Review: Tapscott and Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006)

Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, is a book written for business. As the name implies, they are interested in the economic potential of Web 2.0, providing insightful analysis of the collaborative culture that has grown on the internet over the last decade and recommendations for how businesses can adopt beneficial practices of this culture. While I think the book could have been improved by a less accepting, optimistic view of this technology, it is otherwise a helpful introduction to many of the features of Web 2.0 that are relevant to businesses.

Synopsis
According to Tapscott and Williams, there are four principles of Wikinomics: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. By openness, they mean that businesses must become less proprietary, arguing that in the current economic climate, businesses can’t afford to hoard all of their valuable information. Rather, they need to make it open so as to increase their ability to research and discover new products, as well as to make use of new standards for sharing information. For example, few businesses have the ability to throughly research and analyze all of the data available to them; by making some of that data open, Tapscott and Williams argue that businesses can harness the benefits of having an increased number of eyeballs looking for problems and new opportunities that would otherwise languish in forgotten data.

With peering the authors argue that the hierarchical relationships that dominate most large-scale enterprises should be broken down and replaced by more flexible peer-production methods, like those used in open source projects such as the Linux operating system. Tapscott and Williams argue that by taking advantage of peer-production methods, businesses can leverage the self-organizing forces to make better decisions and create better products without expending more capital.

While the idea of sharing that Tapscott and Williams advocate is likely to be as counter-intuitive as their other Wikinomics ideas, it is less radical and less dependent on new technologies than peering. The authors argue that, instead of keeping intellectual property like patents proprietary, business should open up their IP holdings for licensing by outside entities. By doing so, businesses can have access to more revenue through licensing fees, and also create new product lines by collaborative relationships with other businesses. Like peer-production, sharing allows for new relationships to form that would likely be ignored by businesses focusing on core products and competencies. These new relationships would benefit from self-organizing, emergent effects that lead to new opportunities without demanding heavy investment in research and development or new personnel.

Finally, the increased reach of the web, coupled with faster connections and greater computing horsepower, have enabled what were previously global interactions—a conversation with a supplier in another country, for example—to feel local and instantaneous. For this reason, the authors argue that businesses need to act globally, taking advantage of their ability to coordinate with suppliers and employees across the world.

Open cultures
I found that the most compelling part of the text was its focus on the culture of open enterprises. Tapscott and Williams continually emphasize that to take advantage of the changing economic and technological landscape, businesses must be ready to change their internal cultures and adopt the cultural practices of the community—Linux, Wikipedia—they wish to emulate. According to them, open, peer-production networks have distinct cultures that have to not only be respected by business, but also be leveraged if they wish to make use of the benefits of those networks. In my research of Wikipedia and other peer-produced systems, I’ve been interested in the ways that peer-produced texts depend on the creation of a community of value; that is, the creation of a culture that provides content creators with a return on their investment of time in the project. I think Tapscott and Williams correctly identify this feature of open source projects and argue for its acceptance by those who would use these methods of production in their business.

If I had to make a complaint about the book, I think it would be that the authors take for granted the benefits that “Wikinomics” will bring to business. While it is somewhat normal for those advocating new technologies to gush about their benefits and turn a blind eye to their potential drawbacks, I did get a little tired of the repeated insistence that these new economic forces were going to completely transform business practices for the better. I agree that there are tremendous benefits to the ideas that Tapscott and Williams outline here, I would have enjoyed a more critical approach to their benefits and drawbacks as well. However, that one quibble didn’t ruin the book for me, and I think it is still a valuable introduction to the theory of open source production.

Humans v. algorithms: Search edition

ReadWrite Web has posted a rough transcript of a conversation between the advocates of rival search-engine technologies: Wikio founder and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis. Wikio is an attempt by Wales to create an open, user-generated search algorithm, while Mahalo uses people to power their search results. It’s a pretty interesting conversation about two of the most interesting projects trying to take down Google.

Update: Wikia is the search engine; Wikio is something else (thanks, Jim).

’Nother update: Apparently, Wikio, which was originally attributed to Wales in the story I link to above, is a startup by former Netvibes CEO Pierre Chappaz. ReadWrite Web has corrected their post.

