On Wikipedia, storms, teacups, and _why's notability

In which our hero ponders the Internet's underwear, the oxymoronic nature of social software, and that not only should you not hate the playa but you shouldn't even hate the game.

It must be a weekend, the interwebs have their panties in a bunch again. This time it's about the Wikipedia entry for _why the lucky stiff, one of the major Ruby hackers. For the backstory, see Deletionist Morons by Tim Bray. In short: Wikipedia editors want to delete _why's entry because he doesn't pass Wikipedia's Notability test.

Social software is a funny old thing, isn't it? On the one hand, we have the word "social" with its overtones of informality, emotion, and all those black turtleneck wearing arts graduates. Then we have the word "software" with its harmonics of precision, logical thought, and Aspies with intravenous caffeine. In fact, when you think of "software" you probably think of people who could easily be described as "antisocial". Is it any wonder, then, that the product of the two doesn't exactly mesh well with our view of the world?

Having read Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, I now know that Wikipedia is social software. Not the reading part, but the editing. There's a human process for humans to follow, whereby the humans use the software to debate (something humans do, not software) and arrive at a decision. This is a human, social, process ... not a software one. A lot of the rancour comes from misunderstanding this.

Perhaps an analogy to another social process would help. Wikipedia is like an open source software project where the great unwashed submit patches, the committers choose which to apply, and the core team make executive decisions when needed. There's no piece of code that determines worthiness to be committed to the source tree. Instead, there are people with judgement and human flaws in the way. The Linux kernel shouldn't grow e-mail protocol stacks, web server hacks, and a built-in relational database just because someone submits the patches. The project's committers are there to keep the software project on track. So too with Wikipedia.

Hating the humans or even hating the filtering process is a waste of time and energy. The deletionists and the inclusionists both have a role to play. Wikipedia has a lot of things that it is not and the humans are there to keep the project on track. Those who want to delete and want to keep are doing their bit, just as others did by creating a page for _why in the first place.

The creators of any piece of social software must carefully choose where to punch holes in pure computational deterministic perfection to let human attributes like intelligence or taste shine through. Their choices define the project. This "you want X, I want Y, we'll go back and forth citing Wikipedian principles and external sources until a decision emerges or must be made by an administrator" process isn't Wikipedia's weakness, or even its strength, it is Wikipedia.

In social software as in software projects, the human filters sometimes make poor decisions; you can't have the flexibility and intelligence of humans without their flaws. Using Wikipedia but becoming enraged when your favourite marginal entry is deleted is like going to an art gallery but being enraged that you saw something there you didn't like. It's a big waste of time and energy that could better be spent working on this patch I've got to add a relational database to the Linux kernel ....

What We Have vs. What We Want

After reading Dale's post The Rest of the Rest of Us, I have to share a link that my brother sent me to a story about an Indian businessman's venture to give the poor of India a taste of modern life:

An Indian entrepreneur has given a new twist to the concept of low-cost airlines. The passengers boarding his Airbus 300 in Delhi do not expect to go anywhere because it never takes off.

All they want is the chance to know what it is like to sit on a plane, listen to announcements and be waited on by stewardesses bustling up and down the aisle.

In a country where 99% of the population have never experienced air travel, the “virtual journeys” of Bahadur Chand Gupta, a retired Indian Airlines engineer, have proved a roaring success.

As on an ordinary aircraft, customers buckle themselves in and watch a safety demonstration. But when they look out of the windows, the landscape never changes. Even if “Captain” Gupta wanted to get off the ground, the plane would not go far: it only has one wing and a large part of the tail is missing....

As for the passengers, they are too poor to afford a real airline ticket and most have only ever seen the interior of an aircraft in films.

“I see planes passing all day long over my roof,” Selim, a 40-year-old tyre mechanic was quoted as saying. “I had to try out the experience.”

Jasmine, a young teacher, had been longing to go on a plane. “It is much more beautiful than I ever imagined,” she said.

This story provided a counterpoint to Dale's post that was both sobering and inspiring. I'm reminded of a wonderful line from Garrison Keillor, which I heard years ago on A Prairie Home Companion and which has stuck with me ever since: "Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted if you didn't have it." (Hmm. I just looked this up, and wikiquote renders it as "Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known." Not as inspiring. I prefer my remembered version.)

We have so much to be grateful for. We also have so much to fight for, to make the world a better place. It's easy to fall into acceptance of the unacceptable. It is a good world where people can take joy in something we jaded few lament as a tiresome burden. But it is a better world where we can share what we have, finding more delight in achieving and in giving than in having.

Outsourced identity

I'm a big fan of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and I still count David Weinberger and Doc Searls as some of the best thinkers I've met. The big message of the Cluetrain Manifesto was, of course, that markets are conversations. There's a short but well-crafted piece in the New York Times about the conversational marketing of political candidates, which started with Howard Dean but has been continued in style by Ron Paul.

The author, Matt Bai, observes that the current crop of political candidates have been reluctant to accept this fact although companies are beginning to do it more. I definitely agree that candidates need to meet more with their supporters, online and offline, and build platforms and messages based on what they learn from those meetings (presently political messages are coldly crafted by campaign specialists and pollsters). However, I foresee trouble afoot and it might go some way to explain why politicans are slow to embrace this crowdsourcing of their campaigns.

