{"id":176,"date":"2008-03-01T18:59:41","date_gmt":"2008-03-01T18:59:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yupnet.org\/zittrain\/?p=176"},"modified":"2020-02-10T19:55:40","modified_gmt":"2020-02-10T19:55:40","slug":"chapter-6-the-lessons-of-wikipedia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/yupnet.org\/zittrain\/2008\/03\/01\/chapter-6-the-lessons-of-wikipedia\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 6: The Lessons of Wikipedia"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Dutch city of Drachten has undertaken an unusual experiment in traffic management. The roads serving forty-five thousand people are “verkeersbordvrij”: free of nearly all road signs. Drachten is one of several European test sites for a traffic planning approach called “unsafe is safe.”1<\/a>\u00a0The city has removed its traffic signs, parking meters, and even parking spaces. The only rules are that drivers should yield to those on their right at an intersection, and that parked cars blocking others will be towed.<\/p>\n

The result so far is counterintuitive: a dramatic improvement in vehicular safety. Without signs to obey mechanically (or, as studies have shown, disobey seventy percent of the time2<\/a>), people are forced to drive more mindfully\u2014operating their cars with more care and attention to the surrounding circumstances. They communicate more with pedestrians, bicyclists, and other drivers using hand signals and eye contact. They see other drivers rather than other cars. In an article describing the expansion of the experiment to a number of other European cities, including London’s Kensington neighborhood, traffic expert Hans Monderman told Germany’s\u00a0Der Spiegel<\/em>, “The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior. The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.”3<\/a><\/p>\n

Law has long recognized the difference between rules and standards\u2014between very precise boundaries like a speed limit and the much vaguer admonishment characteristic of negligence law that warns individuals simply to “act reasonably.” There are well-known tradeoffs between these approaches.4<\/a>\u00a0Rules are less subject to ambiguity and, if crafted well, inform people exactly what they can do, even if individual situations may render the rule impractical or, worse, dangerous. Standards allow people to tailor their actions to a particular situation. Yet they also rely on the good judgment of often self-interested actors\u2014or on little-constrained second-guessing of a jury or judge that later decrees whether someone’s actions were unreasonable.<\/p>\n

A small lesson of the verkeersbordvrij experiment is that standards can work better than rules in unexpected contexts. A larger lesson has to do with the traffic expert’s claim about law and human behavior: the more we are regulated, the more we may choose to hew only and exactly to the regulation or, more precisely, to what we can get away with when the regulation is not perfectly enforced. When we face heavy regulation, we see and shape our behavior more in relation to reward and punishment by an arbitrary external authority, than because of a commitment to the kind of world our actions can help bring about.5<\/a>\u00a0This observation is less about the difference between rules and standards than it is about the\u00a0source<\/em>\u00a0of mandates: some may come from a process that a person views as alien, while others arise from a process in which the person takes an active part.<\/p>\n

When the certainty of authority-sourced reward and punishment is lessened, we might predict two opposing results. The first is chaos: remove security guards and stores will be looted. The second is basic order maintained, as people choose to respect particular limits in the absence of enforcement. Such acting to reinforce a social fabric may still be due to a form of self-interest\u2014game and norm theorists offer reasons why people help one another in terms that draw on longer-term mutual self-interest6<\/a>\u2014but it may also be because people have genuinely decided to treat others’ interests as their own.7<\/a>\u00a0This might be because people feel a part of the process that brought about a shared mandate\u2014 even if compliance is not rigorously monitored. Honor codes, or students’ pledges not to engage in academically dishonest behavior, can apparently result in lower rates of self-reported cheating.8<\/a>\u00a0Thus, without the traffic sign equivalent of pages of rules and regulations, students who apprentice to generalized codes of honor may be prone to higher levels of honesty in academic work\u2014and benefit from a greater sense of camaraderie grounded in shared values.<\/p>\n

More generally, order may remain when people see themselves as a part of a social system, a group of people\u2014more than utter strangers but less than friends\u2014with some overlap in outlook and goals. Whatever counts as a satisfying explanation, we see that sometimes the absence of law has not resulted in the absence of order.9<\/a>\u00a0Under the right circumstances, people will behave charitably toward one another in the comparative absence or enforcement of rules that would otherwise compel that charity.<\/p>\n

In modern cyberspace, an absence of rules (or at least enforcement) has led both to a generative blossoming and to a new round of challenges at multiple layers. If the Internet and its users experience a crisis of abuse\u2014behaviors that artfully exploit the twin premises of trust and procrastination\u2014it will be tempting to approach such challenges as ones of law and jurisdiction. This rule-and-sanction approach frames the project of cyberlaw by asking how public authorities can find and restrain those it deems to be bad actors online. Answers then look to entry points within networks and endpoints that can facilitate control. As the previous chapter explained, those points will be tethered appliances and software-as-service\u2014functional, fashionable, but non-generative or only contingently generative.10<\/a><\/p>\n

The “unsafe is safe” experiment highlights a different approach, one potentially as powerful as traditional rule and sanction, without the sacrifice of generativity entailed by the usual means of regulation effected through points of control, such as the appliancization described earlier in this book. When people can come to take the welfare of one another seriously and possess the tools to readily assist and limit each other, even the most precise and well-enforced rule from a traditional public source may be less effective than that uncompelled goodwill. Such an approach reframes the project of cyberlaw to ask: What are the technical tools and social structures that inspire people to act humanely online? How might they be available to help restrain the damage that malevolent outliers can wreak? How can we arrive at credible judgments about what counts as humane and what counts as malevolent? These questions may be particularly helpful to answer while cyberspace is still in its social infancy, its tools for group cohesion immature, and the attitudes of many of its users still in an early phase which treats Internet usage as either a tool to augment existing relationships or as a gateway to an undifferentiated library of information from indifferent sources. Such an atomistic conception of cyberspace naturally produces an environment without the social signaling, cues, and relationships that tend toward moderation in the absence of law.11<\/a>\u00a0This is an outcome at odds with the original architecture of the Internet described in this book, an architecture built on neighborliness and cooperation among strangers occupying disparate network nodes.<\/p>\n

