From: Michael Rand <mikerand@rcn.com>
  To  : <CPC@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
  Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 14:46:51 -0500

FW: on the question of being anonymous

It seems someone else is also struggling over the issue of anonymous.  On
the micro level I am all for it.  But when I open my email box everyday and
find spam in it from people who deliberately obscure who they are I want to
find them and end their efforts.  

Michael Rand
Blogs:
CyberHumanRightsLaw
http://mikerand.blogs.com/cyberhumanrightslaw/
(212) 749 6766
mikerand@rcn.com 

>From the New York Times:


Anonymous Source Is Not the Same as Open Source 
By RANDALL STROSS
WIKIPEDIA, the free online encyclopedia, currently serves up the following:
Five billion pages a month. More than 120 languages. In excess of one
million English-language articles. And a single nagging epistemological
question: Can an article be judged as credible without knowing its author?

Wikipedia says yes, but I am unconvinced.

Dispensing with experts, the Wikipedians invite anyone to pitch in, writing
an article or editing someone else's. No expertise is required, nor even a
name. Sound inviting? You can start immediately. The system rests upon the
belief that a collectivity of unknown but enthusiastic individuals, by dint
of sheer mass rather than possession of conventional credentials, can serve
in the supervisory role of editor. Anyone with an interest in a topic can
root out inaccuracies and add new material.

At first glance, this sounds straightforward. But disagreements arise all
the time about what is a problematic passage or an encyclopedia-worthy
topic, or even whether a putative correction improves or detracts from the
original version. 

The egalitarian nature of a system that accords equal votes to everyone in
the "community" - middle-school student and Nobel laureate alike - has
difficulty resolving intellectual disagreements.

Wikipedia's reputation and internal editorial process would benefit by
having a single authority vouch for the quality of a given article. In the
jargon of library and information science, lay readers rely upon "secondary
epistemic criteria," clues to the credibility of information when they do
not have the expertise to judge the content.

Once upon a time, Encyclopaedia Britannica recruited Einstein, Freud, Curie,
Mencken and even Houdini as contributors. The names helped the encyclopedia
bolster its credibility. Wikipedia, by contrast, provides almost no clues
for the typical article by which reliability can be appraised. A list of
edits provides only screen names or, in the case of the anonymous editors,
numerical Internet Protocol addresses. Wasn't yesterday's practice of
attaching "Albert Einstein" to an article on "Space-Time" a bit more helpful
than today's "71.240.205.101"?

What does Wikipedia's system offer in place of an expert authority willing
to place his or her professional reputation on the line with a signature
attached to an article? 

When I asked Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, last week, he discounted
the importance of individual contributors to Britannica. "When people trust
an article in Britannica," he said, "it's not who wrote it, it's the
process." There, a few editors review a piece and then editing ceases. By
contrast, Wikipedia is built with unending scrutiny and ceaseless editing. 

He predicts that in the future, it will be Britannica's process that will
seem strange: "People will say, 'This was written by one person? Then looked
at by only two or three other people? How can I trust that process?' " 

The Wikipedian hive is capable of impressive feats. The English-language
collection recently added its millionth article, for example. It was about
the Jordanhill railway station, in Glasgow. The original version, a few
paragraphs, appeared to say all that a lay reader would ever wish to know
about it. But the hive descended and in a week, more than 640 edits were
logged.

If every topic could be addressed like this, without recourse to specialized
learning - and without the heated disputes called flame wars - the anonymous
hive could be trusted to produce work of high quality. But the Jordanhill
station is an exception.

Biographical entries, for example, are often accompanied by controversy.
Several recent events have shown how anyone can tamper with someone else's
entry. Congressional staff members have been unmasked burnishing articles
about their employers and vandalizing those of political rivals. (Sample
addition: "He likes to beat his wife and children.") 

Mr. Wales himself ignored the encyclopedia's guidelines about "Dealing With
Articles About Yourself" and altered his own Wikipedia biography; when other
editors undid them, he reapplied his changes. The incidents, even if few in
number, do not help Wikipedia establish the legitimacy of a process that is
reluctant to say no to anyone.

