Citizendium Blog

For me, the bloom is off the rose.

The Internet affects us psychologically and socially in ways that people like Maggie Jackson and Nicholas Carr — to name just two — have been writing about fascinatingly. (I have written and spoken about the individual impact of the Internet a fair bit as well. See 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Perhaps it will make me even more of a Web 2.0 apostate to say so, but FaceBook, Twitter, Digg, many blogs, and many online forums are becoming increasingly obnoxious to me. I’m sorry to have to say it, but it’s true. Why? For a whole variety of reasons. But before I get into the reasons, let me say that these concerns don’t apply so much to Wikipedia, YouTube (except for YouTube forum discussions, which are obnoxious), or my own two new projects, the Citizendium and WatchKnow (still ramping up). Those actually produce (or usefully organize) quite a bit of interesting content. But as to many others — well, for me personally, things have reached a breaking point.

1. Facelessness

Frequently, we find ourselves in conversation with people we don’t know. We have nothing invested with them socially. When I first started talking to people in this way on mailing lists and USENET, back in 1993 I guess it was, online conversations were a bizarre but compelling game. It was still fascinating that I could speak to people who lived halfway across the world. It was the first time that I had conversed very much with people from Europe or Australia. It was also the first time that I could connect with people with very special interests (in my case, the fiddle tradition of County Donegal, Ireland). The social possibilities seemed rich.

Now they seem woefully impoverished. The stunning diversity of humanity online does not make up for the annoying effects of anonymity and disembodiment — or in one word, facelessness.

It so happens that I “know” fairly well on the order of dozens of people, people each of whom I have, at one time or another, spent many hours conversing and/or working. I’ve met some of these people in real life (IRL), but I would not recognize most of them if I were to pass them on the street. And, when you get down to it, I don’t really know much about these people. We only know about our shared interests — Citizendium, Wikipedia, fiddle music, or what have you.

To be honest, this makes me sad. I think that I should know my Internet acquaintances. I’ve spent so much time with them, I feel that I know them — and yet, I don’t. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but I think there is a small sort of tragedy here. It seems pathetic that we so often meet a powerful and natural need for human companionship by sitting down and interfacing with a computer, usually through the medium of the written word. But really to get to know people, we need to be around them — hear their voices, watch their facial expressions, see how they react to things in your immediate vicinity, and in short “pass time” with them.

Please do not write to say that you have gotten to know all sorts of people intimately through deep conversations about many topics that you could not have discussed face-to-face. Yeah, I know. Me too. I have been doing that for a long time myself, so I know it’s possible. And yet a failure to “interface” in person has seemed to make all the difference to the long-lastingness of the relationships. The people who I have met in person after those long conversations I still count as friends; others, whom I never met in person, I’m sorry to say I’ve forgotten some of their names. (That’s an apropos word here — “interface” — isn’t it? On the Internet, we are faceless; so we don’t really connect, we “interface.”)

2. Groupthink

The second reason Web 2.0 is becoming obnoxious to me is that I really, really hate groupthink. It may sound very strange that the main architect of Wikipedia is an individualist, but I am and always have been. Please don’t misunderstand; I am not, contrary to Andrew Lih and the London Review of Books, an Ayn Rand-following Objectivist, and that’s partly because I detest the way so many of Rand’s followers themselves engaged in groupthink without admitting or even knowing it.

But let’s not get off on that tangent. My present complaint is about the groupthink inherent in the design of so many Web 2.0 websites. It is one thing to aggregate opinions and data that reflects opinions, as Google and Slashdot do. (I think James Surowiecki’s excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds has been largely misappropriated in defense of many of these websites, by the way. Not all online crowds are wise.) It is quite another thing to be part of a community that has a variety of mechanisms that allow us to reward people who agree with us and punish those who disagree with us. Those are the tools of conformity and groupthink. As far as I can tell, the rating of comments in Amazon and YouTube are nearly as interesting as the comments themselves. As a result, we’re stuck with a lot of really overinflated ratings on YouTube (though, again, I really like a lot of the content on YouTube, for all the garbage available there) and a lot of pointless head-nodding in Amazon reviews.

(Amazon punishes user scores when your comments are low-rated, and it’s very hard to give a bad review without your comment being low-reviewed in turn. I’d guess this is because most people who care enough about a product to say anything about it generally have good opinions about it. This artificially inflates ratings — good for Amazon, bad for the end user who wants a more accurate view of the product. This is why I always pay careful attention to the well-written bad reviews.)

What’s really disconcerting is when people like NYU’s Clay Shirky seems to celebrate groupthink. If he doesn’t, I wish he would clarify sometime. In this Britannica Blog post, he said essentially that the instantaneous and always-on nature of Internet communication means that people are rapidly losing the patience and even the ability to take longer, more complex stuff (like Tolstoy) on board. But Shirky and some others don’t just assert that this switch to instant, bite-sized communication is happening, they (unlike Nick Carr) seem to celebrate it. I do not, because such communication represents a powerful engine of groupthink, which is both tedious and (if history is a guide) dangerous. If you want to be an individualist, you have to think deeply, a lot, by yourself. I would argue that you really have to come to grips with the great minds of the past (and present), as well. None of this can be done in any “bite-sized” way. But twitters and most blog posts from most people are at once both navel-gazing and intensely attuned to the tastes of one’s audience (real, imagined, or hoped-for). When we write briefly in a medium that makes reading and replying instantaneous, if we aren’t plugged in to whatever happens to be on other people’s minds these days, they won’t read and they won’t reply. We become irrelevant if we’re not mainstream; and you’re bound not to be, because true individualism rarely runs in the mainstream. Of course, the “success metrics” of blogs (Technorati scores, for example) and other social media only encourages this natural human tendency to conformity. I don’t know how any serious intellectual can observe this trend and not be a little nervous.

