Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism (Edge.org)

Some people just don't get it.

What he calls collectivism, in several cases I see as relying on a larger pool of individual expertise. It is not that the group is smarter, it is that in the large sample, we may find individuals with the desired knowledge on a given subject area. This is the why of groupwork: collaboration to produce a greater knowledge base and a better total output, while reducing the weaknesses inherent in unquestioned single perspective.

The collective, as such, is never smarter. However, an aggregated knowledge base contains data beyond the possession of any individual member. We're not talking about intelligence; wiki is about skimming the good data as a group exercise. Yes, perhaps it works beter in a controlled group; OTOH, perhaps that merely pre-selects data limitations.

Unless he's talking about the web browser, and Firefox too is free software.

In any event, sure, Wikipedia is homoegenized collective. The great thing about the web, though, is that it's not all that's there. You can also find blogs, which are usually flagrantly individualized.

Encyclopediae have always been bland homogenized base information. And, when I was a kid in school and tempted to use an encyclopedia for all of the research for my report, they told us that we had to have at least three (or five, or whatever) sources, and *only one* could be an encyclopedia. Encyclopediae are great because they summarize stuff all in one place, and make it easy to find. Their main use for research, though, isn't as a primary source, but as a way of getting you started, of giving you enough background in a subject so that you can *find* the primary sources and effectively place them in some kind of context. More than that, though, encyclopediae are great for people who are curious and want to know something about a topic, but aren't doing scholarship with it. Wikipedia works very well for this sort of thing.

If Wikipedia were the whole world, then, yeah, I'd be worried about what it is. But, that's true of *everything*. If all we had in the world were well-researched scholarly texts that are getting people tenure, then it would also be a very sad world, for such texts are usually inpenetrable to people who aren't PhD researchers in the discipline. If all we had were highly individualized blogs, it would be a sad world, for as great as blogs (like, er, say, mine) are, they're mostly for ranting. If all we had were newspapers, it would be a sad world, because there's the gatekeeper deciding what you get and what you don't, and there is limited space, and there is no coherent reference of topics over time. If all we had was FOX News it would be a sad world, but that goes without saying.

-Rob

Sometimes free software has higher standards of "good enough" than the commercial alternatices. MS word was writen to make a buck and poor quality typesetting was good enough. TeX's version of "good enough" was the best quality typesetting and the output is obviously better.

If taste and judgement is the issue then I personally reckons M$ windows is awful. No only is there no virtual desktop but it also unfailingly implements all of my pet hates. Need I say more?

But the big point is why we do it this way. We develop software this way because it preserves the ability of anyone to join and contribute, to become a member of the community as well as because none of us has all the answers and all of us will disappear from the community eventually, for one reason or another. In contrast to the closed model of development, software released freely will likely outlive its authors, and the code will hopefully provide inspiration and benefit to people not yet born when the software was written. (I am speaking here as a second-generation **ix user; I was alive when Unix was first written, but not yet sentient, so I consider myself to be the continuing and indebted beneficiary of that first generation's groundbreaking work.) The free and open release of methods, concepts and source code could perhaps be compared to plowing one's fields under to replenish the soil, instead of intensively planting until the soil is exhausted, then moving on to other land to do the same thing. Maybe we should call it 'sustainable development', since it's self-renewing in a way when new people come in and pick up the baton. :-)

p.s.: Of course, the FUDdish technique of using words that evoke the old Red Scare Bogeyman ("collectivist", etc.) gets a big roll of the eyes from me...one of these days hopefully trotting out the Communist scarecrow will fall out of fashion.