Open Source Society

The Future of Collaboration: with Wikimedia’s Deputy Director Erik Moeller

I recently had the rare pleasure of corresponding with Mr. ErikMoeller, the Deputy Director of the WikiMedia Foundation. I asked him about the roots of projects like Wikipedia, how these collaborative projects have impacted both technology and society, and where these projects are headed in the future. The key that I came away with from this interview is what I read between the lines. Mr Moeller exudes a passion not just for the Foundation and the projects it sponsors, but for a vision of a cooperative future for both society and technology that many in the free and open-source movement share. He demonstrates it isn’t always about making things available for free, but also about giving people the freedom, the tools, and the knowledge to use these things to increase their own potential as human beings and members of a society.

OSS: What sparked the idea for the Wikimedia project?
Erik: As a child, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales spent many hours poring over
the World Book Encyclopedia. Inspired by the free software & open
source movement, which has resulted in amazing innovations such as the
GNU/Linux operating system, Jimmy launched a first effort to create a
free encyclopedia in March 2000. The Nupedia project, in its first
announcement, was already “planned to become the largest general
encyclopedia in the history of humankind”. But Nupedia was a failure -
an interesting study in the need for openness in collaborative
endeavor. Only 24 articles completed its heavy peer review process,
and the project was quietly dismantled in 2003.

In January 2001, more as an experiment, Wales installed a wiki to see
if it could be used to draft articles, perhaps to be later finalized
for publication. This wiki became its own dedicated site, Wikipedia,
and exploded in growth. Wikis had been around since 1995, invented by
software engineer Ward Cunningham. The first wiki software Wikipedia
used was a tiny open source Perl script (leading credence to the
belief that all good things start as tiny Perl scripts). Since then,
volunteers from all over the world have created the MediaWiki
software, arguably the most widely used & most successful open source
wiki engine.

OSS: Did you expect it to become the phenomenon that is has?
Erik: Me personally? Certainly not. When I first came across Wikipedia (I
had not paid much attention to Nupedia), it seemed wacky and
disorganized. Heck, it _was_ wacky and disorganized. It was also
ridiculously addictive & extremely interesting. It took me a few
months to realize that this thing might become really, really huge &
important.

OSS: Do you think this open model has benefits over commercial information and media sources?
Erik: It’s certainly a useful complement. Wikipedia has its own difficulties
dealing with controversial & hotly debated topics, because they can
turn into battlegrounds for different factions waging “edit wars”.
Worse, one-sided information sometimes will end up being published
without being counterbalanced. It’s difficult to envision an open
environment where such conflicts and problems can never arise — what
we can hope to achieve is to create an environment where, through
meritocratic processes, constructive individuals acting in good faith
help to mediate, mitigate, and de-escalate such situations.

One of the more fascinating internal aspects of Wikimedia culture are
the various dispute resolution mechanisms, ranging from mediation
groups over individual moderators (”admins”) to arbitration
committees. This is essentially an attempt to build participatory
structures that help to achieve similar measures of quality control
and enforcement of “ground rules” as editorial processes and control
mechanisms in traditional media — hopefully without being suspect to
the same biases.

I wouldn’t want to live in a world that’s only run in the wiki way –
but at this point, giving up Wikipedia would be almost as hard for me.

OSS: How do you feel sites like Wikipedia have impacted the way society thinks about information and knowledge?
Erik: Essentially, when using Wikipedia, being a critical reader is no
longer optional, it’s required. In that way it’s different from
traditional media, where we are often told that we have to read with a
critical eye (and we do have to!), but in practice, it’s easier not
to. I really hope that the radical transparency of the Wikipedia
engine will lead more and more people to understand the ways in which
knowledge is formed, gathered, verified, and developed, to
participate, and to always question.

OSS: Do you think open source projects will have any impact on the way society itself is structured and how people relate to one another?
Erik: An interesting question! Open source collaboration practices are
certainly making headway elsewhere - wikis, listservs, version control
mechanisms, blog aggregators etc. are all mainstream tools that are
used throughout the corporate world. It’s become almost normal that
tools for better collaboration are themselves the product of open
collaboration, and the principles and ground rules of the open source
movement become more widely accepted as its methods and best practices
proliferate.

OSS: Do you have plans to expand into other areas and make more types of information and media available in the same cooperative way?
Erik: The Foundation acts primarily as a facilitator for a global community
interested in developing and sharing knowledge. So our role is to
figure out ways in which we can broaden the reach of our projects, to
improve the toolset used by contributors, to set up high level
mechanisms for the community to interact, to document best practices,
and so forth. So the answer to your question would be: We plan to
empower people to collaborate in ever richer, more exciting ways when
it comes to developing and disseminating free educational content.

For example, last year, we’ve improved the video and audio embedding
tools in MediaWiki, while still relying completely on open standards
like Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis. We’re working with several entities to
explore video & audio collaboration using open source tools and open
codecs. And we’re testing tools for exporting content to PDF, hoping
to also support OpenDocument in the near future.

OSS: Do you have any plans to commercialize all or a part of Wikimedia’s projects, for instance licensing CD volumes or creating “premium” content available at a price?
Erik: We’re certainly not going to create “premium” content - that would be
completely against the spirit of free culture. And we can’t
“license” CD volumes because the content is all freely licensed to
begin with. What we can do, and have done, is license the Wikipedia
brand (logo & name) to third parties for commercial products, so we’ll
probably see a bit more of that: Wikipedia mobile phone portals,
Wikipedia DVDs or USB sticks created by third parties, and so on. We
just have to be careful not to be associated with stuff that’s not in
line with our mission & values.

The ideal business cooperation, from my point of view, is one where we
don’t just generate revenue, but in fact inspire others to adopt open
source methods and practices. The best example of that is our
cooperation with PediaPress.com to bring wiki-to-PDF and “print on
demand” functionality to Wikipedia. PediaPress, in the process of this
cooperation, has released all their code under the BSD license (see
code.pediapress.com).

I strongly believe it’s possible to be both principled and open: To
seek friends & allies, while insisting on standard parameters for
every partnership, and using every opportunity to promote the ethics
of the free culture movement.