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Wikipedia and Commons based Peer Production
Jimmy WalesPresident, Wikimedia
FoundationWikipedia 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, 2001wikipedia.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 >10,000. 50+ with >1000
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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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Wikimedia’s 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– Example:Votes 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 don’t know each other each contribute a little bit
• Out of this emerges a coherent body of work
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A Community?
A dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers who know each other and work to guarantee the quality and integrity of the content.
London Berlin
Genoa
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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 2003And 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