The free encyclopedia faces the regulatory state: Anonymity, anarchy, and the public domain

“ Bringing together the sum of all human knowledge requires the knowledge of many humans — including yours!
What is Wikipedia? Wikipedia—the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit—is one of the largest collaborative projects in history. With millions of articles and in hundreds of languages, Wikipedia is read by hundreds of millions of people on a regular basis.
A lot of content already exists on Wikipedia, but many important topics have poor coverage and some have no article at all. ”

“ February 25, 2004 (The Internet) : Wikipedia (Wikipedia.org) , a volunteer-created, multi-language encyclopedia, announced today that the project has reached a milestone of 500,000 articles, spread across 50 different languages.
More than 300,000 new articles were created in the last 12 months alone, making Wikipedia the world's largest and fastest-growing open content encyclopedia. Every day, another two thousand articles are added to this collaborative endeavour. All articles on Wikipedia can be edited and improved by anyone at any time. ”

“ There is, it turns out, in a few cases a tension between the goals of anarchy and encyclopedia creation.
Some tensions spring immediately to the minds of the uninitiated, and I don't mean those. For example, some people would say that anarchy will lead to poor quality and invasion by cranks and vandals. We've learned that, while there are a few problems in that direction, the freedom each of us have to edit others' contributions more or less ensures that we'll remove the vast majority of egregiously bad stuff, crank productions, and vandalism. (See w:Wikipedia/Our Replies to Our Critics.) ”

“ If we were to permit Wikipedia to take controversial stands, it would be virtually impossible for people of many different viewpoints to collaborate. Because of the neutrality policy, we have partisans working together on the same articles. ”

“ Interacting with the community Every article has its own Talk page, too. These Talk pages can be used to make suggestions, post new sources, point out problems, and discuss changes that contributors disagree about.
Look, a new Notification! These let you know when someone mentions your username, thanks you for an edit, or leaves a message on your User Talk page.
One important guideline for community discussions on Wikipedia is to be respectful and civil. Even if you get into disagreements, you should assume good faith on the part of other contributors. ”

“ That there exists such a power of self-regulation is a fact recognized in every department of social intercourse—in the attribution of praise or blame, in the teachings of the moralist, in the eye of the law, and in the process of education. ”

“ But as I have tried to show here, the process is not limited to copyright, or culture, or texts, or the United States. Think of the stories about business method patents, or synthetic biology, or the regulation of musical borrowing on the atomic level. Think of the discussion of the openness aversion that began this chapter. In the middle of the most successful and exciting experiment in nonproprietary, distributed creativity in the history of the species, our policy makers can see only the threat from "piracy." They act accordingly. Our second enclosure movement is well under way. ”

“ A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing now to a regulation of copying. You know the things that computers do when you boot them up? Going from copies to, not just copies of the original work, but even derivative works on top of it. Going from 14 years for new works produced by a real author—there are fewer and fewer of those people out there—to life plus 70 years. That's the expansion of law, but also there's been an expansion of control through technology. ”

“ But it should give us pause that if we had our current guiding set of policy goals in place, our assumption that cheaper copying means we need greater regulation, we would never have allowed it to flourish. As Jessica Litman points out, we are increasingly making our decisions about technology and communications policy inside copyright law. We are doing so according to the logic of control that I have sketched out in this chapter. But the logic of control is a partial logic. It blinds us to certain possibilities, ones that have huge and proven potential—look at the Internet. ”

“ Either by those who see you as a threat, who then invoke the system of law we call patents, or by those who take advantage of the extraordinary expansion of control that the law of copyright now gives them over innovation. Either of these two changes through law will produce a world where your freedom has been taken away. And, If You Can't Fight For Your Freedom, You Don't Deserve It. ”

“ The Wikimedia Foundation Grantmaking process is uniquely designed to reflect the ethics, methods, and agreements that are core to the overall Wikipedia model. Proposals are workshopped on public wikis and improved by volunteer editors. Decisions about which proposals to fund and how much funding to offer are made publicly on wikis, in cooperation with volunteer committee members, Board members, and staff, and with input from the larger community. Wikimedia Foundation Grantmaking has the largest peer-review participation of any funder of its kind in the world. ”

“ But over time, articles improve considerably, and a number of our articles are nearly as good as anything you'll find in any encyclopedia. That's because the core group of our contributors includes quite a few Ph.D.'s, professors, professionals, and top-flight students. So I would say that a better way to estimate the reliability of Wikipedia, than simply to say that it permits cranks and vandals to contribute, is to observe that the articles that are now part of Wikipedia have been created by a general public under the general guidance of some very smart, articulate people. ”

“ In the case of someone putting up copies of vandalism on his personal pages, and my removal thereof, several people have lined up on the side of anarchism and freedom and against abuse of authority. In a way, one has to admire Wikipedia's custodian-custodians and their commitment to their ideals. But there is, I maintain, a proposition that they either have failed to realize, or that they disagree with: the freedom to put something up on a personal Wikipedia page is entirely subsumed by the goal of creating an encyclopedia. ”

“ A wiki is about a community going forward, not cyberstalking someone with whom you disagree. We will do what is required to maintain the civility, and to keep this site to its purpose. You can play games, and plead ignorance. Whatever! We will do what is required to manage cyberstalking. -- billinghurst (talk) 02:24, 29 September 2009 (UTC) As the banning policy states: "This does not mean that obviously helpful edits (such as fixing typos or undoing vandalism) must be reverted just because they were made by a banned user, but the presumption in ambiguous cases should be to revert." ”

“ We remember him before we begin the poem and after we finish it, but during the poem nothing exists but the poem. Consequently while we read The Ancient Mariner a change takes place in it. It becomes anonymous, like the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. And here is the point I would support: that all literature tends towards a condition of anonymity, and that, so far as words are creative, a signature merely distracts us from [Pg 15] their true significance. I do not say literature “ought” not to be signed, because literature is alive, and consequently “ought” is the wrong word to use. ”

