Ένα από τα «μεγάλα μυαλά» της πληροφορικής και
υποστηρικτής της ελεύθερης διακίνησης πληροφοριών στο ιντερνετ, ο Άαρον
Σουόρτζ, βρέθηκε νεκρός στο διαμέρισμά του ενώ σύμφωνα με τις πρώτες εκτιμήσεις
της αστυνομίας πρόκειται για αυτοκτονία δια απαγχονισμού. Οι Anonymous
απάντησαν αμέσως με μια κυβερνοεπίθεση στην ιστοσελίδα του MIT, του ιδρύματος
που είχε γίνει στόχος και του ίδιου του Σουόρτζ, αποχαιρετώντας με αυτό τον
τρόπο το φίλο και συναγωνιστή τους.
Μόλις στα 14 του χρόνια, ο Σουόρτζ ήταν ένας από τους
δημιουργούς του RSS (Rich Site Summary), του εργαλείου που προσφέρει στους
χρήστες του Διαδικτύου τη δυνατότητα να παρακολουθούν το περιεχόμενο ιστοσελίδων,
το οποίο ανανεώνεται συνεχώς, όπως τα ειδησεογραφικά sites και τα blogs.
Αργότερα ο Σουόρτζ αφοσιώθηκε στην πεποίθηση του ότι
οι πληροφορίες πρέπει να διανέμονται ελεύθερα στο Διαδίκτυο, ενώ δήλωνε ότι «οι
πληροφορίες αποτελούν εξουσία. Αλλά όπως σε κάθε εξουσία, υπάρχουν αυτοί που
θέλουν να τις κρατήσουν για τον εαυτό τους».
Σε μανιφέστο που είχε εκδώσει το 2008, είχε γράψει ότι
«ολόκληρη η επιστημονική και πολιτιστική κληρονομιά, που έχει δημοσιευτεί ανά
τους αιώνες σε βιβλία και περιοδικά, μετατρέπεται σε ψηφιοποιημένο υλικό και
κρατείται στα χέρια ορισμένων ιδιωτικών εταιρειών. Ο επιμερισμός των
πληροφοριών δεν είναι κάτι ανήθικο αλλά αποτελεί μια επιτακτική ανάγκη. Μόνο
εκείνοι που είναι τυφλωμένοι από την απληστία θα αρνηθούν σε κάποιον φίλο ένα
αντίγραφο».
Τον Ιούλιο του 2011 ο Σούορτζ είχε συλληφθεί από τις
ομοσπονδιακές αρχές των Ηνωμένων Πολιτειών με κατηγορίες ότι έκλεψε εκατομμύρια
ακαδημαϊκά κείμενα και βιβλία από το ψηφιακό αρχείο του Πανεπιστημίου
Τεχνολογίας της Μασαχουσέτης (MIT).
Ο Σουόρτζ, ο οποίος κατά τη διάρκεια της δίκης είχε
δηλώσει αθώος, αντιμετώπιζε 35 χρόνια φυλάκιση και πρόστιμο 1 εκατομμυρίου
δολαρίων σε περίπτωση που καταδικαζόταν.
Ο 26χρονος είχε δηλώσει αρκετές φορές ότι έπασχε από
κατάθλιψη, ενώ είχε αναφέρει ότι πολλές στιγμές στη ζωή του είχε σκεφτεί το
ενδεχόμενο της αυτοκτονίας.
Ακολουθεί ένα απόσπασμα από τις τελευταίες αναρτήσεις
του ξεχωριστού αυτού ανθρώπου, που δεν πρόλαβε να ενηλικιωθεί – με ή χωρίς
εισαγωγικά.
In September, Swartz wrote one of the final posts on
his blog titled Lean Into The Pain. It’s an inspiring article about how to deal with both mental and phsyical
hardships. Here’s
an excerpt:
When you first begin to
exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not wildly painful, like touching a hot stove,
but enough that if your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop
doing it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more painful.
When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you often feel exhausted
and sore. And
the next morning it’s even worse.
