What are Jonathan Zittrain's views on Wikipedia as presented in his book
“The future of the Internet”?
Will Rees DMD2
In his book “The Future of the internet” Jonathan Zittrain explores the modern phenomenon that is Wikipedia. In a chapter entitled “The lessons of Wikipedia” he explores the history of the website, beginning with the history of the Internet and the history of encyclopedias.
During the early days of the Internet, the promise of unlimited free information was met simultaneously with great excitement and anxiety. Excitement, from those seeking knowledge and information, free from bias or regulation. And anxiety, from those seeking to regulate or profit from the distribution of information. Traditionally encyclopedias were written and published by companies, in order to gain information on any given subject people would need to purchase multiple volumes. With the digital age came digital encyclopedias like Encarta, multiple volumes of information could be stored on a disk and searched or updated with much greater ease. However the information was still not free, nor was it (potentially) free from bias.
In order to have up to date, neutral information, encyclopedias would have to be written, and constantly updated and reviewed by large numbers of people from different backgrounds, all sharing the common interest of sharing accurate information. This is exactly what Wikipedia is; a living encyclopedia constantly changing, written by and monitored by anyone who wants to.
The idea that anyone can potentially alter a true article or write a false one begs the question, “How can wikipedia possibly work?” Jonathan Zittrain likens wikipedia to the Verkeersbordvrij experiment in which a Dutch town removed all driving laws and signposts. During the experiment they found that drivers took more care and responsibility despite the “Certainty of authority based punishment”.
Zittrain comments that with the removal of authority we can predict two opposing results: the first is chaos, the second is basic order maintained. Zittrain believes the absence of law doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of order, and that as the Verkeersbordvrij experiments shows, people will regulate their behavior out of common interest rather than fear of punishment.
There will always be those who would drive at 100mph because no one will stop them, just as there are those who will sabotage information on Wikipedia because the internet is virtually impossible to police. Zittrain believes the majority of people would drive carefully out of a common interest in staying alive and safe, and similarly most people would respect and contribute to Wikipedia properly because, they feel personally responsible in the absence of any real authority to maintain it’s integrity.
Zittrain states “Wikipedia shows, if perhaps only for a fleeting moment under particularly fortuitous circumstances…that the fewer the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility escalates.”
Reference:
“The Future of the Internet and how to stop it” By Jonathan Zittrain. Yale University Press. New Haven & London.2008.