The result is that we become more and more Borg-like (and, plumped in our chairs, less Borg-like). Sorry, but I will not be assimilated. I just won’t play. I won’t Twitter. I won’t blog about the latest cool thing. I won’t update my Facebook page…often.

Let’s put it this way. I have complex, ever-changing, idiosyncratic tastes and views. The notion that I ought to be particularly concerned about “what’s percolating in blogs now” (for example) deeply offends my individualism. It’s sad and ridiculous that I should let my free time be eaten up by the concerns of an often faceless group of people — especially one that often behaves like a pack of hyenas — rather than my own personal concerns, or by interfacing with the great “cathedral-like minds” of the past. I’ll genuflect where I please, Shirky.

3. Such a godawful waste of time

The first time we see a shiny new Internet toy, we are all oohs and aahs. But, OK…isn’t it time to stop it with the “Which Star Trek character are you?” quizzes on Facebook? (Yes, yes, I have taken such quizzes. I’m not proud of it.) Why do we play these games? Aren’t they getting tiresome already?

Seriously, to my way of thinking, there are worthwhile Web 2.0 projects — like, of course, the Citizendium and WatchKnow (not launched yet) — but it seems like the vast majority of the websites, and many attractive and popular features within more worthwhile sites, are a waste of time.

Now, if you tell me, “You’re not getting it, this is social media, it’s for socialization,” I reply, “Yes, but what kind of socialization?” Are you seriously telling me that you make or foster meaningful friendships with all the silly tools and communities that exist out there? If you want to socialize, shouldn’t you be having a beer, playing pool, watching a game or movie together, taking a hike together — that sort of thing? No, I am not convinced. The fact that it is popular does not mean that this kind of socialization is a healthy way of socialization. It is a pale shadow of the real thing.

If competing for a place on Digg’s front page is of little value qua socialization — and on anybody’s account it has little value in terms of getting knowledge or wisdom — then sit down and tell me soberly: what the hell is it good for?

I know a reply to this will go something like this: you’re whistling in the wind. You’re a luddite. You’re trying to stop the tide. Complaining about Web 2.0 today is like complaining about television in 1960. To which I reply: I know that Web 2.0 is here to say; I helped build it and I know exactly the source of its staying power. I wrote in 2004 that sites like Wikipedia are natural institutions. But every human institution is imperfect, and some have far more flaws than others. Prostitution, for example.

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Wasting our free time in faceless groupthink, staring at a screen instead of jostling shoulders or holding hands — is that where we in post-industrial societies are going? Is it where we want to be going? If you’re a kid, is that what you want society to be like when you grow up? If you’re a parent, is that what you want for your kids?

And if not, how can we use our boundless creativity to find a solution?

The sheer number of fields that are intensely interested in wiki knowledge communities is staggering.  (I’ve learned this partly because I’ve been invited to speak by a surprisingly varied assortment of groups.)  I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while.  Here goes (in no particular order):

• Philosophy - social epistemologists are fascinated by the change in standards of knowledge implicit in a wiki encyclopedia like Wikipedia; there are semi-serious metaphysical issues in the relativistic notions lampooned by Stephen Colbert as “wikiality.”
• Library and information science - two of the field’s concerns are credibility of information and how people get their information; people now get a lot of information online via wiki…
• Communication - the game-changing conversational and production dynamics of wikis are fascinating
• Journalism - the idea of a really big collaborative news wiki, not yet successful but seemingly possible, is frightening and fascinating to journalists
• English/writing - the notion of asynchronous, distributed collaborative writing, wiki-style, has a lot of English majors hot and bothered
• Publishing business - massive groups of volunteers working together to create something that is actually usable by people outside those groups poses a potential threat to, and opportunity for, the traditional publishing business model
• Internet business - ooh!  A new way for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to exploit the sheep and make money!
• Computer science - it’s a major new Internet phenomenon, and CS people study the Internet
• Anthropology and Sociology - wiki communities are possibly more fascinating than the ordinary online community because they involve not just interaction but strong collaboration; the description and quantification of such social behavior is fascinating for people in these fields
• Political science and philosophy - what sort of communities are wiki communities?  How are they governed?  How should they be governed?  (A particular interest of mine.)
• Government - governments are intensely interested in wikis because they allow large numbers of people to organize information together, and one of the biggest headaches in governing is precisely how to let large numbers of people to organize information together
• Futurology - wikis like Wikipedia (and maybe Citizendium) portend great things, because they can bring together millions of people in a common cause; what does that mean for the future?
• Activism - see above, the part about millions of people in a common cause.
• Nonprofits - I was surprised to learn, a few years ago, that Wikipedia is the great success story of the nonprofit world; but this shouldn’t have been surprising, because Wikipedia et al. successfully harness zillions of unpaid volunteers, which is exactly what nonprofits dream of doing.
• The open source/free culture community - because these communities produce free knowledge
• Education - Wikipedia and, potentially, Citizendium and a children’s encyclopedia I would like to see created, have forever changed the way most kids, and college and even grad students, study; and educationists, who love love love group work, are highly interested in how wiki can be used as a teaching tool.
• Science and research generally - the impact of wiki knowledge resources on the perception of their fields, and the possibility of using wikis to organize their knowledge, is highly interesting to researchers of all sorts.

