Trusting Everybody to Work Together
- This article by Pete Forsyth, a former editor-in-chief of The Signpost, is an edited version of an article published by Wikipedia @ 20 (CC BY 4.0)
I first embraced Wikipedia's radical, open invitation to write an encyclopedia in 2006. Most other web platforms at that time featured restrictive permission schemes. Their software, policies, and culture sharply limited users' ability to express their ideas. Wikipedia's platform, by contrast, mostly stayed out of my way. I was free to explore my interests and share my knowledge. I quickly got to know and work with other people who shared my interests, without needing to seek permission first. The site's documentation and policies encouraged me to use my own judgment and contribute what I felt was worthwhile; and its inner workings reinforced that ethos, enabling me to simply follow my own conscience and collaborate.
Wikipedia's creators eliminated the editorial bottleneck in traditional encyclopedia writing by using a flexible software platform that empowered contributors. But the original wiki software they had adopted in 2001 wasn't fully up to the task. Key policies and software features had to be developed before Wikipedia could truly become "the encyclopedia anyone can edit"—that is, before "anyone" could come to include hundreds of thousands of people working in concert. Once implemented, those early improvements to the platform also benefited discerning readers, providing insights into the production process. This element—facilitating reader insight into writers' actions and motivations—may at the time have seemed an ancillary benefit, secondary to the need to support a burgeoning community of writers and editors. But transparency to readers has become a key component of Wikipedia's identity, and as Wikipedia's star has risen, many of us have come to expect greater transparency from more traditional publications as well.
Those building the early versions of Wikipedia's software were guided more by instinct than by careful planning. Staff and volunteers deliberated individual features on the Wikipedia-L email list and on the wiki itself. Reading through those old messages, which are publicly archived, one gets to know a community in pursuit of a shared ideal, rather than a businesslike group pursuing a carefully planned strategic roadmap. The email list discussions are rife with aspirations and idealism, but they lack the kind of gravitas one might expect in the founding days of what would become one of the world's top websites. Wikipedia's earliest architects, both staff and volunteer, managed to construct a robust core of policies, procedures, and software that in many ways outstripped the projects planned out by the executives and investors of other major websites.
Two decades into Wikipedia’s existence, the importance of some of the key software features introduced in those early days is not widely understood. As I'll discuss, the early software of Wikipedia empowered writers and readers alike with a complete picture of the activities involved in producing the site's content; but more recent changes to the software have at times eroded the completeness of information available to those users, seemingly with little appreciation for its significance. Maybe the early architects' scorn for such norms as formal hypotheses, approval mechanisms, analysis of risk vs. opportunity, and detailed reports was a double-edged sword; it enabled them to accomplish incredible things at an inflection point in the Internet's evolution, but it did little to establish broad buy-in to a set of principles that could guide future efforts. Since there was no clearly-articulated central theory in the early days, we have little to go on in explaining how Wikipedia's basic infrastructure has come to support so much generative collaboration. A clear understanding of Wikipedia's early success would be of interest to Internet enthusiasts and historians, but it would have great practical value as well. Such an understanding should inform the kind of strategic vision and planning that a project of Wikipedia's current scale requires.
A theory explaining the unexpected success of Wikipedia could also inform other projects focused on organizing people around the globe to build an information commons. Other sites have tried and failed to replicate Wikipedia's success, but have those efforts been driven by a fulsome understanding of why Wikipedia succeeded? In the absence of a clear, widely accepted theory, we should view definitive statements that Wikipedia's success cannot be replicated with skepticism. We should hesitate to dismiss the possibility of other projects emulating Wikipedia's success, and instead continue to ask basic questions, until we arrive at satisfactory answers.