FC NOW: The Fast Company Weblog
November 3, 2006
Is Open Source Mania Already Dead?
A few weeks ago Larry Sanger, the co-mastermind behind Wikipedia, announced he's taking on the grassroots encyclopedia with his own "fork" (a term used by hackers when two groups working on open-source software move in opposing directions) called Citizendium. Sanger--who at one point was Wikipedia's only employee--left the org in 2002, not exactly on great terms with his former co-founder, Jimmy Wales. The two have been reported to have had both philosophical and personality clashes (in fact, on Wikipedia, Wales declares himself the site's sole founder).
With Citizendium, which is slated to launch by the end of the year, Sanger--who has a doctorate in philosophy--is challenging the Wikipedia philosophy head-on: instead of anonymous writing and editing of submissions by anyone, Citizendium will have a stable of expert editors (that reflect what some might say are elitist academic creds like: PhDs, masters degrees, published work, etc.) that all submissions will be filtered through. Citizendium will literally begin by taking Wikipedia's 1.4 million articles (ten times that of Britannica) and comb through those with its experts, to weed out the inaccurate and the biased. Surely the academics will be thrilled to regain their authoritative voice, but the site's sustainability is dependent on whether or not the masses will want to participate in this refereed version of the post-modern encyclopedia they know and love.
This of course raises the central debate of the entire open-source movement: does the revival of the expert mean we're already over the whole utopian idea of a democratic, user-generated world? Have we realized that it just doesn't work?
Posted by Danielle Sacks at November 3, 2006 3:01 PM | Category: ideas |
5 Comments
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The idea of forking itself a very open sourceish. Can you do that in a closed source world? that too while taking the whole of the previous data into your project?
The basic thing of open source culture is to do whatever you want with the data/source if you dont like the present setup. Having the freedom to modify or tweak things to your satisfaction (be it a neophyte or a "phd"). I think OS is not dead, its making many people realize different possibilities and oppurtunities. and this fork shows that its getting into mainstream.
deepak
Just how do you determine who the experts are?
Experts aren't immune from biases either.
how many professors can he afford to pay?
The idea that expert-centric, profit-driven models are the only viable ones is no less naive than the "whole utopian idea of a democratic, user-generated world." What we're seeing is simply the world re-negotiating what works, and it's a matter of both context and preference.
In the Open Source world, the fact that anyone can read the source code of a program and modify it, doesn't mean that just anybody's modifications will be accepted. In fact, having "commit rights" --the ability to make semi-official changes--to a project, is a sign of status. Different projects are differently open--while by definition all Open Source projects let you have the source code and modify it, some groups are interested in other programmers' contributions and others aren't.
Often groups split and create code "forks" based on this very point: access privileges.
Only time will tell whether adding dedicated experts to the Wikipedia projects will improve it. Most likely the change will simply make it different; we might see Citizendium becoming known as more reliable for certain topics, but sparse or behind the times on others.
But open source development has been around since the dawn of time, and certainly since the early days of programming. It's not dying--it's just becoming so ubiquitous that people are forgetting that, for a decade or so, it was a big deal.
It's a bit of a stretch to conclude that because someone is developing an "expert-driven" version of Wikipedia, that this automatically means that a democratic internet is dead. We should be more concerned about the network neutrality debate. I don't think the internet is free from elitism--that's just human nature. Luckily, however, we don't have to deal with the same scarcity issues that we have with traditional media.