Is anyone else as amazed as I am at the sheer number of disciplines interested in the topic?

Why are wiki knowledge projects of such intense and broad-based interest?

There’s a good reason.  It’s because of what wiki knowledge projects are.

They are a new thing under the sun: international communities of volunteers that collaboratively produce free knowledge, information of use to everyone, distributed online; and, in the form of Wikipedia and soon the Citizendium too, they are remarkably huge and well-used.  The mere description is enough to get a whole bunch of people excited about these communities, even if they don’t understand them very well.

But there is an even more essential explanation: wiki knowledge projects are an enormous coming-together of people to understand the world.  Long ago in the 1990s and in the dark ages before that, learning and imparting knowledge socially was as it were fractured, done through a variety of institutions: schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and of course informally in groups.  And these institutions were inherently separated by space and time.  Most of these institutions will continue, I am sure; they have their place.  But the Internet provides a way that everyone, globally, of all ages, of all professions, of various educational attainment, can participate together in the same (virtual) place and at the same time, in both the creation and consumption of a new sort of knowledge project.

I think most people have vaguely, but not quite, realized that we are coming to grips with a new kind of knowledge institution – one that has the potential to be as powerful as any that has come before it, or more so.  (I introduced the idea of wikis as a new institution in this paper.)  Everyone may not quite understand what they’re dealing with, but a growing number of people understand that this new institution is very deeply important.

And over the coming years, they will realize that it is deeply important that we get it right.

I had never seen ProCon.org until a few hours ago. Having looked over it, I’m surprised that I didn’t know about it before.

ProCon.org is a cluster of issues-oriented websites written and maintained by a staff of hired writers (bright young researchers fresh out of college, from the looks of it), all under the management of a non-profit group with a $700,000 yearly budget. For example, here is their Euthanasia homepage. There are homepages about many other hot-button issues, including “Should marijuana be a medical option?” and “Should prostitution be legal?” and “Is sexual orientation determined at birth?”

The general concept seems, on my first glance, to be very interesting and solid, and the results have the earmarks of being well-executed. There are several standard resources, such as a “1-minute overview,” “Top 10 Pros and Cons,” etc. These would appear to be very valuable resources for students and researchers, although I would suspend judgment on that until I had read through a few of these in great detail, and gotten some expert opinions, which I haven’t done. In addition, there is a wonderfully refreshing full (and well-organized!) disclosure of information about the organization itself (and see this and this and this).

But the most interesting aspect of the site may be its voluminous collection of pro-and-con issues pages. They are organized around groups of topics, and within each topic there are one or more questions. There is a separate page about each question. On the question page, there are two columns, listing “pro” and “con,” and in the columns, quotations from various named sources. Each source is exhaustively described.

The whole project looks wonderful, from the point of view both of a researcher and of someone who loves neutrality in educational resources. My compliments also to whoever designed the site and its software. It is remarkably well-laid-out.

I’m writing about ProCon because I think it is fascinating in several ways. In one way, it represents a wholesale rejection of the idea of community editing, which in this day and age is fascinating. I am impressed by what happened when somebody decided simply to pay a dozen researchers to create free, reliable (apparently), open (in the sense of “full disclosure”), and neutral content. Could Wikipedia have assembled this website? I’m laughing. How about CZ? Well, maybe! But probably not, because this sort of highly organized content, with specific, agreed-upon rules (such as the five-tier “credibility ranking” system) would be rather hard to execute by the herded cats of CZ (much less Wikipedia). Why do I say that? Because I have tried to organize complex content types and complex projects within my various online projects. I’ve occasionally succeeded (as with subpages, sort of), but it is very hit-or-miss (again…as with subpages). Besides, I can also tell you from similar experience that a lot of the work that has gone into ProCon.org is “gruntwork,” and not the sort of work that people sign up to do as an online volunteer.

I am also impressed by the apparent care and thought that went into making the resource as a whole both neutral and open. They seem to have really thought out just what you would have to do in order to create a neutral debate site, and have gone far above and beyond the approach that most newspapers or encyclopedias take. Among other things, I am glad that they both let partisans state their own views as forcefully as possible, and give amazingly full information about the partisans and their affiliations. In short, I am heartened that — it seems — there might be somebody out there who believes as much as I do in the possibility and beneficiality of neutrality. Of course, I am aware that there might be some people who are not convinced on this point. I know that a lot of people detest all attempts at neutrality and insist that it is in principle impossible. (But I think they are confused.) So I open the question up to you: is ProCon.org neutral? Does it illustrate ideals that the likes of CZ and Wikipedia should be following?

(By the way, I have no connections at all, that I know of, with ProCon.org.)

This post was linked by the New York Times online business section.

It’s been a pretty big news story: for a few days, editing of Wikipedia was effectively blocked throughout much of the U.K., because Wikipedia had, and still has, an uncensored reproduction of the Scorpions’ album cover for Virgin Killer. This shows a completely naked pre-pubescent girl in a sexually suggestive pose.

Does it bother you that Wikipedia reproduces an image that is, arguably, child pornography? It does me. Now, I think the Internet ought to be safe for porn, but not child porn. It was Jimmy Wales’ Bomis.com, after all, that den of soft-core porn “glamour photography” (the Jimbo-approved euphemism), that paid my paychecks when I was starting Nupedia and Wikipedia. (I often used to say that Wikipedia was built using good fertilizer.) But I don’t think that a general encyclopedia, used by millions of school kids (at least at home) should host sexually suggestive pictures of naked pre-pubescent girls. That ought to be obvious to Wikipedians, and the fact that it’s not is yet more evidence that not all is well in Wikipedia-land.