The key difference is between a politician and a product. A product can be anything you want it to be, and the power of markets is their ability to convey information from consumers to producers about exactly what the consumers want. A politician, however, is not infinitely malleable. You can take a silver-spooned religious buffoon and dress him up in the trappings of "compassionate conservatism" and "small government", and surround him with powerful experienced advisers, but at the end of the day he's still a cut-taxes-and-spend faith-based moron to the manor born, albeit one surrounded by a coterie of evil. Similar statements, of course, can be made about economically-inexperienced welfare-suckled liberals whose solution to every economic problem is spending, even when the problem is too much spending.

A candidate comes with beliefs. A candidate comes with experience. I think these are intrinsic and unchanging, based on my observations of politicians. The risk of outsourcing your campaign is that you'll be turned into something you're not. Because ultimately the product is you: your identity. The same risk exists when candidates give themselves over to campaign specialists for branding and positioning, but the difference is that politicians can fire their advisors. They can't fire their supporters.

I know that I've heard far more about one of the minor Republican candidates because of the huge online activity generated by his supporters. It's difficult to read Reddit or Digg without finding stories about him. I'm not naming him, because that would reward the behaviour of gaming social news sites and I'm opposed to that (not least because it makes them less useful to me). If you want to find out who it is then read the NYTimes article (or Reddit or Digg).

I wonder how much of the impression of policies, attitudes, and experience that I've received from the candidate's supporters is truly reflective of the candidate. As with specialist-manufactured identities (such as those of the other candidates), it's impossible to tell. But that's my point—crowd-sourcing your identity and messaging is no more a guarantee of authenticity than hiring professionals. We're still not at the stage where the candidate interacts genuinely and personally in online media (most candidates have staffers writing their blogs, with the exception of Fred Thompson).

When a candidate interacts meaningfully, taking the time to answer questions and thoughtfully tackling new topics, we can see how they think and feel. You'd hope to see this on television, but the debates fail to inform or entertain. The Internet is really our last hope for this.

Getting the Market to Tell the Truth

We like to believe that what we see and hear is real, or at least a reflection of reality. But in fact, our perception is conditioned by what we already believe, and the language we have that lets us recognize the raw data that's coming in to our senses.

For a vivid example of this phenomenon, walk out into a meadow, and watch how long it takes you to distinguish how many different types of grass you see. If you were a farmer, a rancher, or a botanist, you might quickly recognize oats, fescue, rye, and a variety of other grasses. As a city slicker, it will all blend into one, until you spend the time to look, slowly disambiguating all the different species that would jump out at you if you already had names for them. For another example, see my article Remaking the Peer to Peer Meme, which talks in part about how the name change from "free software" to "open source" was an exercise in meme engineering, reframing the boundaries of a subject that everyone thought was already well understood. Or for that matter, just look at What is Web 2.0? Changing the words changed what we were able to see.

Names and concepts are tools that let us see and think, and new concepts help you see the world in new ways. In this light, I wanted to share Ethan Zuckerman's thought-provoking post over at Worldchanging.com about Lester Brown's argument about why conservation, not new energy sources, remains critical in the face of global warming.

Ethan wrote:

“The key to restructuring the global economy is to get the market to tell the truth.” The prices we’re paying now aren’t real prices - our gasoline prices don’t include climate change, respiratory injury and other consequences. If we included these costs, we’d be paying $10 a gallon, not $3. We need to restructure the tax system to lower income taxes and raise carbon taxes, as they’re doing in Sweden.
 

Brown observes that socialism collapsed because it didn’t let the market tell the economic truth. Capitalism, he believes, may collapse because it doesn’t tell the ecological truth.

I love the idea of "getting the market to tell the truth." Put that filter on, and you see a whole lot of things in a new light! This is a useful idea whether or not you're interested in the threat of global warming. It's a fabulous way to think about all kinds of markets. (For example, I used to argue that open source is science, not religion. We don't have to argue for particular positions or ideologies. We have to discover what is true about how software development works in the networked age. It was that discovery process, incidentally, that led me from Open Source to Web 2.0.)

Telling the truth is not a moral concept in this sense, it's a scientific one. It's using our intelligence to understand things in a broader context, and to give ourselves a framework for thinking more clearly, a map that is more accurate, and thus helps us get where we really want to go.

Yearly Database Self-Examination

27b Stroke 6 has a useful list of sites that can help you track and manage your profile in all the databases marketers are collecting on you. I like their idea of a yearly self-examination. It's easy to moan about the loss of privacy. But it is actually possible to learn about and correct some of the data that people are keeping about us, and perhaps even to reduce the amount. But it takes persistence and regular attention, just like exercise and diet.

Aristotle defined virtue as "the control of the appetites by right reason." My brother James, publisher of Travelers Tales, neatly reframed this in modern language as "virtue is knowing what you really want" (and making the right choices to act on that knowledge.) Many of us complain about things, but don't act. Virtue as defined by Aristotle is not an obsolete concept. It's a practical tool for a better life, and it applies in areas from personal good habits to social good habits.

(Aside: some people might be confused by James' formulation, which could be interpreted as a call to hedonism rather than a call to virtue. But in fact, Epicurus, the original father of hedonistic philosophy (who is so often mischaracterized and misunderstood) understood that what people want is what makes them happy, and what makes people happy is not the pursuit of pleasure but the pursuit of what is right and good. In fact, the pursuit of the good, and understanding the relationship between "the good" and human happiness was the whole aim of ancient Greek philosophy.)

But I digress. Part of daily virtue is deciding whether issues like privacy matter to you, and if they do, not just fulminating about them, but taking constant small steps to bring the world into accord with the good that your "right reason" helps you to see.