Info/Law

Saw a fun little post on Ars Technica after lunch: Many minds, one novel? Wiki tries to create art, about a group of British university students who are trying to harness the power of peer production to write a novel from the ground up. So far many thousands of words of rambling, stream-of-consciousness prose have emerged, punctuated with bits of obscurantism and non sequiturs that suggest a sort of dime-store Hunter S. Thompson aesthetic at play. This is at least, both quantitatively and stylistically, an improvement over last fall’s efforts by a bunch of cyber law professors to draft a law review article in the collaborative mode.

But can a project like this ever succeed? The evidence so far suggests not. Perhaps the cyberprofs and the wiki-novelists need to go back and reread The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and particularly chapter 10, which sets forth some necessary preconditions that must be satisfied for the peer production model to work. What was present in the open-source software context (and even the Wikipedia context) is that all the participants in the project agree on what it is that they’re building, at a fairly high level of specificity. Raymond’s popmail client worked because everybody who contributed to it agreed that they were building an e-mail client; you didn’t have one developer think it was supposed to be an e-mail client, another thinking it was supposed to be an office suite, a third thinking it was supposed to be a shoot-em-up game, and so forth. Beyond the broadest possible generalities — “we’re writing a novel!” or “we’re writing a law review article!” — the recent collaborative drafting efforts I mentioned haven’t acheived that sort of consensus about the organic nature of the project.

Is Wikipedia a counter-example?  I think not, mostly because Wikipedia isn’t a single work, but rather a collection of more than a million individual works (more than 1.6 million, in English, as of this afternoon) that all add up to an encyclopedia.  The consensus on what is to be achieved is there, on an entry-by-entry basis; there’s an editorial consensus on what the entry on the Heavy Metal Umlaut ought to be about, and edits that depart from that consensus are shortly brought back into line.

Filed under: Media, Peer Production