Perhaps it’s time to remind the world that there is a wonderful new, and growing, alternative: Citizendium (CZ). If you’re reading this on the CZ blog, you no doubt know that we are another free wiki encyclopedia project, but started by a co-founder of Wikipedia, yours truly. (But I’m writing it so you can forward it to family, friends, and colleagues who don’t know about CZ.) A lot of people don’t know what we’re here for and they have bought all sorts of misinformation about us. Let’s fix that, shall we?

Let me sum up the case for CZ. We are still around, we’re still growing, and we’re steadily becoming a viable alternative to Wikipedia. We are small, but vigorous. We have no vandalism. We have grown steadily over the one-and-a-half years since our public launch, and we’ll be breaking 10,000 articles in the next few months. I won’t bore you (again) with the reasons, but I think that there will come a tipping point for us, after which a lot more people will know about us and swell our ranks. And they should! We aren’t going away, and even at the current rate, we’re going to have hundreds of thousands of articles in the long run. We’re non-profit, Creative Commons, community-managed, and we’re open to everyone who is willing to use their real names and identities. We’re a remarkably pleasant and well-behaved community, and I think we do great work. We have pioneered a new model, a public-expert hybrid community; we’ve shown that it is not just viable, it is in many ways a clearly superior model for the organization of an open, online knowledge community.

And, of course, the cover of Virgin Killer will never appear on the pages of CZ.

Now, if you are harrumphing (rather ridiculously, I might add, but that’s just me I suppose) that of course the cover of Virgin Killer should not be “censored,” and that Wikipedia is better than CZ insofar as it doesn’t feature such “censorship,” then let me point something out. Let me point out the wonderful, delicious fact that you can stick with Wikipedia. The two projects naturally attract delightfully complementary groups of people. The people who want to hide behind pseudonyms, who want to play governance games in order to push their biases, and who want to prove their maturity and enlightenment by putting up pictures of naked little girls, can stick with Wikipedia. I’ll be delighted if they do. But I think that in the long run, you’ll see that a lot more people will want to contribute under the more sensible CZ system.

Time will tell, but you know, I was right about the viability of the Wikipedia model long before it was popular or even known to almost everyone reading this post. And I have a strong and well-justified belief in the viability of the CZ model, a belief that is well-informed by my experience actually developing the Wikipedia model, many other online projects, and thinking deeply about online knowledge communities.

We’ll be hosting a big Citizendium Open House in January, as a way to boost this great project to the next level and welcome a lot of new people who might be curious about the project. Be on the lookout for announcements here and elsewhere.

A friend told me that my name came up on a Prairie Home Companion (a famous U.S. public radio show), but he didn’t tell me it was in a poem. Well, thanks, Garrison Keillor, for the recognition.

Open blog — your comments requested! 

I want to open up the Citizendium blog to general discussion of an important topic: how can we keep Google (and the larger Internet) from “making us stupid”?  I solicit your ideas.  Click on “Comments,” or scroll down to the bottom, and share them!

(more…)

Here’s another essay, which I’ve been saving up.

Mark Pesce, in a talk that appeared on Edge.org, appears to argue that the plugged-in world of the future will foster an anti-democratic revolution. Stated briefly and clearly, his argument goes like this:

(1) As more and more people get online and get connected, they join communities, like Wikipedia, that empower (”hyperempower”) them.

(2) Wikipedia and other successful online communities are not democratic; they combine anarchy with mob rule.

(3) Increasingly, these empowered people will turn their collective attention to the problems of politics, as Barack Obama’s online campaign community does.

(4) In embracing politics, they will not become less anarchical, or less apt to be organized by mob rule. Political action will look like Wikipedia’s anarchical, mob-rule community.

(5) So, sooner or later, these mob-like political groups will seize power from democracies.

Apparently, Pesce thinks such an event would be a good thing; as he says in his speech, “representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and rebooting them is not enough.”

This is a transparently poor argument. Why think all online communities are or will be anarchical or mob-like, like Wikipedia? They aren’t. Why think that, just because people become politically mobilized online, groups like Obama’s will eventually try to start a real (bloody) political revolution? Maybe they will, but any strong claim like this requires strong evidence, and Pesce hasn’t given any. Finally, why think it follows that just because online communities are anti-democratic, the meatspace societies such communities favor will also be anti-democratic? Of course, this does not follow. Ignoring the more radical outliers, Obama’s followers are Democrats. I am quite sure that if you were to survey even some of the most radical and annoying of Wikipedians, you would find the number of them who actually oppose democracy to be very small indeed.

I think Pesce, and many other would-be Internet revolutionaries, have forgotten that we are still in the early stages of the Internet. Most people who spend much time in the Wikipedia community find that they dislike its governance; many would prefer something more sensible, with a few clear, established rules and a reasonably reliable way to enforce them. Since I was there, I can assure you that Wikipedia could have been instituted that way. Moreover, Wikipedia has flourished precisely because of certain definite policies. It’s not a stretch to say that the only reason Wikipedia has been as successful as it has been has been its commitment to certain policies (which a certain non-anarchist, yours truly, helped to establish in its first year), such as creating encyclopedia articles (as opposed to personal essays, for example), neutrality, and not signing articles, with discussion about an article happening on a separate (”talk”) page. There was a time — in the project’s first year — when these policies were, each of them, at least somewhat controversial. We easily could have gone farther and added a low-key, bottom-up role for experts. Also, it would have caused a fork, but we could have instituted the use of real names as a policy, at least for administrators. Such policies would have made it possible to enforce rules and approve articles, as the growing Citizendium now does. The point is that Wikipedia’s development has not been wholly anarchical, and indeed its success has depended precisely on its not being so. Moreover, less anarchical projects might well do better in the long run; I hope so, but we’ll see.