“ We are conscious only of the world they have created, and we are in a sense co-partners in it. Coleridge, in his smaller domain, makes us co-partners too. We forget for ten minutes his name and our own, and I contend that this temporary forgetfulness, this momentary and mutual anonymity, is sure evidence of good stuff. The demand that literature should express personality is far too insistent in these days, and I look back with longing to the earlier modes of criticism where a poem was not an expression but a discovery, and was sometimes supposed to have been shown to the poet by God. ”

“ But when we are reading the Ancient Mariner, or remembering it [Pg 14] intensely, common knowledge disappears and uncommon knowledge takes its place. We have entered a universe that only answers to its own laws, supports itself, internally coheres, and has a new standard of truth. Information is true if it is accurate. A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. Information is relative. A poem is absolute. ”

“ I am, therefore, very much afraid that the danger of a free press outweighs its utility, particularly where the law offers a way of redressing wrongs. In any case, however, the freedom of the press should be governed by a very strict prohibition of all and every anonymity. ”

“ And in the light of that truth it is clear that the exemption of the pursuit of knowledge from the laws of honor is the most hideous conceivable enlargement of anarchy; worse, by far, than an exemption of the pursuit of money or political power, since there can hardly be attained without some regard for at least the appearances of human welfare, whereas a curious devil might destroy the whole race in torment, acquiring knowledge all the time from his highly interesting experiment. ”

“ Book sellers in 1760 had no conception of the power that you coders would give them some day in the future, and that control adds to this expansion of law. Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before. Right? Because here, here's a simple copyright lesson: Law regulates copies. What's that mean? Well, before the Internet, think of this as a world of all possible uses of a copyrighted work. Most of them are unregulated. Stop talking about fair use, this is not fair use; this is unregulated use. To read is not a fair use ”

“ In fact, the openness aversion sometimes obscures self-interest as well as the public interest. Think of the relentless insistence of the movie companies on making video recorders illegal. Nor does the framework of maximalism help if our goal is to have all the interested economic actors in the room when policy is made. For example, by framing issues of communications policy or Internet regulation as questions of intellectual property, we automatically privilege one set of interested parties—content owners—over others who also have a large economic stake in the matter. ”

“ Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society. In 1774, free culture was born. In a case called Donaldson v. Beckett in the House of Lords in England, free culture was made because copyright was stopped. ”

“ The serious impediment to the free flow of commerce by the local regulation of train lengths and the practical necessity that such regulation, if any, must be prescribed by a single body having a nation-wide authority are apparent. ”

“ Nor is it likely that publicity will assure us the possession of knowledge beyond what we already have through the work of independent investigators. Nor is it probable that enforced publicity will elicit impartial truth. This proposition is of a piece with the punitive theory in the treatment of the problem, a theory which has already led the people far astray. Men shrink instinctively from such stringent regulation, and this is a true index of the moral relation, if we may so speak, of this problem to legislation. ”

“ Try to imagine a form of labor imposed by force, that is not a violation of liberty; a transmission of wealth imposed by force, that is not a violation of property. If you cannot succeed in reconciling this, you are bound to conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice. ”

“ Whilst it is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people, and whilst it is evident that the means of diffusing and improving useful knowledge form so small a proportion of the expenditures for national purposes, I can not presume it to be unseasonable to invite your attention to the advantages of superadding to the means of education provided by the several States a seminary of learning instituted by the National Legislature within the limits of their exclusive jurisdiction, the expense of which might be defrayed or reimbursed out of the vacant grounds which have accrued to the nation within those limits.
Such an institution, though local in its legal character, would be universal in its beneficial effects. ”

“ and a primary object of such a national institution should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic what species of knowledge can be equally important and what duty more pressing on its legislature than to patronize a plan for communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country? ”

“ For we need freedom in and among actual events, not apart from them. It is to be hoped therefore that there remains an alternative; that the road to freedom may be found in that knowledge of facts which enables us to employ them in connection with desires and aims. A physician or engineer is free in his thought and his action in the degree in which he knows what he deals with. Possibly we find here the key to any freedom. ”

“ but, when the mind has been stored with useful knowledge, and strengthened by being employed, the regulation of the behaviour may safely be left to its guidance. ”

“ When, however, education takes cognizance of the union of mind and body in acquiring knowledge, we are not obliged to insist upon the need of obvious, or external, freedom. It is enough to identify the freedom which is involved in teaching and studying with the thinking by which what a person already knows and believes is enlarged and refined. If attention is centered upon the conditions which have to be met in order to secure a situation favorable to effective thinking, freedom will take care of itself. ”

“ In an analogous way, since democracy stands in principle for free interchange, for social continuity, it must develop a theory of knowledge which sees in knowledge the method by which one experience is made available in giving direction and meaning to another. The recent advances in physiology, biology, and the logic of the experimental sciences supply the specific intellectual instrumentalities demanded to work out and formulate such a theory. ”

“ Then men learned how absolutely essential to physical well-being was abundance of water, and our language records in its favourite expression, “free as water,” the meaning of the untold millions that civilization has spent to supply all people freely with this essential. We are learning the greater [Pg 190] lesson about the necessity of free knowledge more slowly, because intellectual and spiritual things are not so readily discerned by our mortal eyes, and it takes more time to read even those messages that God has written very large for those who have eyes to see ”

“ More than a generation will be requisite, under the administration of reasonable laws favoring the progress of knowledge in the general mass of the people, and their habituation to an independent security of person and property, before they will be capable of estimating the value of freedom, and the necessity of a sacred adherence to the principles on which it rests for preservation. ”