Dominated by editors: Wikipedia and traditional publishing

Tim O’Reilly recently posted his thoughts on a 2006 article by Aaron Swartz, Who Writes Wikipedia?. Swartz argues that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s contention that the encyclopedia is not “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” but rather “a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” is flawed. Swartz argues that Wikipedia needs to depend on that faceless mob, rather than the group of editors described by Wales for its content.

O’Reilly disagrees with Swartz, however, suggesting that the Wikipedia model—where numerous contributors supply the raw material which dedicated editors transform into a usable product—is quite similar to the traditional publishing model.

Take O’Reilly’s book publishing operations: we have far more outside authors than we have employees. Many of them are passionate experts rather than professional writers or editors, just like Wikipedia authors. Their work is improved by an editing team and brought to market in the context of brands that we’ve created, but we couldn’t do what we do without them. This is just as true of any publishing company. Did Bloomsbury’s editors invent Harry Potter? No, it was a welfare mom who dreamed up the idea while riding on the train.

I recently presented some research at the SCMLA that I believe offers some support to O’Reilly’s claim. I did a study of the revision histories of high- and low-quality Wikipedia articles, and what I found was that while the high-quality articles’ revision histories were very similar to those of high-quality articles in other contexts, the low-quality articles were quite different from those in offline contexts. (The “offline contexts” here are previously published studies of revision in academic writing.)

While low-quality offline writing in previous studies was characterized by excessive editing with very little content development, the low-quality Wikipedia writing in my study was characterized by very little editing of vast amounts of relevant content.

In other words, I found that while the process for creating good writing in Wikipedia looks very much like the process for creating good writing elsewhere, bad writing in Wikipedia is bad because it is not effectively edited. While my study was small and needs some further investigation, it seems like this result would support O’Reilly’s claim that the Wikipedia publishing model is quite similar to that of traditional publishing.

Update: In a reply to a comment on his post by John H, O’Reilly makes a point similar to mine:

Aaron’s point was that MOST of the articles are written by outsiders. They are then edited and improved by the insiders. The “long tail of articles”, as you put it, aren’t written by a different demographic, but they haven’t benefited from Wikipedia’s *editing* community.

New Wikipedia study: Zealots and Good Samaritans

Denise Anthony, Sean W. Smith, and Tim Williamson of Dartmouth have released a new study of volunteer help on Wikipedia. In the paper, “The Quality of Open Source Production: Zealots and Good Samaritans in the Case of Wikipedia,” the authors argue that the quality of Wikipedia articles depends on “Good Samaritans,” or infrequent posters who maintain article quality, and “zealots,” dedicated users who spend a great deal of time on the site. Essentially, Anthony et al. argue that Wikipedia maintains its quality through the quantity of its users.

Here’s the abstract:

New forms of production based in electronic technology, such as open-source and open-content production, convert private commodities (typically software) into essentially public goods. A number of studies find that, like in other collective goods, incentives for reputation and group identity motivate contributions to open source goods, thereby overcoming the social dilemma inherent in producing such goods. In this paper we examine how contributor motivations affect the quality of contributions to the open-content online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We find that quality is associated with contributor motivations, but in a surprisingly inconsistent way. Registered users’ quality increases with more contributions, consistent with the idea of participants motivated by reputation and commitment to the Wikipedia community. Surprisingly, however, we find the highest quality from the vast numbers of anonymous “Good Samaritans” who contribute only once. Our findings that Good Samaritans as well as committed “zealots” contribute high quality content to Wikipedia suggest that it is the quantity as well as the quality of contributors that positively affects the quality of open source production.

via The Wired Campus

Open source law

New Zealand is using a wiki to create a publicly editable draft of its new police act. The draft is here while the homepage describing the project can be found here. According to the site, the project is being monitored by a review team, presumably to prevent vandalism. Here’s a description of the motivation for the project:

The Police Act Review has maintained an open process throughout, and wiki technology offers a novel way for people to have a say in the law-drafting process as well. This may well be one of the first pieces of legislation ever developed in New Zealand with the aid of such an online tool

This project appears to be incredibly open; the government is even soliciting alternative versions of the law:

To help get you started, we've included some headings and a few example clauses. But don't feel constrained. For instance, if you'd prefer to work offline and upload a complete Act for others to comment on, by all means add it beneath the one we've started (there's a space provided under the "Alternative versions" heading).

It will be interesting to see how this project is received and what it produces.

via Boing Boing