It should be noted that Mr. Wales is a full-time volunteer, and that neither
he nor the thousands of fellow volunteer editors has a pecuniary interest in
this nonprofit project. He also deserves accolades for keeping Wikipedia
operating without the intrusion of advertising, at least so far. 

Most winningly, he has overseen a system that is gleefully candid in its
public self-examination. If you're seeking a well-organized list of
criticisms of Wikipedia, you won't find a better place than Wikipedia's
coverage of itself. Wikipedia also provides a taxonomy of no fewer than 23
different forms of vandalism that strike it.

It is easy to forget how quickly Wikipedia has grown; it began only in 2001.
With the passage of a little more time, Mr. Wales and his associates may
come around to the idea that identifying one person as a given article's
supervising editor would enhance the encyclopedia's reputation. 

Mr. Wales has already responded to recent negative articles about vandalism
at the site with announcements of modest reforms. Anonymous visitors are no
longer permitted to create pages, though they still may edit existing ones. 

To curb what Mr. Wales calls "drive-by pranks" that are concentrated on
particular articles, he has instituted a policy of "semi-protection." In
these cases, a user must have registered at least four days before being
permitted to make changes to the protected article. "If someone really wants
to write 'George Bush is a poopy head,' you've got to wait four days," he
said.

When asked what problems on the site he viewed as most pressing, Mr. Wales
said he was concerned with passing along the Wikipedian culture to
newcomers. He sounded wistful when he spoke of the days not so long ago when
he could visit an article that was the subject of a flame war and would know
at least some participants - and whether they could resolve the dispute
tactfully. 

As the project has grown, he has found that he no longer necessarily knows
anyone in a group. When a dispute flared recently over an article related to
a new dog breed, he looked at the discussion and asked himself in
frustration, "Who are these people?"

Isn't this precisely the question all users are bound to ask about
contributors?

By wide agreement, the print encyclopedia in the English world reached its
apogee in 1911, with the completion of Encyclopaedia Britannica's 11th
edition. (For the fullest tribute, turn to Wikipedia.) But the Wikipedia
experiment need not be pushed back in time toward that model. It need only
be pushed forward, so it can catch up to others with more experience in
online collaboration: the open-source software movement.

Wikipedia and open-source projects like Linux are similarly noncommercial,
intellectual enterprises, mobilizing volunteers who will probably never meet
one another in person. But even though Wikipedians like to position their
project under the open-source umbrella, the differences are wide. 

Jeff Bates, a vice president of the Open Source Technology Group who
oversees SourceForge.net, the host of more than 80,000 active open-source
projects, said, "It makes me grind my teeth to hear Wikipedia compared to
open source." In every open-source project, he said, there is "a benevolent
dictator" who ultimately takes responsibility, even though the code is
contributed by many. Good stuff results only if "someone puts their name on
it."

WIKIPEDIA has good stuff, too. These have been designated "featured
articles." But it will be a long while before all one-million-and-counting
entries have been carefully double-checked and buffed to a high shine. Only
923 have been granted "featured" status, and the consensus-building process
is presently capable of adding only about one a day.

Mr. Wales is not happy with this pace and seems open to looking again at the
open-source software model for ideas. Software development that relies on
scattered volunteers is a two-step process: first, a liberal policy
encourages the contributions of many, then a restrictive policy follows to
stabilize the code in preparation for release. Wikipedia, he said, has "half
the model."

There's no question that Wikipedia volunteers can address many more topics
than the lumbering, for-profit incumbents like Britannica and World Book,
and can update entries swiftly. Still, anonymity blocks credibility. One
thing that Wikipedians have exactly right is that the current form of the
encyclopedia is a beta test. The quality level that would permit speaking of
Version 1.0 is still in the future. 

Randall Stross is a historian and author based in Silicon Valley. E-mail:
ddomain@nytimes.com.







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