If that was all that happened,
you’d probably never do it. It’s not that much fun being sore. Yet we do it
anyway — because we know that, in the long run, the pain will make us stronger.
Next time we’ll be able to run harder and lift more before the pain starts.
And knowing this makes all the difference. Indeed, we come to see the pain as a
sort of pleasure — it feels good to really push yourself, to fight through the
pain and make yourself stronger. Feel the burn! It’s fun to wake up sore the
next morning, because you know that’s just a sign that you’re getting stronger.
Few people realize it, but
psychological pain works the same way. Most people treat psychological pain
like the hot stove — if starting to think about something scares them or
stresses them out, they quickly stop thinking about it and change the subject.
The problem is that the topics
that are most painful also tend to be the topics that are most important for
us: they’re the projects we most want to do, the relationships we care most
about, the decisions that have the biggest consequences for our future, the
most dangerous risks that we run. We’re scared of them because we know the
stakes are so high. But if we never think about them, then we can never do
anything about them.
Και ένα δείγμα γραφής του από ένα άρθρο του σχετικά με
τη διαδικασία συγγραφής των λημμάτων της Wikipedia που έχει συζητηθεί πολύ.
Who writes Wikipedia?
I first met Jimbo Wales, the face of Wikipedia, when
he came to speak at Stanford. Wales told us about Wikipedia’s history,
technology, and culture, but one thing he said stands out. “The idea that a lot
of people have of Wikipedia,” he noted, “is that it’s some emergent phenomenon
— the wisdom of mobs, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing — thousands and
thousands of individual users each adding a little bit of content and out of
this emerges a coherent body of work.ӠBut, he
insisted, the truth was rather different: Wikipedia was actually written by “a
community … a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” where “I know all of
them and they all know each other”. Really, “it’s much like any traditional
organization.”
The difference, of course, is
crucial. Not just for the public, who wants to know how a grand thing like
Wikipedia actually gets written, but also for Wales, who wants to know how to
run the site. “For me this is really important, because I spend a lot of time
listening to those four or five hundred and if … those people were just a bunch
of people talking … maybe I can just safely ignore them when setting policy”
and instead worry about “the million people writing a sentence each”.
So did the Gang of 500
actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he
counted who made the most edits to the site. “I expected to find something like
an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because
that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it
turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524
people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4%
of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who
[are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or
something like that.”
Stanford wasn’t the only place
he’s made such a claim; it’s part of the standard talk he gives all over the world.
“This is the group of around a thousand people who really matter”, he told us
at Stanford. “There is this tight community that is actually doing the bulk of
all the editing”, he explained at the Oxford Internet Institute. “It’s a group
of around a thousand to two thousand people,” he informed the crowd at GEL
2005. These are just the three talks I watched, but Wales has given hundreds
more like them.
At Stanford the students were
skeptical. Wales was just counting the number of edits — the number of times a
user changed something and clicked save. Wouldn’t things be different if he
counted the amount of text each user contributed? Wales said he planned to do
that in “the next revision”, but was sure “my results are going to be even
stronger”, because he’d no longer be counting vandalism and other changes that
later got removed.
Wales presents these claims as comforting. Don’t
worry, he tells the world, Wikipedia isn’t as shocking as you think. In fact,
it’s just like any other project: a small group of colleagues working together
toward a common goal. But if you think about it, Wales’s view of things is
actually much moreshocking: around a thousand people wrote the
world’s largest encyclopedia in four years for free? Could this really be
true?
Curious and skeptical, I decided to investigate. I
picked an article at random (“Alan Alda”) to see how it was written.Today the Alan Alda page is a pretty standard Wikipedia page: it has a couple photos, several
pages of facts and background, and a handful of links. But when it was first created, it was just two sentences: “Alan Alda is a male actor most famous for his
role of Hawkeye Pierce in the television series MASH. Or recent work, he plays
sensitive male characters in drama movies.” How did it get from there to here?
