The Pinged Hobbit

Any one who knows me will tell you, im a big fan of open source software. It’s not just because I can some wonderful pieces of software for nothing. I like transparency, the whole ethos of how the open source community operates. The sheer fact that a loose formed selection of people working as peers can sucessful create applications that can rival industry standard options but they are produced at a fraction of the cost. You only have to look at some of the applications out there. Gimp, Firefox, Thunderbird, Linux, the list grows daily. Not for nothing are big firms like IBM and Sun Microsystems now looking towards the open source community for there software. IBM’s server software was failing miserably, they couldn’t compete with Microsoft. IBM knew they needed to change how their software worked, maybe even develop a whole OS. A costly exercise in any one’s book and not a project to be taken lightly. What was IBM’s solution? They turned to the open source community. They allowed their own engineers to integrate with the Linux communities out there, releasing their source code to allow it to be utilised in LAMP and other pieces of software.

This audacious and perhaps risky move has paid off for IBM, they were lagging behind in the server market but by working with (and helping create some of) the Apache web server they have managed to turn their fortunes around.

The real power of open source is in how quickly it can adapt and react to changes and influences. An error or bug found will be pounced upon and worked on by enthusiastic contributors the instance it’s existance is revealed to the world where as in big corporations errors can take an age to be fixed, the red tape and the over complicate procedures restrict change. Similarly, with an open source piece of software new features can be added extremely fast, while a normal project would still be in the development stages even.

No where is the power of open source and peer building more clearly displayed then in one of the biggest open source projects out there, Wikipedia. Wikipedia is probably the biggest source of information most people will ever come across, its size and scope rival the Britannic Encyclopedia. But unlike the Britannica, Wikipedia isn’t produced by a paid army of staff, it isn’t monitored and updated by a company. Its the run by 5 full time paid employees and thousands of unpaid but willing contributors. People who donate their time and expertise for no monetary reason. The open source ideals at the heart of the project give each contributor and equal footing when it comes to the content of an article.

A lot of detractors see this as a down side, sighting the fact that anyone can contribute to an article what ever their knowledge of a subject as a problem, it could lead to mis information. But far from being a drawback, the open nature of Wikipedia gives rise to more accurate information on the whole. Because thousands of people are contributing time and edits can be instantly published Wikipedia can respond faster to errors found. For instance an error spotted in Britannica will have be corrected in the next issue, this could be months or years in the printing and will be a costly exercise. If a contributor spots and error in Wikipedia they can correct the open an edit view of the page, correct the information and publish a revised version in a matter of seconds. A study conducted by MIT found that an obscenity randomly placed in an article on Wikipedia will be fixed after 1.7 minutes on average.

This fast respsonse and instantaneous ability to edit brings another advantage, especially for Wikipedia. By allowing anyone to edit and create an article, Wikipedia can stay up to date on current events. Not only can they keep a track of the past and information, but they can also be as good as most news feed. Infact the huge number of contributors can allow Wikipedia to have bettter/more indepth reporting on an event than most news papers. As an example take the case of the July 7th bombings in London

At 8:50am on the morning of July the 7th 2005, London came to a stand still as four explosions rocked the city centre. With in 18 minutes the first entry in an article about the subject appeared on Wikipedia, while the major news agencies where trying to make sense of it. Morwen, a contributor from Leicester wrote “On July 7, 2005, explosions or other incidents were reported in central London, specifically Aldgate, Edgware Road, Kings Cross St Pancras, Old Street and Russell Square tube station. They have been attributed to power surges”.

Minutes later, other community memebers added more information. By the time Americans woke a few hours later there were hundreds of users involved in creating the article. Twenty four hours later over twenty five thousand users had been involved in creating a fourteen page account of the event*. By being user edited Wikipeida was able to live up to its naming (Wiki is Hawaiian for quick). This event also demonstrates another change that peer Wikipedia is having on society. Wikipedia and the web as a whole like it are having an effect on the way human history is recorded, comprehensive accounts and records are no longer just kept to a few, everyone can record their own views and the information they are aware of on their own websites. Historians in the future will no longer have to rely on just a few politically coloured views of what happened during a certain event. They will be able to turn to the wealth of information published by none censored sources on the web. This can only lead to more accuracy.

(* account of the events of july 7th 2005 on Wikipedia taken from Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams)

Wikipedia: London Bombings, first 24 horus

edit: also see my follow up post