Pesce is not the first to suggest that the Internet will result in a massive anarchist revolution. At the risk of banality, let me say that I favor good old-fashioned democracy both on-line and off, and I obviously oppose the anti-democratic, mob-rule society Pesce appears to desire. I do not think that the mere fact that Wikipedia has a dysfunctional anarchical/mob-rule governance system indicates that democracy itself is somehow outmoded — that seems to be Pesce’s inference, and it is as silly as it sounds. In his talk, I should clarify, Pesce does not really say what he’s in favor of. But I can make a reasonable guess. He says that our inevitable destiny is the destruction of democracy and the “hyper-empowerment” of individuals. Well, in politics, democracy is the only way to “hyper-empower” people; anarchy leads to mobocracy, and mobocracy disempowers all but those with the stomach and ability to lead the mob.

However all that is, and as many people have said, I would say instead that the Internet is more likely to strengthen our democracies. Pesce has nothing like a coherent or plausible argument to the contrary — merely a “just so story,” wishful thinking delivered with breathless, barely concealed hopefulness.

UPDATE (July 30): an almost identical version of this appears on the Britannica Blog.

The part of the Britannica Blog “Your Brain Online” debate that I am interested in is this question: does Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, mean the end of the Great Books or of liberal education? And is anybody really saying that it does mean that? I’ve written once before on this question, but I would like to clarify my position.

Let’s get clear on what the problem here is. The problem is not that most people are in danger of becoming “uncultured”; there never was a time or a place in which most people were particularly cultured, i.e., thoroughly familiar with the history, literature, science, religion, and so forth that defines a culture. The problem — if we can believe what some Web 2.0 revolutionaries say — is that those who are cultured are doomed to become uncultured, by the inevitable influence of the Internet on our minds, at least by the standards of liberal education. And our children will never be cultured again, not by the standards of liberal education. Rather, they will be acculturated by the Internet. It seems that Clay Shirky, just for example, believes that the only things of cultural importance in the future will take place in “the crowd” online, a “group mind” or a “collective intelligence” — even if the crowd looks in the future a lot different from how it looks in 2008. Of course, I could easily be misunderstanding Clay, and so I want to make this point very generally, and not as an attack on Clay. My concern is that, if we are on a vector toward the radical collectivization of knowledge in this way, the products of the best individual minds of the past will become less and less valued by anybody. Yet they plainly do have considerable value, on virtually any educated person’s view now. If we did not think so, we would not buy the books of the people who have posted on the Britannica Blog, for instance: no individual mind would be worth spending so much time on.

If you are not convinced by the example of Tolstoy, think of various dense, system-building philosophers. If anyone were to say — and I dare not accuse anyone of actually saying this, as that truly would be damning — that such thinkers are no longer relevant, because they weren’t part of anything like a Blogosphere, that would be to declare your own personal intellectual bankruptcy, your utter failure to benefit from a liberal education. Let’s be serious, here. If you actually think the Internet’s “group mind” somehow renders passé all the difficult, great books, which shaped our civilizations — if that is what you really want to do — then you certainly are not, not in any way, “on the cutting edge.” I don’t concede that one inch. If you say such a thing, then it seems to me you have merely given us embarrassing evidence that you not really fit to be reasoned with.

But I very much doubt that such philistinism — and that might be too good a word for it, because what it is, is just crude, unserious, uneducated, or silly nonsense — is actually the direction we are travelling in. There are far too many people who still actually appreciate all those old books, and the value of the liberal education that only they can impart. Moreover, if we are travelling toward such widespread philistinism, I have not seen the case made convincingly that we are. Merely to point to the power of the Wikipedia model, or the sheer amount of information in the Blogosphere and all the rest of the Internet, does not even come close to making the case. Pointing out that some of us as it were compulsively check for e-mail and other short Internet communications, and have little time or concentration for long reading, also does not prove that we are, all of us, doomed to become philistines.

Do I really need to point out the virtues of liberal education and how they apply in the present case? Sadly, perhaps I do. “How soon we forget.” Liberal education is so called because it liberates the mind from a million prejudices, replacing them with knowledge of history, science, and culture, and above all making it possible to think through new problems. (For those who are not familiar with the phrase, “liberal education” refers to “the liberal arts,” not to a position on the political spectrum.) So far from being irrelevant, nothing could be more useful in the proper evaluation and appreciation of newfangled stuff like Web 2.0 than a liberal education. Is it any wonder that the principals in the debate are all, quite obviously, possessed of a liberal education and so familiar with great artists and thinkers like Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Proust?

My concern is not “nostalgic,” of course — why would it be? To say so assumes, first of all, that the Great Books (not just Tolstoy of course) are in fact passé, that we have somehow “moved on” from them. But nobody has established that, not in the slightest way. More importantly, nobody in the Britannica debate ever clarified in what sense the Internet poses any sort of threat to how we value the Great Books — other than that we might have to rouse ourselves a little if we want to read them. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with nostalgia or with silly romanticization of a novel-gobbling past. It has to do with a proper valuation of human minds and of what they have produced, both individually and in the aggregate, from around the world and from the dawn of recorded history until the present. If someone really did want to dismiss the power and interest of individual human minds and what they are capable of producing as somehow passé, he would thereby do away with all those great books, and the strange, ever-conflicted, varied culture that resulted from them, and I suppose replace them with the Borg. You will be assimilated; resistance is futile. Right? It’s techno-socially determined. You can’t do anything about it.

