[…] the agency’s official seal. Wikipedia has refused to remove the image from its FBI page. Wikipedians have a history of standing firm on controversial articles. It’s unclear whether a specific […]

[…] Jonathan Zittrain The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It — Chapter 6: The Lessons of Wikipedia. — Yale University Press, 2008. — ISBN […]

[…] Zittrain, Jonathan (2008). The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It — Chapter 6: The Lessons of Wikipedia. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300124873. http://yupnet.org/zittrain/archives/16. Retrieved […]

On one hand, this concept has merit. There are numerous world wide examples of the effect on citizens from overzealous rule making and omnipresent authority. This can be seen in Murakami’s depictions of peoples’ reaction to the Tokyo subway gas attack. On the other hand, it’s difficult to imagine Americans adjusting well to a complete lack of rules and authority. We are brought up to look out for number one.

Note 38 points to a “Note 2″. But this reference does not make much sense (and it is also not a glitch that would be solved by pointing to note 37, since Raymond’s quote is not from the “Release Early, Release Often” piece).

[…] http://yupnet.org/zittrain/archives/16 […]

Anti-democratic tendencies?

[…] The Lessons of Wikipedia […]

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[…] depuis engendré bien des rejetons et est très souvent citée en exemple par les gurus du web2.0. Certains voient même dans la recette Wikipedia le remède aux maux qui menaceraient la survie […]

I would like to see the dutch concept applied at my college. Moreso with parking than driving. I do think pedestrian crosswalks are important, but a lot of the other “traffic signs” do seem redundant at times. Regarding parking - after a couple of tickets in a couple of weeks… it would be nice to rid the streets of parking signs, and just follow that last sentence of paragraph one. It probably wouldn’t “work”… long term, but one can dream…

[…] Zittrain, Jonathan (2008). The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It - Chapter 6: The Lessons of Wikipedia. Yale University Press. ISBN […]

[…] Zittrain, Jonathan (2008). The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Yale University Press. ISBN […]

[…] Zittrain, Jonathan (2008). The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Yale University Press. ISBN […]

Regarding “There are currently only a handful of bureaucrats, and they are appointed by other bureaucrats.” - This is technically true but misses the point - on the English Wikipedia, bureaucrats are chosen in the same manner as administrators - after a nomination and a seven-day process of editors expressing “support” and “oppose” opinions, a bureaucrat decides if “rough consensus” has been achieved; if so, the nominee becomes a bureaucrat.

If there was every a “slow-to-change walled garden” ripe for being unleashed via the Internet, it is the sphere of Academia.

Some call the University the last utopian space on earth. Rather than shelter such a space, however, we should strive to make it relevant again - to extend that utopia to the world. Public discourse was once the primary concern of the scholars and thinkers: Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, etc.

That, in fact, is the primary goal of my current online endeavor, http://www.TheFinalClub.org

Check it out to read lecture-by-lecture blogs of Harvard classes by Harvard students.

The removal of all rules to create a Utopian driving civilization is interesting, but the point about Boston is well noted. There are many practices that work well in one culture but not in others. For instance, if Boston had free bicycles like the city of Amsterdam offers, you’d probably find one guy in Lynn with 10,000 bikes in his basement and none on the streets.

Sociologically speaking, citizenship of this type seems more likely in homogeneous populations as found in northern Europe. Diversity of minds and ideals, however, tend to muddle such citizenship. Of course, the internet is a place for those of like mind to congregate without barrier of geography. So, maybe there is a chance after all.

This is what Boston was like, before 1976, and driving was clearly a combat sport, and if you were from out of town, you were completely lost, because the lack of a grid and the absence of law enforcement meant that there were very few rules. I do recall one local paper saying that the “last time anyone was pulled over for a traffic violation was in the time of Charlemagne…”

The Nature “study” comparing Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Brittanica was biased, was not peer-reviewed, and in fact was heavily criticized for its lack of scientific rigor. It appeared in Nature’s “News” section written by journalists, not scientists, and a rebuttal to the whole fiasco can be found here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/23/britannica_wikipedia_nature_study/

I can’t believe I wrote “it’s” (with the apostrophe) in the second sentence of my first comment. Ugh.

Darn it — bumped the “Add comment” button. The link is:

http://www.mywikibiz.com/MyWikiBiz#History_of_the_site

One last note: the article “Arch Coal” that actually prompted Jimmy Wales to ban MyWikiBiz from Wikipedia was actually not written from any contract or payment from the Arch Coal corporation. It was an unpaid exercise on my part, just to see how long it would take for a short article about a Fortune 1000 company to get scraped into Wikipedia from my site. As history records, we learned a lot more than that about Wikipedia’s leadership from that one little experiment.

Thank you for this exposure and your fair assessment of the controversy. I now only cringe to think that Wikipedia will now see fit to have an article about the business, and I’ll get the same treatment that John Seigenthaler and Fuzzy Zoeller “enjoyed”.

I am fascinated that MyWikiBiz appears in this book. As it’s founder, I think that you did a good job summarizing the experience for the uninitiated. I would describe some things slightly differently — such as Wales and I “coming to an accomodation”. It was more accurately an ultimatum from Wales, and I accepted it in exchange for his public endorsement of the “Concordat”. He made clear to me that I didn’t have much room to bargain; in fact, at one point in the conversation he said, “Greg, be quiet for a minute and you might learn something.”

Unfortunately, the footnote links to Centiare are no longer live. The owner of that site changed directions, but I have copied some of the content relevant to your book to: