English Audio Request

Aside from describing Wikipedia’s history, Lih offers some suggestive reflections on the roots of its remarkable growth and its distinctiveness as a project. After all, the million-dollar question about Wikipedia—the one that foundations and businesses are desperately trying to answer—is not how it works but why it works. Lih’s forays into philosophy, psychology, and sociology, however, are too brief and shallow to be of much use.
Much could have been said on these topics. Two of Wikipedia’s co-founders found each other on philosophy-related mailing lists. Indeed Sanger has a philosophy PhD (his Ohio State doctoral thesis is titled “Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification”), while Wales almost completed a PhD in finance. They came to the project with assumptions about human cooperation that appear to be rooted in philosophy, economics, and evolutionary psychology (among other disciplines), but those ideas are poorly articulated in the book.
Lih does point out that Sanger and Wales were heavily influenced by Ayn Rand’s Objectivism (shades of Alan Greenspan), according to which, reality exists independent of consciousness and life’s great purpose is the rational pursuit of self-interest. Wales’s fascination with Rand was so deep that he even named his daughter after a protagonist in one of Rand’s books. But Lih does not explain the steps from Objectivism to an encyclopedia that “could detail what is true in the world without judgments.” After all, didn’t the Encyclopedia Britannica (or Diderot’s Encyclopédie, for that matter) aim to check judgments at the door and detail only “what is true in the world”? And isn’t that the aim of the new computational search engine, WolframAlpha? How does Objectivism enter the picture?
Maybe it doesn’t. While Sanger and Wales present themselves on blogs and at new-media conferences as mavericks with ideas, they did start off with some rather conventional plans for an online encyclopedia. And their decision to switch over to the anyone-can-edit mode—they are still debating which of the two came up with this scheme—may have been a stroke of luck rather than a product of a theory of cooperation or philosophically-rooted convictions about the virtues of self-interest. Linking Wikipedia to Objectivism may simply be an effort at lending some ex post gravitas to the project (or, more likely, its founders).