English Audio Request

Lih also could have told us more about the puzzling psychology of Wikipedians. Who are those people? What makes them so addicted to “wikicrack,” to spending countless hours improving the site, often doing mundane, repetitive tasks that they would never do for money? Lih relies on the work of Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler to address the puzzle. Benkler’s studies of “peer production” draw on the thought of Russian anarchist Piotr Kropotkin, who believed that cooperation is as important in the evolution of species as competition and that “mutual aid” is essential to human survival. Lih does not mention that Rand and Kropotkin are not exactly intellectual soulmates. Lih also does not explain how these two diverging philosophies—one prizing egoism, the other altruism—could live happily together in one site. “Wikipedia is the obsessive-compulsive’s dream come true. It has a bottomless pit of source material with which to indulge one’s pet peeves or obsessions,” Lih offers. But we already knew that. What we (still) do not understand is why some people find deleting commas on Wikipedia more rewarding than playing solitaire or browsing Gawker. Is the public-benefit aspect important? The pleasures of a complex cooperative activity? The unusual possibility of being cooperative from home? Lih leaves us wandering.
To be sure, he does offer some fresh insights about Wikipedia itself. For example, he compares the transformation of this initially small project into a digital metropolis to the process of urban planning outlined in Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. There is, indeed, much to be said about the similarities between Wikipedians and Jacobs’s “self-appointed public characters,” the people who hang out and help produce the “social structure of sidewalk life.” But Lih does not push this comparison far enough: he clings, so to speak, to the “life” side of the equation and never ventures into the darker “death” side. Surely, the increased bureaucratization of Wikipedia would destroy some of those public characters that he admires so much. And how will that affect the project?