Wikipedia is not really a public resource in the traditional sense
In When it comes to Wikipedia, love trumps selfishness, a blog entry written today by Paul C. Campos, there’s a claim that Wikipedia doesn’t suffer the tragedy of the commons because building it is an “act of love”. This is in reference to what Clay Shirky had to say in his recently published new book Here comes everybody (if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend you get a copy). In it, Shirky likened Wikipedia to the Ise Shrine in Japan which each generation of Shinto priests has torn down and rebuilt for a total of 61 times in the past 1,300 years. Now, I love Shirky’s writings and I think he’s dead-on in many aspects in his book but I think he’s missing some subtleties of how Wikipedia works that are essential to understanding why it works. The flaw in Campos’ statement, built on top of Shirky’s analysis, is that he pre-supposes that Wikipedia is a public resource, that is, everyone has the right to use it and no one has the right to exclude anyone else from doing so. That’s not really a good way to characterize Wikipedia though.
In order to understand why that is, we have to separate two different roles that Wikipedia users take on: readers and contributors. For readers, Wikipedia is indeed a public resource. Everyone can use Wikipedia for whatever purpose they want and there’s no way for my reading to cause someone else to be excluded from reading it. To readers, most of the web is a public resource.
When looking at contributors, however, a very different picture emerges. To anyone who has spent some time behind the scenes in Wikipedia and watched people write and improve articles (or participated), the articles of the highest quality tend to be associated with one or more primary users who care very deeply about that article. There is often, in fact, a very strong sense of ownership for what they’ve created. This is evidenced by the meticulous care some users take in preparing “their article” for the process of recognizing them as good or featured. Or by their vociferous reaction when another user edits the article in a way that, in the eyes of the author, do more harm than good. Or by the many users who list the articles they have written and the recognitions they have received on their user page. It’s their work, “their stuff”, they care about it and they are willing to defend it.
There are occasional downsides to this sense of ownership authors feel for their work such as when potentially constructive, well-meaning, and talented new contributors are driven away by an author’s excessive need for protection. But that need is an essential element required to understand why Wikipedia has indeed “not been destroyed by free riding and vandalism, like an overgrazed pasture or north Atlantic cod population,” as Shirky put it. It’s not that Wikipedia by some miracle defies the tragedy of the commons. Indeed, very much the opposite is the case: the sense of ownership, the individual willingness to defend what one has created is what keeps Wikipedia alive. The challenge “merely” lies in balancing the interests of the author to protect his work and the interests of the community (and indirectly the readers) to see content expanded, developed, and refined further.