Does anybody in this debate really believe that Web 2.0 spells the end of the great books and of liberal education, and its entire replacement by the productions of undifferentiated “crowds”?

Surely nobody really believes that, or even anything like it. I do wonder, of course, what the perceived merits of the Great Books and liberal education will be, once we have gone through the massive societal transformation that, I fully agree, the Internet is bringing us. I would like to point out that if we do give up the foundations of Western civilization, indeed the written records of all civilizations, and if we give up even any pretention to having to become acquainted with those records, we give up a very great deal.

The prospect is nothing short of horrifying. It would be quite literally the death of civilization as we have known it. That means all the good parts as well as the bad. It essentially would herald not a bright new world, cleaned of bad old influences, but very probably a new dark age. After all, those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

As an aside, I should also state (apparently, it’s necessary) that I am not opposed to Web 2.0. If you know me, you’ll realize this is just silly. I just have a different idea about what direction we should take, that’s all. (For some clues, see 1, 2, 3, 4.) I am much more optimistic about the prospects of the Internet and what it means for human civilization. I think it will enhance liberal education as never before, and more likely to usher in a new enlightenment than to cause the death of civilization.

Just for your interest, I have put together a “best of this blog” category. I’ve included only stuff written and “published” originally in this blog — not papers or CZ pages.

The following describes an idea I had a few weeks ago while attending an entrepreneur’s conference in Paris.  I have little desire and even less time (between Citizendium and Watchknow) to pursue this myself, so I commend it to anyone who is interested.  I want to kick it out the door and see if it survives on its own.  I will not be working on it myself.  I was informed that this idea resembles the moribund PICS project somewhat.  I view this as an interesting possible alternative to the too-influential search behemoths, Google and Yahoo, as well as their various would-be Web 2.0 competitors: it would make Web search entirely distributed, decentralized, and less subject to the control of any single interest.  By the way, I circulated the idea among a set of very distinguished Internet thinkers and was graced with some interesting replies.  Suffice it to say that quite a few very smart people think this is worth thinking about, at the very least.  “The case for syndicated Web ratings,” below, captures why I am so excited about this idea.

The idea

Should there be a universal standard, like RSS, that enables people to rate (and otherwise describe) websites — and to syndicate that data? If there were such a standard and such syndicated data, search engines could seed their results in creative ways using the data. That’s the basic idea.

Ultimately, such a standard could greatly decentralize the power of Internet search. How? Well, imagine five kinds of tools.

(1) Tools and data types for the ratings themselves:

(a) “Rating toolbars,” like StumbleUpon’s, allow you to recommend and rate a website you’re looking at. In addition, you can write a description, add tags, and rate it on specific dimensions like length, accuracy, grade level, and “family-friendliness.” The toolbar then publishes a “feed” of your ratings wherever you choose. The only required data for an individual rating are: URL and up-or-down.

(b) Moreover, it could be possible to rate another person’s or entity’s feed (meta-rating), as well as a feed of feeds (meta-meta-rating).

(c) Moreover, a feed could have meta-data about the person doing the rating, listing facts like education level, age, ethnicity, political views, or whatever a person might feel is relevant.

(2) Social bookmarking services, such as Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, as well as websites like Mahalo and Wikia Search, would be encouraged to publish their data using the standard (or at least allow their users to publish their own work easily). Mapping from existing attributes used by, e.g., del.icio.us to a well-designed standard would seem to be easy.

(3) Various “Web rating registrars” collect many feeds in one central location. Most registrars are absolutely open; a few are carefully edited. Moreover, most registrars, based on internal, statistical analysis of ratings, and/or meta- and meta-meta-ratings, offer a service that labels certain feeds as recommending porn, spam, and virus-infested webpages — a sort of distributed blacklist of both websites and of feeds.

(4) Search engines then use the data aggregated by the registrar(s). Due to the quantity and variety of data published in the aggregated feeds, it becomes possible to weight and filter search results not just on Google-style pagerank algorithms, but also things like:

(a) quality according to generally trusted sources; or quality according to your peer group; or quality according to academic and academic-endorsed sources; etc.

(b) whether the page contains porn, spam, or viruses.

(c) webpage type (e.g., one attribute might allow us to search just those pages that are marked as movie reviews).

(d) education level of resource (i.e., suitability for children; or post-graduate work).

(5) Making distributed rating into a Digg-type game.  As new pages came on the Web, once they had a certain minimum number of ratings, you can easily imagine “fresh meat” websites that enable and encourage people to rate them even more, letting users rate the newest, most popular stuff coming online about their particular interests. This would work a little like Digg or Reddit, except that the inputs would not come from individual users “Digging” a story, but from countless decentralized feeds rating a fresh page for the first time.

The case for syndicated Web ratings

On first glance at least, the case for syndicated Web ratings is surprisingly, even startlingly compelling.

Improves poor search engine results.  Probably the most common complaint about search engine results is that, while often relevant and useful, they do not always place the highest quality material front and center.  The best is often buried deep. The system is not broken, but it could use improvement.  If there were enough syndicated Web rating data, and effective mechanisms were in place to combat gaming the rating system (e.g., using statistical analysis of ratings, meta-ratings, and “certified” rating providers), the result could be used by search engines to deliver far higher-quality results.  This would also subtly encourage people to create higher-quality Web pages, i.e., pages that are more likely to be highly-rated.  (Cf. here this paper.)

