* Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory.
* Wikipedia is the worst source of information, except for all the others.
* Wikipedia: the Internet’s greatest reason to feel a little bit optimistic about human nature.
You can list all the philosophical, technical, or economic reasons you want (and surely those are important to consider) but in my mind the community of real, living humans with (yes) opinions but that have recourse and clarity to correct those is invaluable. I have never seen a community with such professionalism and due diligence (almost every single troll edit I have seen is immediately reverted) as Wikipedia editors.
There is also something to be said about the “culture” where trolling is not rewarded. By and large, vandalizing Wikipedia is not “cool,” people don’t rejoice for it because I think everyone feels at least a little bit of attachment or debt to Wikipedia. It’s helped us all learn more than we probably ever could before and been there through schoolwork, essays, reference reading, and general curiosity. It’s such a special corner of the Internet and I think “replicating aspects of it” won’t work, at least not the way you want. Wikipedia is a holistic being, it’s a community of people, yet also a resource, and even a culture, so any similar project needs to do the genuinely hard, slow, and boring work (something Wikipedia embraces - that most of the process is routine grammatical fixes, meta cleanup, rewriting, etc. over genuinely adding increasingly more information) of cultivating those higher standards and community outreach.
The end-result is often OK, but often jumbled and confusing, and it often feels like getting taught a subject by someone who's just a year or two ahead of you. You definitely feel you can learn something, but the person teaching you doesn't necessarily have very good command of the material themselves.
It's position in society is also weird. It has authority, but that authority can be abused. I once ran into a Wikipedian who had been busy for several years promoting a religious philosophy in a little neglected corner of Wikipedia, by gluing together little disconnected fragments to make a build up the wiki page for it. It was definitely badly done original research, but he successfully tapped the authority of Wikipedia.
Start here.
* There's a variant on design patterns which you can call Community Patterns.
* Some patterns are software design patterns
* Some patterns describe Agile software development.
* Some patterns describe how to run a wiki (and why)
* Wikipedia originally adopted these patterns and extended them for its own policy.
See also: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks
If you want a long thoughtful writeup, check this text by Aaron Swartz
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroads
That's some baseline sources off the top of my head. There's a lot more written about this. It seems like there are several concepts working together that a lot of people find un-intuitive.
* In the main, human beings are honest. In fact mathematics predicts it must be so. (Game theory)
* Humans "automagically" cooperate if their numbers are small (under Dunbar's number), but fail to do so over that number.
* If you can keep the number of cooperating people under control, you can take advantage of this.
* Conversely, if something needs attention, the ability to rapidly recruit them to the point needing attention is paramount (see eg. smart mobs)
Partly by accident, partly by design, wiki engines exploit the above 3 elements. At first approximation, as long as >>51% of users are honest, the wiki will continue to function. The measured value on operational wikis is something like 60-80%.
Or is the concern not around how content is submitted but more around how disputes are resolved?
For every person with a deep insight in a subject, there are fifty people who think they have a deep insight, and it is hard to tell the difference from the outside.
My concern was not that nobody would contribute, but that the wrong people would contribute.
Also "neutral point of view" is impossible, as any writer knows.
It is surprising and amazing the Wikipedia works so well. Although I'm sure they use a lot of resources on combating trolls and manipulation.
If it’s hard to tell the difference from the outside, how do we know which one we got?
But for most subjects, rumours of objective truth’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
(Objective truth being another thing that doesn’t exist in theory but does in practice).
And you're right. It's never been entirely clear why Wikipedia succeeded vs. others although there are various theories.[1] Certainly there have been failures: Goggle Knol and, at this point I think it's fair to say, Quora.
[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/10/the-contribution-conundrum...
As I said: this putative explanation predicts we would have all sorts of great free things that we don't have, e.g., free reliable news, free trustworthy product reviews, good documentation for python libraries, etc., etc. Yes, it's possible to tell a bunch of just-so stories, but the number of free parameters you need always exceeds the amount of data explained.
Open source already existed and was thriving so I’m still not getting why there was any doubt. Seems like it would have just been FUD from the encyclopedia industry and people who didn’t know about open source.
That said, i dont think tax revenue supported infrastructure is really the definition of communism either.
There could be a useful transferable lesson here. Any endeavour which has a really big risk attached to it (here, the risk of vandalism) can still be a success if you deploy sufficient mitigations, countermeasures and vigilance against that risk.
* Wikipedia works in theory, but not in practice (as soon as you scratch the surface). - The problem is that there are many good pages, but that just lulls one out of the necessary skepticism.
* Try the Wikipedia sources that are hopefully on the bottom of each page instead. Also search on Stack Exchange and Reddit for book recommendations.
* Wikipedia: the Internet’s greatest reason to feel pessimistic about the state of disinformation and propaganda
EDIT: my comment is definitely more substantive and thoughtful than the one it is responding to, so I would appreciate if the downvoters could likewise reply to this comment, in addition to down-voting it.
I should have simply said that all three points are completely unsubstantiated.