Marcus Hanschen

How has Internet use changed during the past decade?
A decade ago we were at the dawn of that era, and not at all clear about what it was going to be like. Now we are part of the way into it, so some things, like e-mail and e-commerce, we can safely assume are going to be major features of life for the next half century. And there are new phenomena rising out of the Internet that were utterly—or almost utterly—unanticipated, like Wikipedia, which is creating a new online community bent on upgrading our communal knowledge. We’re not at the end of innovation, we’re at the beginning.

You love Wikipedia. Describe it.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia on the Internet that aspires to have all the world’s knowledge, which is entirely created and maintained by the people who use it. And it’s free, in all of the languages that people speak. That’s the aspiration. Every page, every article is editable by anyone at any time. It’s bigger now than Britannica. It’s certainly more current. It’s remarkable that something like this would work at all—much less work well—most of the time.

But where is the systematic arbitration of truth? Where is the gatekeeping?

Who said the arbitration of truth is ever systematic? Or that it could be or should be?

Who said that quality emerges out of gatekeeping? There are issues of information quality in Wikipedia. There was recently an entry that was put in as basically some kind of joke, which made an untrue allegation that went unchallenged for several months. But that’s the exception, not the rule. If there are issues of information quality, you then ask the right question. The right question is not, "Why is Wikipedia bad?" The question is, "How do you manage to be so good?" Not perfect, given how it operates. In other words, there are new phenomena— it’s a bit like the immune system. It’s emerging. It trains itself.

Is that its beauty?
Yes. When people hear any page can be edited at any time by anybody, they’re horrified. Because they imagine that mostly means people are going to say stupid, wrong things, or advance their agendas because there are no controls. Because there’s no one in charge. They think you have to have somebody in charge. I say the fact that any page can be edited by anybody at any time means every single bit of it can always be improved. If there is a problem, you can fix it. Or somebody else can. Or you can say, "This ought to be fixed," and post a note—and then somebody else comes along and fixes it. So the dynamics for improvement— assuming that’s what the community believes in, and that there’s a critical mass of people that value that—that’s what drives up the quality and the usefulness. There’s got to be a critical mass of people who believe in democracy and are willing to practice it, or it’ll wither and die. So this Tinkerbell idea that you have to believe in it—which people are going to identify as a weakness—is a fundamental condition of all social systems. Money is also an illusion. If we stop believing in money, the whole system breaks down. People construct long, irrefutable, beautiful arguments about it, but money is still an illusion. So is democracy.

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