Decentralizes search power.  Not only would the system be open, it would be fully distributed and decentralized, like the Blogosphere.  If well-constructed, a syndicated Web rating system would place the most powerful, important dataset for making the Web searchable directly in the hands of Internet users.  This could essentially “level the playing field” and could be profoundly disruptive to Google et al.

Many more people would be involved in vetting the Web.  There are huge numbers of people using Digg, del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon, as well as newer services like Mahalo and Wikia Search.  But their users are contributing just to those search/bookmarking services, and are not benefitting the search results used on a daily basis on services like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com.  How many more people would take the time to recommend and rate Web pages if they knew their data would be distributed across the Web, and would help the proper placement of websites they know and love?  It could be an order of magnitude or more: suddenly, we all have a direct vote about search results.

Speeds up recognition of good new websites.  Websites would not have to wait for months or even years for their quality to be recognized, as they do now. Right now, Google dominates search, and Google’s rankings are effectively but still somewhat lamely determined by a somewhat mysterious, proprietary algorithm involving the most-linked-to and most-clicked-on websites. Since it often takes some really excellent pages months or even years to receive the number of links they “deserve” — if they ever do receive them — it takes that long for them to rise up in Google’s search results. By contrast, if we could seed search results in line with massive amounts of data about website ratings, a really excellent new website might be placed at the top of the rankings almost immediately.

Could be used to tailor search to the individual user. With data about education level, a search engine could, on request, return only those pages appropriate for a 5-7 year old — or for post-doctoral researchers.  Moreover, with data included in the feed about the rater, we would be enabled to see, for any given search, what the top rated websites were for our peer group. How teenage girls rate a news article might differ greatly from how 40-year-old men rate them — and this would be useful data for both groups to have.  With data about pornography contributed by trusted sources, the user could opt to have a search guaranteed to omit pornography.  In general, the adoption of the standard could improve the flexibility and power of Internet search.  And because it would be an open standard, it would become possible to use the standard (and later versions of the standard) to organize all manner of distributed Internet rating, description, organization projects, possibly more effectively than proprietary products have done.  For example, the system could foster an open project to create a free, more powerful search alternative to proprietary “walled garden” services for children and education.  (See item (4) under “The idea” above.)

Could be a way to combat Web abuse.  In particular, a syndicated Web rating system could be used as a neutral, universally distributed protocol for publishing and sharing data about what websites are considered sources of viruses, spam, porn, and criminal activity.  These problems — long considered the most serious of Internet problems — might be best attacked by widely distributing, decentralizing, and only then organizing the means to attack them.

If this analysis is correct, the idea could be deeply disruptive — but positively so.

How gaming the system could be combatted

What stops people from posting multiple feeds, all of them favorable to their own websites?  Indeed, won’t gaming the system be far worse in this case than under the present system?  At least under the present system, if you want to game the system, you must go to the trouble of creating interlinking “dummy” websites and spamming blogs with links, and so forth — that makes gaming the system relatively difficult.  But this system makes it possible to influence search results directly.  This might be why no such system has been created yet.  That, anyway, is what a critic might say.

The solution is that most search engines will not be so silly as to aggregate the ratings in any simple way, or treat all feeds (or individual ratings) equally.  First, it will be possible to “certify” and rate feeds; second, there will be internal indicators of abuse that search engine coders will be able to analyze and exploit.

It is entirely possible that a search engine will not use a feed if it is not in some way adequately “endorsed.”  Endorsement might be via networks of certified feeds, which have a distributed protocol allowing network members to vet other feeds.

The internal indicators of abuse might prove to be more powerful, however.  If a certain website is often described as “porn,” for example, and if it is recommended by a feed as non-porn, the feed registrar might discard that particular feed.  More generally, ratings and descriptions will be mutually reinforcing in a variety of ways, so that it will be possible to devise algorithms to detect abuse automatically.

But probably the most effective way to combat system-gaming will be a combination of certifying feeds and internal data analysis.  While it might be easier to post a feed in bad faith than to create a web of supporting websites, the data in the system itself will be far richer and thus capable of creating more powerful, creative solutions to the gaming problem.

Indeed, it seems entirely possible that we could, using syndicated Web ratings, engineer systems that are virtually perfect in their elimination of virus-ridden websites, porn, really bad blogs, and other stuff.  At bottom, the combination of transparent, rich data and the fact that most Internet users act in good faith might mean the disappearance of cruft from our search results.

What if the system succeeds?

“But wait,” you might say, “I don’t like the idea that cruft will disappear from search results.  There is something comforting about cruft being in our search results.  That means that any schlub like me can get the ear of the whole world.  Even if this Web rating system is distributed and decentralized, it is not really egalitarian.  Wouldn’t it mean the effective silencing of people who are unjustly regarded as ‘not good enough,’ or not mainstream enough, to be rated highly?”

The short answer is: no, and in fact the effect might be precisely the opposite: it would probably empower the regular folks even more the current search system.  Since meta-tagging would enable us to label our feeds in various ways, we could search for results that are important and relevant for our peers.  Moreover, a syndicated Web rating system would allow us to pluck undiscovered talents out of the obscurity that Google’s popularity-based algorithm places them in.

Besides — if the new system has undesirable results, no doubt Google or a Google-like system, that does not use syndicated ratings, will still exist and still be heavily used.

