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August 6, 2006
Mitch Kapor: The Case for Wikifying Politics
Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gave a great presentation this morning at the last day of the Wikimania conference about the potential of using wikis to transform political discourse and reaching greater consensus. I've put his direct quotes in quotes, though a large amount of the rest of the notes are close to verbatim, because Mitch speaks at a perfect pace for liveblogging. :-) -andy
Mitch's training started as a 1960s flower child - a disc jockey and a teacher of meditation, along with being a mental health worker. He bought an Apple II in 1978, and it changed his life - "My first experience with a disruptive technology."The technology adoption curve - showed the famous bell curve of early adopters, pragmatists, conservatives and laggards. He shows himself as several places to the left of early adopters, being very early in using disruptive technologies, from PCs to the Net to Second Life and social production, like Wikipedia. "Massively distributed collaboration... has enormous implications that go far beyond the current set of projects" out there.
"Wikipedia is too interesting to not be involved in it." He's be evangelizing it among nonprofit organizations like the World Resource Institute - why aren't these groups editing articles that represent their areas of expertise? At the Level Playing Institute, founded by his wife, he's been asking them the same thing. They then created a weekly (wikly?) meeting in which they add to articles, from homophobia to affirmative action. They're non-technical people, but they care about these issues passionately.
People tell him all the time that Wikipedia cannot possibly work - but it does. Then they get skeptical again. They keep changing their minds, like it's a zen koan, an insolvable riddle, which they have to answer not in a literal fashion, but use it to examine their way of thinking. It challenges a fundamental set of assumptions that in order to have useful information you need somebody "in charge," people who are experts and certified by a higher authority. They come to realize that the view they had of how the world has to work is just wrong.
It's not that odd that people would find Wikipedia unbelievable. We're products of the cultural condition we grew up with, and we don't even know what are implicit assumptions are. Take urban graffiti. One thing we know about it is that it's difficult to remove - takes specialized equipment. It's an instance where instant vandalism has long-term effects. They take this idea and apply it to Wikipedia - if someone writes something wrong, it's like permanent vandalism, rather than something that can be corrected easily by the community. So some of the strangeness is a transitory effect.
Let's talk about blogs vs. wikis. What's special about a wiki? Blogs are hailed as a very, very big deal initially. They've become an important medium for personal expression, and some bloggers are now very influential. But I find blogs, especially political blogs, disappointing. They're the talk radio of the Internet. They're a series of individual ideas one after another, like billiard balls bouncing around. The culture of blogs focus on individual expression. They reinforce the partisanship that people already have, so it's hard to turn to them for thoughtful deliberation - it's a fundamental limitation.
Wikis, on the other hand, are fundamentally collaborative. Rather than producing a series of 100 comments, a wiki will have a series of 100 edits that improves the content. This is something appreciated by Wikipedians, but others don't see this difference. There really is a secret sauce to Wikipedia. I've learned this from Jimmy Wales. As a techie, I had some unlearning to do when it came to Wikipedia. I didn't like these tools very much. Then I heard Jimmy talk. It's not about the technology - we could almost do this on bits of paper. The secret sauce is the community that's bound together by shared values and practices. It's the unity that comes from the sharing of values and practices that keeps the community together, like "We believe in neutral point of view," or "we believe in being bold."
I really thought that it was heartening to hear Jimmy talk about Wikipedia's challenges and opportunities. This turn towards quality is important - it's not just about the number of articles. More quality would be good. The drive to linguistic diversity is very important.
Hobbit vs. Africa. During Wikipedia's early years, there was more content about Lord of the Rings than all of Africa combined. That's because the early community knew more about Tolkein than the Transvaal. (my words, not his.) So Wikipedia does need to make active efforts to recruit editors that represent a broader, more diverse view. That's why we're able to brag about the Nature article - Wikipedia does well with science, but probably would have lost a matchup if it were comparing humanities.
