Wikiality

The NYT Magazine's cover story on the intelligence community's use of Web 2.0 information-sharing tools like blogs and wikis does an expectedly good job of covering the issue's bases: advantages (faster information development, more communication), disadvantages (inability to keep secrets), legal and cultural criticisms (laws that prohibit cross-agency sharing, civil liberties violations that occur from massive information collection and analysis). What interested me most was its description, somewhat familiar to Wired-reading geeks out there, but still nicely stated, of the benefits of information dispersal capabilities of newer web technologies:

The C.I.A. set up a competition, later taken over by the D.N.I., called the Galileo Awards: any employee at any intelligence agency could submit an essay describing a new idea to improve information sharing, and the best ones would win a prize. The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A. In his essay, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?

Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views. He was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the “reader-authored” encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia’s owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly… What most impressed Andrus was Wikipedia’s self-governing nature. No central editor decreed what subjects would be covered. Individuals simply wrote pages on subjects that interested them — and then like-minded readers would add new facts or fix errors. Blogs, Andrus noted, had the same effect: they leveraged the wisdom of the crowd. When a blogger finds an interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it, along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree it’s an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.

… In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst’s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically.

The reason this works, when it does, is because of the assumption that in a massive, dispersed information-sharing community, bad faith either doesn't exist or is mitigated by a tide of good actors. The counterpoint to this is the Colbert notion of "wikiality"--the mass movement of information sharers to game the system and produce inaccurate results. You can argue that there's no real incentive for such activity, nor is there an effective mechanism for organizing the large dispersed groups that it would require. But we've already seen similar schemes work with other popular information collection tools: Googlebombing is an overt attempt to distort the value and meaning of information in order to alter public perception. Web 2.0 knowledge sharing works because it assumes a collective incentive to organize and disseminate trustworthy information will drown out individual bad actors; it fails, however, to account for the way mass media can mobilize groups to form a collective interest in acting in bad faith.