Edit by edit, I watched the
page evolve. The changes I saw largely fell into three groups. A tiny handful —
probably around 5 out of nearly 400 — were “vandalism”: confused or malicious
people adding things that simply didn’t fit, followed by someone undoing their
change. The vast majority, by far, were small changes: people fixing typos,
formatting, links, categories, and so on, making the article a little nicer but
not adding much in the way of substance. Finally, a much smaller amount were
genuine additions: a couple sentences or even paragraphs of new information
added to the page.
Wales seems to think that the
vast majority of users are just doing the first two (vandalizing or
contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual
bulk of the article. But that’s not at all what I found. Almost every time I
saw a substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an
active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically
around 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an
account.
To investigate more formally, I purchased some time on
a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. I wrote a
little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the
latest version.† Instead
of counting edits, as Wales did, I counted the number of letters a user
actually contributed to the present article.
If you just count edits, it
appears the biggest contributors to the Alan Alda article (7 of the top 10) are
registered users who (all but 2) have made thousands of edits to the site.
Indeed, #4 has made over 7,000 edits while #7 has over 25,000. In other words,
if you use Wales’s methods, you get Wales’s results: most of the content seems
to be written by heavy editors.
But when you count letters,
the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10)
are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits
to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit — this one! With the
more reasonable metric — indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use
in the next revision of his study — the result completely reverses.
I don’t have the resources to
run this calculation across all of Wikipedia (there are over 60 million
edits!), but I ran it on several more randomly-selected articles and the
results were much the same. For example, the largest portion of the Anaconda
article was written by a user who only made 2 edits to it (and only 100 on the
entire site). By contrast, the largest number of edits were made by a user who
appears to have contributed no text to the final article (the edits were all
deleting things and moving things around).
When you put it all together,
the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of
information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In
addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name
of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply
care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits.
But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
And when you think about it,
this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near
a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly
wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the
background research seems impossible.
On the other hand, everyone
has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they’ve come to
know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or
two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become
particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special
syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.
Other encyclopedias work similarly, just on a much
smaller scale: a large group of people write articles on topics they know well,
while a small staff formats them into a single work. This second group is
clearly very important — it’s thanks to them encyclopedias have a consistent
look and tone — but it’s a severe exaggeration to say that they wrote the
encyclopedia. One imagines the people running Britannicaworry more
about their contributors than their formatters.
And Wikipedia should too. Even
if all the formatters quit the project tomorrow, Wikipedia would still be
immensely valuable. For the most part, people read Wikipedia because it has the
information they need, not because it has a consistent look. It certainly
wouldn’t be as nice without one, but the people who (like me) care about such
things would probably step up to take the place of those who had left. The
formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around.
Wales is right about one
thing, though. This fact does have enormous policy implications. If Wikipedia
is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it
easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to
squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to
broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit.
Unfortunately, precisely because
such people are only occasional contributors, their opinions aren’t heard by
the current Wikipedia process. They don’t get involved in policy debates, they
don’t go to meetups, and they don’t hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things
that might help them get pushed on the backburner, assuming they’re even
proposed.
Out of sight is out of mind,
so it’s a short hop to thinking these invisible people aren’t particularly
important. Thus Wales’s belief that 500 people wrote half an encyclopedia. Thus
his assumption that outsiders contribute mostly vandalism and nonsense. And
thus the comments you sometimes hear that making it hard to edit the site might
be a good thing.
“I’m not a wiki person who
happened to go into encyclopedias,” Wales told the crowd at Oxford. “I’m an
encyclopedia person who happened to use a wiki.” So perhaps his belief that
Wikipedia was written in the traditional way isn’t surprising. Unfortunately,
it is dangerous. If Wikipedia continues down this path of focusing on the
encyclopedia at the expense of the wiki, it might end up not being much of
either.
Πολύ εγγλέζικο έπεσε ρε παιδί μου
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήΓιατί ξέρουμε κι εμείς να πουλάμε μούρη αφερφέ, όχι μόνο ο μετανάστης.
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήmathepeze
Αν και το έκανα αντιγραφή....
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήmathepeze