Wikipedia omitted a step that was considered indispensable throughout the entire history of encyclopedias - verifying facts - and replaced it with a new step - verifying sources. This maneuver is characteristic of many of the most successful online experiments: get rid of something deemed essential and replace it with a completely different process, suited to the affordances and limitations of a world-spanning, public, anonymous network.

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That's what eBay did in 1995, when (as Auctionweb), it created a person-to-person selling platform that neither verified the identities of buyers or sellers, nor did it use an escrow service that held money in trust until goods were received. Rather, it replaced these existing measures with a new kind of reputation system, whereby reliable sellers could be sorted from scammers by looking at their numeric scores.

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That's also what Kickstarter did. Kickstarter is based on a scheme first mooted by John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier in 1998, which they called "The Street Performer Protocol":

schneier.com/wp-content/upload…

In the Street Performer Protocol, a provider of goods or services announces that once a set amount of funds were pledged, they will deliver something.

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Think of a street juggler who wows a crowd with an escalating series of impressive tricks, before calling out, "For my final trick, I will juggle eleven razor-sharp machetes with my feet - but I will *only* do this trick once there's $100 in my hat."

Many people tried to implement this as a digital service before Kickstarter. They all foundered on a seemingly insurmountable hurdle: the sellers were raising money *to make the thing they were raising money for*.

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All the pre-Kickstarter platforms erred on the side of protecting buyers by holding onto the money until the promised goods or services were delivered. But because the seller needed the money to deliver on their promise, this repeatedly failed. It was a procedural vapor-lock: I can't do the thing until I have your money, but I can't get your money until I do the thing.

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So Kickstarter jettisoned the escrow step, handing campaign creators the full payout and then trusting them not to run off with the dough. The platform understood that this would allow a certain amount of fraud and failure, but deemed it worthwhile, especially after they took countermeasures to minimize backer losses, such as verifying sellers, subjecting projects to human review, and canceling any project that failed to meet its funding goals.

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(If you need the money to do the thing, and you don't raise enough money, then you will not be able to do the thing.)

In the Oblique Strategies deck, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt counsel us to "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before":

stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

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That's what Wikipedia did when it swapped verifying facts for agreeing on sources. It's what eBay did when it swapped validating sellers and buyers for reviews. It's what Kickstarter did when it swapped escrow for acceptable losses, project review, and setting minimum funding thresholds.

Platforms may not know it, but they live by the "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before" maxim.

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They're forever removing seemingly load-bearing Jenga blocks to see whether the whole thing collapses. After all, it's certainly possible to omit a step and cause a catastrophe.

Kickstarter competitors like Indiegogo tried omitting the funding threshold restriction, passing any amount raised to the creator, even if it was too little to complete the project.

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After an initial blush of success, lost a lot of ground to Kickstarter, partly due to customers who felt burned when the project they put money into never delivered.

But that's not the only problem with "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before." Often, the new measure instituted to replace a former bedrock principle turns out to have critical flaws that bad actors can discover and exploit.

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So eBay's success conjured up an army of "reputation farmers," who sold a series of low-value items to the public (or to one another, or to alternative accounts they operated themselves), cultivating a high reputation on the platform. Once they reached this high score, they listed a bunch of high-value items (like dozens of $1,000 laptops) and absconded with the money.

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And Kickstarter's payment threshold isn't that hard to game: just set a very low funding goal, and you are guaranteed your money. Sure, the funding goal has to be high enough to satisfy a human reviewer, but for many items, it's hard to know exactly what constitutes a reasonable funding threshold.

Then there's Wikipedia. 25 years ago, it seemed easier for a group of strangers to agree whether a source was noteworthy and reliable than it would be for them to agree on a fact.

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But while that remains true, it did open up a new avenue of attack: bad actors who wanted to slip lies and spin into Wikipedia could switch from arguing about which facts were true to arguing about which sources were reliable.

That's exactly what's happening today, and it's the conflict that forms the spine of Josh Dzieza's lengthy, magisterial essay on the past, present and future of Wikipedia for *The Verge*:

theverge.com/cs/features/71732…

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How Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

How the world’s largest encyclopedia became the factual foundation of the web, but now it’s under attack from the right wing, tech billionaires, and AI.

^{Josh Dzieza (The Verge)}

Dzieza describes how compelling the Wikipedia "facts about facts" approach is. It's such a sweet hack that it converted many Wikipedia vandals and trolls to editors in good standing, who switched from making Wikipedia worse to making it better.

But in an age of endless culture wars, conservatives have turned their sights on Wikipedia. Conservative publications are - empirically speaking - the most falsehood-strewn, conspiratorial branch of the press:

pewresearch.org/journalism/202…

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The Political Gap in Americans’ News Sources

Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to both use and trust many major news sources, according to Pew Research Center.

^{Beshay (Pew Research Center)}

The fact that reality has a pronounced left-wing bias means that many popular conservative publications have been disqualified as reliable sources on Wikipedia, starting with the *Daily Mail* in 2017. This has the Maga right spitting feathers about "anti-conservative bias on Wokeapedia," and has Maga Congresstrolls demanding that Wikipedia unmask its editors and disclose their identities, a risk formerly confined to Russia, India, China and Turkiye.

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The emergence of this threat in the USA is a potential game-changer for the Wikipedia Foundation, which has long relied on its US domicile - and the First Amendment - to protect the core project from political censorship. Wikipedia's status as the best, most trusted source of information on the internet has painted a crosshairs on its back: leaked Heritage Foundation slides detail a plan to force Wikipedia to unmask editors who contribute criticism of Israel to the project.

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The Media Research Center has called for the Big Tech monopolists - Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, all openly allied with Trump today - to block Wikipedia until it agrees to treat Newsmax, OANN and other conspiratorial publications as reliable sources.

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Ironically, one of the things the right hates most about Wikipedia is that it takes affirmative measures to identify and correct its bias, for example, by actively encouraging editorial participation by members of minorities who are underrepresented in Wikipedia's volunteer editor cohort. Right wing demagogues call this "DEI," even as they demand that the government force Wikipedia to institute DEI for conspiracy-addled right wing trolls.

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As the saying goes, "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

The culture war on Wikipedia isn't the only risk the project faces. Dictators around the world are obsessed with dominating Wikipedia. Dzieza describes how one anonymous editor in a Middle Eastern autocracy was summoned by the secret police, who ordered him to capitalize on his standing as a long-term Wikipedia editor to insert pro-regime materials into the encyclopedia.

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One of Wikipedia's great strengths is its structure. While Wikipedia started out as one of the internet's characteristic "benevolent dictator for life" projects, with founder Jimmy Wales taking on the role of "God King" of Wikipedia, Wales voluntarily walked away from his power, creating a nonprofit with an independent board (Wikimedia Foundation) and then handing his veto power over to an Arbitration Committee made up of volunteer editors.

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This was a rare and remarkable gesture. The internet has many of these "benevolent dictator for life" public interest projects, and nearly all of them are still controlled by their founders, who may be benevolent, but are far from perfect:

pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdf…

It's all the more remarkable that the internet's most prominent self-deposing benevolent dictator is Jimmy Wales, a self-professed, Ayn Rand-reading libertarian.

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While many of self-described leftist benevolent dictators who preside over other key pieces of internet infrastructure decided that their projects needed the long-term control of their founders, it was Wales, a libertarian, who decided that a project of so much collective importance should have collective rule.

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But while Wales has stepped down as Wikipedia's God King (and its "single throat to choke" by the world's dictators and thin-skinned billionaires), there is something of his unique genius in the ethos of the project, and its ability to civilly bring together people of many irreconcilable viewpoints to collaborate on something they all value. I've known Wales for decades and count him a friend, notwithstanding the wide gap in our political philosophies.

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If you want to be a Wikipedian - and I hope you do - there are many ways to get started. The easiest is probably fixing punctuation errors and typos: when you come across these on a Wikipedia entry, click the edit button and just *fix 'em*, making sure to check off the "this is a minor edit" box before you hit submit.

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