Right now I'm working with a group that's creating an online social network for African American professionals. We were having a meeting, and it happened to be on a day when we had some high school students in the office working on a project. We invited one of the students to join the meeting, to meet some potential role models. He came to the meeting and he sent an email afterwards. He said, he understands that the business targets the black middle class, and that they should expand the business to help less successful black families as well. Content about scholarships, learning opportunities, etc. If he hadn't been at the table, this idea would have never come up. If you're not inclusive, the realm of possibilities is limited by who you have at the table.
Mitch then showed two edits two the entry about him on Wikipedia. People who spend a lot of time working with Wikipedia's markup codes, but aren't necessarily good writers. Wikipedia needs to lower barriers to entry so people with other skills can participate. But this may have some pushback by current Wikipedians. "No, that's not right. Mark my words about inclusion. If you want Wikipedia to success, we must find ways to lower barriers to participation, and improving user interaction at all levels is important.... We have to step it up, step up the game, and if it were up to me, I'd make it a major priority... Sometimes change is painful, but we need to step up."
Let's talk politics. What does this have to do with politics? He shows a poster for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. People who see the movie come out transformed because they see the world isn't in great shape, and it's not a partisan issue. The scientific consensus is clear. Meanwhile, we have growing economic inequities. We've gone tragically off-course in terms of America's role in the world. We really are leaving the world a worse place for our children, and that's not the legacy I want to leave behind.
Politics here in the US is broken. What's the problem? Partisanship and negativity are high, from Ann Coulter to the Daily Kos. There aren't many opportunities for finding consensus, and ordinary people don't like the political choices they see. This is actually really serious, like having serious disease but being in denial about it. We're in one hell of a mess. Democracy is a grand concept, and it's at risk.
Wikipedia is a kind of existence truth of the power of a self-governed, decentralized community making a positive impact. And it's an inspiration for doing something like it in politics. It has certain key attributes. It needs to be participatory and hands-on - nothing happens on Wikipedia unless it's like this. The product - Wikipedia - and the process of creating it are inextricably entwined, and it can't be separated. It's a wiki that uses itself to produce itself. The same mechanisms of transparency and accountability about article develop apply evenly to the authors of those changes. People are known for what they do and don't do. Any movement for democratic reform would have to operate by the values and processes it seeks to achieve in society. It has to be the thing it's trying to bring about. In every stage, Wikipedia aspires to practice what it preaches. This could be a pretty bold thing for a political movement.
There has to be a high aspiration for respectful dialogue that brings out our best selves, not our worse selves like blogs. And we don't have to turn over our fates and destinies to experts. Any person can participate as an equal - in the case of a politics wiki, formulating policies to help improve the world.
Is this absurd? I guarantee that in 99 percent of the audiences I speak to as completely absurd. But the PC was absurd in the 70s, the commercial Internet absurd in the 80s. Politics is not known for respectful collaboration. "We need a political movement that doesn't practice politics as usual just as Wikipedia doesn't practice Britannica as usual." "It's not going to be about talking - it's going to be about doing."
I do think that some new tools will be very helpful. "If I had one idea to offer, I think we need to have tools and software that help us argue better." I think it as an extension of Wikipedia culture. A fair idea is central, and you don't want to use unfair tactics to make you point. You don't hide info, you don't use selective evidence. Having fair arguments and having communities where people can constructively disagree is really important.
The final point I want to make is this. There are no panaceas or easy solutions. Trying not to be naïve, I don't want to suggest any technodeterminism, or that Wikis will save the world. But sometimes difficult decisions have to be made, and facts alone aren't enough to make those decisions. Wikipedia's best article on the war in Iraq doesn't make a conclusion about whether the US should withdraw. Wikipedia goes out of its way to avoid being drag down by arguments about what we should or shouldn't do. Facts alone aren't sufficient to guide decisions. So what would this political movement stand for? It'll only work if people come together around commons values. You could apply wikipedia to a particular ideology, but what about for reaching consensus. So I wanted to share my thinking and my struggle for solving this. I think Wikipedia can be a key inspiration, though, and there's much we can learn from it. "There's so much work to be done from that inspiration to make the world a better place."
Posted by acarvin at August 6, 2006 10:16 AM
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