Last week, a number of friends emailed me Chris Wilson’s story in Slate, The Wisdom of the Chaperones. I’m glad I’m finally getting a chance to respond to it.

When stories like this are published, I always come back to the same observation: a number of journalistic accounts of Wikipedia are really lazy. I mention one example of this in a dissertation chapter I just finished. When a Wikipedia editor named Essjay was found to be lying about his credentials, Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen argued that, like the communists, Wikipedia had found a way to make Essjay disappear: “Jimmy Wales fired loyal Jordan/Essjay and, all of a sudden, the kid/theologian is history. One minute he's everywhere and then he's nowhere...Now Wikipedia just says: RETIRED: This user is no longer active on Wikipedia.” Yet, had Keen taken a few minutes to do some research, he would have found that Wikipedians were obsessively discussing the Essjay controversy on a request for comments page and in a Wikipedia article about the controversy. This controversy didn’t disappear on Wikipedia – it multiplied. Journalists and critics seem to be so blinded by disgust or annoyance that they fail to do their job - they fail to investigate. There are problems with Wikipedia, and if these folks would take the time to make careful, researched arguments about those problems they might gain some credibility. As it stands, Keen comes off as the exact thing he rails against in his book: an amateur.

Wilson seems also to have stopped short in the area of research. As I read through the article a first time, I was completely on board with Wilson’s comment that "social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy" while in reality "a small number of people are running the show." Yep. This is a big problem, and people should continue to debunk any notion that Wikipedia is utopian or democratic. However, that remark was followed with this citation: "According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits." This piqued my interest. After reading Aaron Swartz’s study, I’m skeptical of blanket statements that Wikipedia is run by a few elites. Certainly, administrators wield power, but Swartz makes a convincing case that it all depends on what you count. If you count the number of edits a Wikipedian makes, you’ll get the “1 percent” story. However, if you count the amount of text changed by Wikipedians, you’ll get a much murkier story. According to Swartz’s study, it turns out that casual Wikipedians contribute a great deal of content.

But Wilson was citing a much newer study as he made his argument that Wikipedia represents the "wisdom of chaperones" rather than the wisdom of crowds. Maybe this Palo Alto study provided a different account? So, I went to the PARC study, and now I wonder if Wilson even read it. It turns out that when you actually read the study, these researchers found something similar to Swartz:

“Although the population and content of Wikipedia appear to be in continued exponential growth, a closer look revealed a major shift in the distribution of work in the system. We discovered an initial rise and subsequent decline in the influence of ‘elite’ users. This result held true whether elite users were defined by peer-selected groups (administrators) or data-driven groups (high-edit users). We demonstrated that this decline was not due to a decrease in elite user activity or to shifts in user group editing patterns, but instead was driven by marked growth in the population of low-edit users – the rise of the bourgeoisie. These results were consistent whether the data were analyzed by edit count or by the actual change in content.” (Kittur et. al.)

In other words, elites are actually making a smaller proportion of Wikipedia edits as more and more "low-edit users" contribute to the project. These researchers cite Swartz’s study and they cite Jimmy Wales' claims that Wikipedia is essentially written by a very small number of people. Then, they conclude that the truth lies somewhere in the middle: "we show that the story is more complex than explanations offered before." Wilson takes one piece of information from a complex and complicated argument and completely perverts the meaning of the study. He makes it sound as if these researchers argue that Wikipedia is written by a relatively small number of "chaperones." The quotation I provide above should be evidence enough that the study found things to be a lot more complex than this. But I’m not sure that Wilson actually read the study.

Wilson’s "chaperones" argument raises necessary questions, but it does so by cutting corners. Critics of Web 2.0 utopianism often worry that we are lauding amateurs and that the work of professionals is getting shuffled aside. But stories like Wilson’s are evidence that the professionals are not always doing their homework. The argument he makes needs to be made, but why can’t it be made more responsibly? Why can’t Wilson include in his argument that Wikipedia, while not utopian, is the result of a complex composition process that involves both "elites" and "low-edit" Wikipedians? This wouldn’t stop him from discussing that the Wikipedia inner circle wields a good bit of power, and it would allow him to show readers that the issue is complicated.

Wikipedia is not utopian, but it’s not dystopian either. Journalists like Wilson can better serve their readers by slowing down a bit and explaining the complexities of phenomena like Wikipedia.