This and the other earlier discussion reminds me of my early days researching open source communities (7 years ago!)- a lot of people just simply refused to believe that any good could come out of distributed innovation communities - we now know better.... for me wikipedia is still in its early days and the rules are just now being figured out --- for example it is now being reported that NEW ARTICLES - will need to be started by REGISTERED Users: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051205/ap_on_hi_te/wikipedia_rules graf: Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday. People who modify existing articles will still be able to do so without registering. The change comes less than a week after John Seigenthaler, a one-time administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, complained in an op-ed published in USA Today that a biography of him on Wikipedia claimed he had been suspected in the assassinations of the former attorney general and his brother..... Today - coincidentally - today I had the pleasure of hosting Denise Anthony from Dartmouth at the Sloan Innovation Seminar - her paper is VERY interesting because it shows that there is significant value from the anonymous contributors: Her paper: "Explaining Quality in Internet Collective Goods: Zealots and Good Samaritans in the case of Wikipedia" is available at: http://web.mit.edu/iandeseminar/Papers/Fall2005/anthony.pdf Abstract: One important innovation in information and communication technology developed over the past decade was organizational rather than merely technological. Open source production is remarkable because it converts a private commodity (typically software) into a public good. A number of studies examine the factors motivating contributions to open source production goods, but we argue it is important to understand the causes of high quality contributions to such goods. In this paper, we analyze quality in the open source online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We find that, for users who create an online persona through a registered user name, the quality of contributions increases as the number of contributions increase, consistent with the idea of experts motivated by reputation and committed to the Wikipedia community. Unexpectedly, however, we find the highest quality contributions come from the vast numbers of anonymous “Good Samaritans” who contribute infrequently. Our findings that Good Samaritans as well as committed “Zealots” contribute high quality content to Wikipedia suggest that open source production is remarkable as much for its organizational as its technological innovation that enables vast numbers of anonymous one-time contributors to create high quality, essentially public goods. Best, Karim Judd Antin wrote:
An interesting side note: the distinction between 'transient' and 'fixed' communication or media appears to underlay the legal notion of defamation. Wikipedia doesn't fit cleanly into either of those categories. Should a work that is universally and indefinitely editable be subject to the same requirements as traditional slander and libel? It could certainly have an effect on an individual's reputation, but at the same time that individual (or any other) is empowered to immediately remove the offending passage.
--Judd
--Judd Antin School of Information Management & Systems (SIMS) University of California Berkeley jantin@sims.berkeley.edu http://technotaste.com blog: http://technotaste.com/blog
Barry Wellman wrote:
the current AOIR debate about wikipedia highlights another problem. It is quite easy to make legally defamatory statements on Wikipedia.
Normally, the remedy is a law suit for civil damages.
But if the author is anonymous, whom does one sue?
And yes, I know that defamation law suits are expensive and hard to do. But at least the legal remedy is there in principle -- when the author is known. But the Wikipedia approach is like someone flooding the mail with anonymous defamatory photocopies.
Barry _____________________________________________________________________
Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________
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-- Karim R. Lakhani MIT Sloan | The Boston Consulting Group Mobile: +1 (617) 851-1224 http://spoudaiospaizen.net http://web.mit.edu/lakhani/www | http://opensource.mit.edu My *new* book: http://tinyurl.com/cjxj6