This project should be developed openly

This effort should be developed openly in the free-for-all way that characterizes much open source development.  This is absolutely required, in fact, because otherwise there will likely not be adequate adoption of the standard.  The standard should be propagated by an open, neutral consortium, not any single entity, and certainly not any for-profit business.  No single interest should have control over a standard that could be so consequential.

I have no interest in leading the effort, or even participating very much in it, except as a user.  I am merely putting the idea out there and hoping that others, who have more experience writing standards and working with syndication, will be motivated to create the components of the system.  My main concern is that the standard itself be adopted according to an open, democratic process, and not be unduly influenced by any single interest.

Questions and answers

Shouldn’t we discuss this idea and make sure it really is a good one before we rush off headlong to implement it?

Yes.  Hopefully the discussion will happen on the Blogosphere, Slashdot, and elsewhere as well.  I asked for comments on SharedKnowing, for what it’s worth.  It’s a Big Idea and it would affect everyone online deeply, and so it needs a huge amount of vetting and exploration.

How would I create a Web ratings feed?  I wouldn’t want to write XML by hand.

If the idea has legs, people will create free software that will write the XML for you, as well as post it automatically (i.e., syndicate it for anyone’s use).  It is easy to imagine people writing toolbars like the StumbleUpon toolbar, which allow you to rate websites and provide other information about them, which info is then syndicated automatically.

Where would the feeds be posted?

Think of this on analogy with blog feeds.  One could post one’s ratings feed anywhere online, where they could be found by webcrawlers.  But one could also register the feed with various feed registrars (in the same way you register a blog feed with Technorati), or post directly to the registrars.

What might the markup for a rating feed look like?

 We define a markup schema that allows people to declare whether they think a Web page, or a whole domain or subdomain, is high quality, or garbage; and to describe and evaluate it on any number of features. Just for example — we need not use these exact tags or features — we might write something like this:

<webrating>
<url>http://en.citizendium.org/</url>
<url-equiv>http://www.citizendium.org/</url-equiv>
<domain-or-page>domain</domain-or-page>
<overall-rating>7</overall-rating>
<overall-rating-yes-or-no>yes</overall-rating-yes-or-no>
<content-quantity>4</content-quantity>
<content-quality>9</content-quality>
<education-level>college</education-level>
<website-type>reference</website-type>
<pornography>no</pornography>
<keywords>encyclopedia reference wiki free open content collaboration</keywords>
<description>A new wiki encyclopedia project inviting everyone to participate under their own real names, and making a special, low-key role for experts.</description>
</webrating>

What elements should be required by the standard?

It seems that search engines could be improved with just two officially “required” elements: the URL and a “yes or no” overall rating.  This would allow, e.g., digg.com users to publish their ratings.  It is possible that after further discussion we will decide that certain other elements might be needed.  Of course, feed aggregators and registrars, and search engines, might require various additional pieces of information.

There is a difference between “high quality” and usefulness.  Some academic papers, for instance, might be very high quality, but useful for only a very small number of people.  How can this be taken into account in the ratings standard?

It could be approached in many ways, no doubt.  For example, we might adopt “usefulness” as an element.  One might then rate a page with an academic paper on it highly (or not!) in terms of reliability, but low in terms of usefulness-for-me.  The default “yes-or-no” rating would then be interpreted as usefulness-for-me, not as high quality.  Another idea would be simply to make use of an education level element, or even a special attribute for academic papers.  In any event, this is the sort of question of detail that those developing the standard should think long and hard about.

How could the system get started?

You might say this is an interesting idea, but how can it get started?  Probably, if it happens at all, entrepreneurs will make it happen.  The system would involve, in fact, at least four different new business types, namely (1), (3), (4), and (5) under “The idea” above, and existing social bookmarking websites might be persuaded to drive it forward as well.

Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet indicates that something like this is the natural next step.  There is a natural progression of search “generativity”:

1. The Yahoo! directory — proprietary, centralized directory
2. Google — proprietary, centralized search
3. Mahalo and Wikia Search — free, centralized search enhanced by human input
4. Syndicated Web ratings — free, decentralized search enhanced by human input (with data support for dynamically created tagging and directory systems)

In short, this may the prototypical “idea whose time has come.”  If enough people are interested, the support for a truly distributed project like this will quickly appear.  But if people aren’t that excited about it, it will die a perhaps well-deserved death.

But another reason to be optimistic that the standard, once published, will be rapidly adopted and used, is the simple fact that there are so many people already engaged in rating and recommending websites, even though the ratings benefit only the other users of the websites. But how many more of us would actually take the time to rate and describe websites, if we knew the work would positively affect the results of all competitive Web search services? In other words, what if we knew that our vote would count? We’d vote!

Shouldn’t we simply pressure social bookmarking websites to work on a standard and use it to publish their data?

It couldn’t hurt.  If we should target any websites for such pressuring, it should be those that are already sympathetic to the ideals of the open source community.  Go to work on them.  Of course, many will prefer to ignore this idea, because it is profoundly disruptive.

I support this idea and I want to make it happen.  What should I do?

Here are some things you could do:

1. Write about it.  Debate about it.  Help build the critical mass of people interested in the idea.
2. Join forums that are discussing the idea, and work toward a shared understanding of what the standard should look like.
3. If there is support for the idea, eventually someone will set up a wiki to work on the standard.  Then you could help work on the standard.
4. Start writing software, or adapting your current software — preferably, free software — to do the things listed under “The idea” above.  Then announce your software and get other people working on it.  Standards are often developed alongside applications that use them.

The idea is loose…and it’s up to you and the innovation commons in general to make it happen, if it’s going to happen.