Imagine this! You sit back glowing with satisfaction because yesterday that über exemplar of collaborative endeavour, Wikipedia, properly attributes your contribution to the welfare and development of the human race. But what's this? You look in today to recharge your self-worth batteries and you've been erased! Like a Joe Stalin photocall you're gone … gone … gone … “This is what makes innovating so damned unsafisfying. It's a total burnout to create new stuff and have other people take credit for it, over and over. Makes me want to put on the brakes and start taking out patents.” Dave Winer, Scripting News, 11 June 2005
Now for those of you who don't know, Dave Winer is a giant among innovaters (is that ok Dave? 🙂 who has made a major contribution to the development of one of the variants of the Web information syndication formats called RSS (which can mean Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, or RDF Site Summary - your choice depends either on your ideological viewpoint or the current state of your memory:)
Now RSS is really important because it makes it really really simple to transfer information about distributed resources which can be of any media type. So no complex ontologies and no need to navigate the complexities of the semantic web … again as Tim Berners Lee, the godfather of the Web is supposed to have said … “scruffy works” (I can't track down the written quote).
For a practical application of RSS on this site see the 'Most Recent Auricle Podcast' or the top of Auricle or the 'Syndicated Sites' and 'Syndicated LOs' at the bottom. Each of these are pulling in syndicated information from other sites which has been offered in the RSS format.
But back to Dave Winer.
Along with others, including Adam Curry (who some now know as 'Podfather' - godfathers, podfathers … no mothers in RSS or podcast origins then?), Dave recognized that with a minor enhancement of the syntax RSS could also enclose information about media resources and that information could include the actual link to where the media resource was archived. Simple thing maybe, but many acts of genius are based on such apparently simple conceptual leaps. And, so, suddenly, RSS made access to distributed media resources really easy. And because RSS files are usually dynamically generated there was a way of automatically distributing information about new resources.
The rest is history (I'll come back to that statement) but, in summary, other people, but most notably Adam Curry, also made their own conceptual leaps and added their 5% to close the circle and move from interesting innovation to fundamental change. Suddenly a new global media distribution mechanism was born which came to be known as 'podcasting', with even the major broadbasters like the BBC getting in on the act. Dave Winer came to be perceived as one of the stars not the star.
Anyway, that's the context for today's post, but let's get back to the core.
Basically, Wikipedia is perhaps the finest public example around of a community editable web page (a wiki) in action. The community can create the knowledge base; the community can delete the knowledge base; the community can change the knowledgebase.
Now all of this might frighten the pants off anyone used to traditional academic writing. They will expend prodigious amounts of energy to preserve and secure their work in aspic (oh! … ok password protected PDF) and ensuring proper attribution for both their own and others' contributions. So the concept of a system where any community member can alter or even delete what you've said must be the stuff of nightmares.
But it ain't so bad. Rest easy. Wipe the sweat from your brow. Let your blood pressure fall. Think calm thoughts and then read Jon Udell's recent post Wikipedia and the social construction of knowledge. Jon definitely has something valuable to contribute.
Now back to my earlier throwaway line '… the rest is history'. You see what Dave Winer doesn't grasp is that he's controversial (I didn't say wrong … I said controversial). What Wikipedia is actually demonstrating ever so well is that it's subverting the traditional 'history is written by the winners' (no pun intended) model. A traditional model would have the biographer or autobiographer writing their account with the aim of that becoming the seminal reference until of course a few years later (preferably when you're dead and therefore obviously you can't respond:) another revisionist author comes along and tries to throw you from your rightful reputational throne and claim it for themselves. Until, that is, a revisionist of the revisionist view comes along and puts you back on your pedestal.
What Wikipedia has done is put into warp drive a process that used to take years/decades/centuries so that, if you are famous (or infamous) enough, it can happen almost in real time.
One minute you're the statue. The next you're the pigeon:)
Dave Winer has little reason to worry about his important contribution not being recognized. The only reason that his temporary 'erasure' occured at all was because some 'author' thought he was important enough to erase. The 'repair' (revision) systems of Wikipedia are so fast that this can only ever be a transient experience anyway. But what's really interesting, as Jon Udell shows, is the picture which emerges by being able to compare different versions of a Wikipedia document. But what is important here is to have plenty of Wikipedia friends, or at least supporters, watching after your interests otherwise you have to do the maintaining of your own Wikipedia references.
Social historians should be salivating about the opportunities for comparative review of viewpoints in later years once a controversy has died away. Why was person x removed in later revisions? Why was the role of y promoted to the detriment of x? Does x have a rightful claim? Did x build upon the earlier work of others and have they been given proper attribution? Did x lose support (or go on vacation for a couple of weeks) and gave up 'correcting' due to pure exhaustion?
In conclusion, it would be a pity if Dave Winer's feelings about his role not being properly acknowledged led him down the patent route for future innovation as he threatens. The law of unintended consequences can so often cause an unexpected ricochet. I'm thinking here of his recent satirical 'Curry Collage' which simply provided the media savvy Curry with the means and justification to respond far more effectively and devastatingly than Dave ever could. In his Daily Source Code (16 May 2005 - MP3 Download) Curry employed an impressive array of controlled polemic, themed music (to reach the emotional centres), and, above all, perfectly timed silence at the end of the show. If you're so inclined, you can listen to this particular episode and judge for yourselves (start at ~26 minutes 20 seconds in and run it until the end).
It would also be a pity if the last entry in Wikipedia about Dave was about just that … I've got a feeling that he would be a lot less famous as a result but we would also have lost somebody who has made a difference.
