Wikipedia and copyrights

Wikipedia and copyrights

We may define “anarchic production”as production without copyrights or other property rights, and Wikipedia was offered to the class as proof of this analytic proposition.

Notwithstanding its lack of property rights, Wikipedia has exclusionary features that result in exclusionary consequences mirroring those property rights produce. While this does not deny Wikipedia’s quality, it raises the question whether this superiority is attributable to truly “anarchic production.”A fair critique is that it is improper to define “anarchy” one way and then test its existence by reference to some other quantity. But, a better definition of “anarchic production”takes into account some exclusion beyond that created by property rights. A narrower definition raises the possibility of “anarchic production”that is, incongruously, extremely exclusionary–for example, a system without property rights that excludes persons based on race would still be expected to produce inherently superior products.

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia

To begin, Bongwon Suh et al. present evidence in their paper, “The Singularity is Not Near: Slowing Growth of Wikipedia,”of growing exclusion of non-prolific and new editors. During the global slowdown in Wikipedia edits, which started in early 2007, “middle class”editors (Wikipedians who make 2-999 edits per month), not high-frequency editors (those who make 1000 or more edits per month), reduced their edits at the highest rate. More tellingly, the percentage of new edits reverted increased over the same period of time despite the drop in overall edits. Indeed, excluding vandalism and bot reverts, low-frequency and occasional editors experienced the greatest resistance–“since 2003, edits from occasional editors have been reverted in a higher rate than edits from prolific editors,”and “this disparity of treatment . . . has been widening . . . at the expense of low-frequency editors.”There are also other indicators of growing exclusionary conduct: the number of blocked IP addresses and pages deleted increased during this time, as did the number of protected entries.

There is reason, according to some sources, to believe these trends may be related to Wikipedia’s bureaucratization, unequal content production and complex rules.

Not only are editors a fairly homogonous group, which by itself suggests exclusionary forces at play, but a small minority of Wikipedians make the bulk of site’s edits and contribute the lion’s share of its content. Moreover, a small group of Wikipedia bureaucrats–usually prolific editors themselves–wield exclusionary powers such as deleting articles, protecting pages from future edits and blocking IP addresses altogether. The result is a classic conflict of interest.

Editors who contribute the most have the greatest “skin in the game”and are highly motivated participants. But, these editors also have the expertise and power to impose non-trivial, exclusionary costs on new and infrequent participants, and it is unlikely they are immune from confirmation bias or other natural impediments to complete objectivity. For example, an inexperienced user can contest the deletion of a new entry, but “debates about the merits of articles often drag on for weeks, draining energy and taking up far more space than the entries themselves. Such deliberations involve volleys of arcane internal acronyms and references to obscure policies and guidelines . . . . The result is that novices can quickly get lost in Wikipedia’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy.”

Thomas Hou noted in response to a request for comments to …..that having one’s edits subsequently edited is a slight disincentive to future participation–this could be due to time, education and energy costs required to successfully contest edits or deletion, the negative psychological feelings accompanying what one perceives as “unjust”edits, or both. This disincentive is magnified by an editorial process that unequally rejects the work of non-prolific contributors. As Wikipedia’s reputation shifts from egalitarian and open to unequal and anti-newcomer, its credibility among potential and current non-prolific editors will erode, further disincentivizing participation.

Deletionists

Beyond this conflict of interest, a strain of thought called”deletionism”has become a cause célèbre for many administrators. In contrast to “inclusionists, deletionists favor strict standards for accepting entries and emphasize the “objective significance”of an entry when deciding whether to keep a new addition to the encyclopedia. As Andrew Lih, a prolific administrator himself, explained after noticing the deletion of entries on the first ombudsperson for PBS and Pownce.com, “It’s as if there is a Soup Nazi culture now in Wikipedia. There are throngs of deletion happy users . . . tossing out customers and articles if they don’t comply to some new prickly hard-nosed standard.”

Even if the data suggest deletionists are “winning the battle for Wikipedia’s soul,”it is important to understand why. The following are some possible reasons:

First, deletionists have forced out a not insignificant number of prolific contributors who became discouraged by excessive deletion and rulemaking. While the first order consequence of this is the exclusion of valuable Wikipedians, the important second order effect is a shortage of savvy allies for new and infrequent contributors in the fight against overzealous deletionists.

Second, deletionists can leverage the proliferation of Wiki rules and their familiarity therewith to amplify the costs new and infrequent users face. As Suh et al. conclude, the growth of Wikipedia is “limited by available resources in Wikipedia and advantages go to members of that population that have competitive dominance over others.”

In conclusion, though property rights do not determine who contributes to Wikipedia’s content production, Wikipedia is not without serious exclusionary features. It seems that, taken together, Wikipedia’s elaborate bureaucracy, unequal content production, increasingly complex rules and deletionist tendencies combine to raise the costs of participation for non-prolific and new contributors.

Main source: MatthewLadner

Conclusion

Notes

See Also

References and Further Reading

About the Author/s and Reviewer/s

Author: international


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