The problem raised in the first part of this book underscores this dissonance between origins and current reality at the technical layer: PCs running wild, infected by and contributing to spyware, spam, and viruses because their users either do not know or do not care what they should be installing on their computers. The ubiquity of the PC among mainstream Internet users, and its flexibility that allows it to be reprogrammed at any instant, are both signal benefits and major flaws, just as the genius of the Web\u2014allowing the on-the-fly composition of coherent pages of information from a staggering variety of unvetted sources\u2014is also proving a serious vulnerability. In looking for ways to mitigate these flaws while preserving the benefits of such an open system, we can look to the other layers of the generative Internet which have been plagued with comparable problems, and the progress of their solutions. Some of these resemble verkeersbordvrij: curious experiments with unexpected success that suggest a set of solutions well suited to generative environments, so long as the people otherwise subject to more centralized regulation are willing to help contribute to order without it.<\/p>\n

Recall that the Internet exists in layers\u2014physical, protocol, application, content, social. Thanks to the modularity of the Internet’s design, network and software developers can become experts in one layer without having to know much about the others. Some legal academics have even proposed that regulation might be most efficiently tailored to respect the borders of these layers.12<\/a><\/p>\n

For our purposes, we can examine the layers and analyze the solutions from one layer to provide insight into the problems of another. The pattern of generative success and vulnerability present in the PC and Internet at the technical layer is also visible in one of the more recent and high profile content-layer endeavors on the Internet: Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It is currently among the top ten most popular Web sites in the world,13<\/a>\u00a0and the story of Wikipedia’s success and subsequent problems\u2014and evolving answers to them\u2014provide clues to solutions for other layers. We need some new approaches. Without them, we face a Hobson’s choice between fear and lockdown.<\/p>\n

THE RISE OF WIKIPEDIA<\/strong><\/p>\n

Evangelists of proprietary networks and the Internet alike have touted access to knowledge and ideas. People have anticipated digital “libraries of Alexandria,” providing the world’s information within a few clicks.14<\/a>\u00a0Because the Internet began with no particular content, this was at first an empty promise. Most knowledge was understood to reside in forms that were packaged and distributed piece by piece, profitable because of a scarcity made possible by physical limitations and the restrictions of copyright. Producers of educational materials, including dictionaries and encyclopedias, were slow to put their wares into digital form. They worried about cannibalizing their existing paper sales\u2014for\u00a0Encyclopaedia Britannica<\/em>, $650 million in 1990.15<\/a>\u00a0There was no good way of charging for the small transactions that a lookup of a single word or encyclopedia entry would require, and there were few ways to avoid users’ copying, pasting, and sharing what they found. Eventually Microsoft released the\u00a0Encarta<\/em>\u00a0encyclopedia on CD-ROM in 1993 for just under $1,000, pressuring\u00a0Britannica<\/em>\u00a0to experiment both with a CD-ROM and a subscription-only Web site in 1994.16<\/a><\/p>\n

As the Internet exploded, the slow-to-change walled garden content of formal encyclopedias was bypassed by a generative proliferation of topical Web pages, and search engines that could pinpoint them. There was no gestalt, though: the top ten results for “Hitler” on Google could include a biography written by amateur historian Philip Gavin as part of his History Place Web site,17<\/a>\u00a0a variety of texts from Holocaust remembrance organizations, and a site about “kitlers,” cats bearing uncanny resemblances to the tyrant.18<\/a>\u00a0This scenario exhibits generativity along the classic Libertarian model: allow individuals the freedom to express themselves and they will as they choose. We are then free to read the results. The spirit of blogging also falls within this model. If any of the posted material is objectionable or inaccurate, people can either ignore it, request for it to be taken down, or find a theory on which to sue over it, perhaps imploring gatekeepers like site hosting companies to remove material that individual authors refuse to revise.<\/p>\n

More self-consciously encyclopedic models emerged nearly simultaneously from two rather different sources\u2014one the founder of the dot-org Free Software Foundation, and the other an entrepreneur who had achieved dot-com success in part from the operation of a search engine focused on salacious images.19<\/a><\/p>\n

Richard Stallman is the first. He believes in a world where software is shared, with its benefits freely available to all, where those who understand the code can modify and adapt it to new purposes, and then share it further. This was the natural environment for Stallman in the 1980s as he worked among graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it parallels the environment in which the Internet and Web were invented. Stallman holds the same views on sharing other forms of intellectual expression, applying his philosophy across all of the Internet’s layers, and in 1999 he floated the idea of a free encyclopedia drawing from anyone who wanted to submit content, one article at a time. By 2001, some people were ready to give it a shot. Just as Stallman had sought to replace the proprietary Unix operating system with a similarly functioning but free alternative called GNU (“GNU’s Not Unix”), the project was first named “GNUpedia,” then GNE (“GNE’s Not an Encyclopedia”). There would be few restrictions on what those submissions would look like, lest bias be introduced:<\/p>\n

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Articles are submitted on the following provisions:<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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