendium almost a year ago: it’s here, 08:39 14 April 2007 on an article which, definitely to my fault, has seen verrrry little update since I created it (imported it from WP even).

How embarrassing, really.

And then, you add the ubiquity of different communication types: email, forums, on the wiki (and then in the article space, in the mainspace, and in the article and user talk pages)… I mean stuff gets all over the place!

Arrrgghh, how do you fix it?! Do you make a rule that says everything must happen in one place? Impossible, people will always have preferences.

It seems the biggest blessing of the advent of wikis—the fathomally unlimited user collaborative space—is also it’s own Achillies’ heel. A wiki is the ultimate government filing office: old files and policies get usurped by new ones, and the spider-webs are never cleaned up. If virtual dust could collect, surely wikis would be the filthiest places on the internet—even dirtier than porn sites, if you could believe that! Allergens beware!

In some way, I credit us with at least having the foresight to create article clusters, “subpages” as we call them. It was definitely a good move on our part.

But as of yet there is no solution to keeping all the lines of communication together. Maybe some kind of new protocol should be created; or some systematic website; or some kind of database. Obviously there has to be a division in wiki cultures that separates the communication from the development. All the talking, posting, emails, forum posts need to be in one place, while all the work should be in another.