Wikipedia and Commons based Peer Production

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Wikipedia and Commons based Peer Production

• Jimmy Wales
• President, Wikimedia Foundation
• Wikipedia Founder

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What is Wikipedia?

• Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopedia
  written by thousands of volunteers in many
  languages
• Free license allows others to freely copy,
  redistribute, and modify our work commercially or
  non-commercially
• Founded January 15, 2001
• wikipedia.org

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What is the Wikimedia Foundation?

• Non-profit foundation
• Aims to distribute a free encyclopedia to every
  single person on the planet in their own language
• Wikipedia and its sister projects
• Funded by public donations
• Applying for grants
• wikimediafoundation.org

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Advantages of Free License

• Remains non-proprietary
• Decreases individual sense of ownership
• Increases a sense of shared ownership
• Enhances the popularity of Wikipedia
• Attribution requirement extends brand

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Free Software

• MediaWiki is GPL
• We use all free software on the website
• GNU/Linux
• Apache
• MySQL
• Php

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How big is Wikipedia?

• English Wikipedia is largest and has over 130
  million words
• English Wikipedia larger than Britannica and
  Microsoft Encarta combined
• In 15 months the publicly distributed compressed
  database dumps may reach 1 terabyte total size

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How big is Wikipedia Globally?

• English 533,000 articles
• German 220,000 article
• Japanese 110,000 articles
• French 100,000 articles
• Swedish 71,000 articles
• Nearly 1.5 million across 200 languages
• 20 with gt10,000. 50 with gt1000

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How popular is Wikipedia?

• According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is more popular
  than the websites of
• Expedia
• Paypal
• Excite
• Geocities
• New York Times
• 500 Million pageviews monthly

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Slashdotting

• We used to worry about it, but now we are big
  enough to barely notice
• Instead we worry about

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Popedotting
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Wikimedia Projects

• Wikipedia
• Wiktionary
• Wikibooks
• Wikisource
• Wikiquote
• Wikispecies
• Wikimedia Commons
• Wikinews

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Wikimedias Hardware

• 40 servers
• Squid caching servers in front to serve cached
  objects quickly
• Apache/PHP webservers in the middle
• Database backend (MySql)

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MediaWiki

• MediaWiki is one of many wiki engines
• Collaborative software that allows users to add
  or edit content
• Primarily developed for Wikipedia from 2002
  onwards
• Scalable and multilingual
• Free license

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MediaWiki features

• Quality control features (versioning)
• Editing features (simple markup)
• Community features (talk pages, profiles, access
  levels)

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Our use of MySQL

• We serve around a half billion pageviews per
  month
• 200 million queries per day
• 1. 2 million changes per day
• At peak times we handle nearly 6000 queries per
  second
• Using MySQL replication, Master 4 Slaves 1
  for backup

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Problems we have

• Our database schema is suboptimal but will
  improve in MediaWiki 1.5
• A few slow queries can sometimes slow the site,
  as performance on a box goes from 2500/s to
  1000/s
• Replication is fragile - and if anything goes
  wrong we have to go read only and resync
  everything

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Development Challenges

• Wiki text is freeform, but many types of data are
  better handled in a structured way
• Routine server administration by volunteers works
  o.k. now, but as our traffic continues to double
  we need help
• Unlike editing and reading, there is a learning
  curve

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Development Challenges

• Unlike editing and reading, there is a learning
  curve
• We need people to start getting involved now
  before the need is critical

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Page History
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Organisation by the Community

• The free-form nature of the wiki software lets
  the community determine how it wants to interact
• ExampleVotes For Deletion

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Two Views of Wikipedia

• Emergent Phenomenon, pseudoDarwinian
• Community of thoughtful users

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A former Britannica editor

• Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will
  assure that those writings and editings by
  contributors of greatest expertise will survive
  articles will eventually reach a steady state
  that corresponds to the highest degree of
  accuracy.
• Does someone actually believe this? Evidently so.

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Emergent Phenomenon?

• Thousands of individual users who dont know each
  other each contribute a little bit
• Out of this emerges a coherent body of work

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A Community?
Berlin
London
Genoa
A dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers who
know each other and work to guarantee the quality
and integrity of the content.
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Implications

• Emergent Model
• Need reputation mechanisms like Ebay, Slashdot
• Users are tiny, have no power

• Community Model
• Reputation is a natural outgrowth of human
  interactions
• Users are powerful, must be respected

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80/10 Rule

• Counting only logged in users, and even excluding
  some prominent approved bot users
• 10 percent of all users make 80 of all edits
• 5 percent of all users make 66 of edits
• Half of all edits are made by just 2 1/2 percent
  of all users

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Edits by Anons

• Controversial, intruiging
• Yes, you can edit this page
• Without logging in!

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Edits by Anons -

• Anonymous ip numbers can edit Wikipedia, and do
• But these edits make up a total of around 18 of
  all edits, with some evidence of a downward trend
  over time
• Anecdotally, many regular users report sometimes
  editing anonymously by accident or as a quiet
  form of Sock Puppeting

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Edits across namespaces

• Articles 85
• Talk pages 8
• User Page 3
• User Talk Pages 4
• These percentages are stable in 2003
• And 2004

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Wikipedia Governance

• A confusing but workable mix of
• Consensus
• Democracy
• Aristocracy
• Monarchy
• Wikipedians are flexible about social
  methodology results over process

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Community Challenges

• How can such a large community scale?
• Through software features
• Through policy (mediation, arbitration)
• Through an atmosphere of love and respect

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Neutral Point of View policy

• NPOV - Neutral Point of View
• Diverse political, religious, cultural
  backgrounds
• Kept together by our NPOV policy
• NPOV is a social concept of co-operation, avoids
  some philosophical issues.

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Conclusion

• Wikipedia is a community
• Automated and artificial Slashdot-style
  reputation metrics are not needed and may not be
  desirable
• Peer production on the net requires respect for
  individuals in the community who take leadership
  roles