According to The New York Times, most contributors are male.  More specifically, “less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are female.”  This, in turn, has skewed the gender [...]]]> Time magazine recently did a true-to-form story on Wikipedia, where guest editors (and our very own featured author) Jonathan Zittrain (see here too), Robert McHenry, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Mike Schroepfer assisted in writing/editing/re-writing a feature entitled Wikipedia’s “Ten Years of Inaccuracy and Remarkable Detail.” As the piece explained, Wikipedia just celebrated its 10th birthday.  The site has 17 million entries in more than 250 languages, quite a feat given that Encyclopedia Brittanica only has 120,000 and only in English.  The Time wiki-like piece notes that Wikipedia has a “diverse, international body of contributors.”

According to The New York Times, most contributors are male.  More specifically, “less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are female.”  This, in turn, has skewed the gender disparity of topics and emphasis.  Wikimedia’s executive director Sue Gardner explains that topics favored by girls such as friendship bracelets can seem short when compared with lengthy articles on something boys typically like such as toy soldiers or baseball cards.  The New York Times notes that a category with five Mexican feminist writers might not seem so impressive when compared with 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons.”

Why is this so?  Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and author of “Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia,” explains that Wikipedia’s early contributors shared “many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd,” including an ideology that “resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women.”  He notes that adopting an ideology of openess means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists.”  The demographics of Wikipedia’s editors may also stem, in part, from the tendency of women to be “less willing to assert their opinions in public.”

How Wikipedia is now, and has been, responding is worth noting.  Sue Gardner told the Times that she hopes to raise the share of women contributors through subtle persuasion and outreach to welcome newcomers to Wikipedia.  Dave Hoffman and Salil Mehra’s terrific piece Wikitruth Through Wikiorder demonstrates that the site has already fostered efforts to create a more inclusive environment.  As Hoffman and Mehra explain, Wikipedia has an Arbitration Committee whose volunteer members rule on disputes and set forth concrete rules on how users should behave.  The Arbitration Committee has sanctioned users who make homophobic, ethnic, racial or gendered attacks or who stalk and harass others.  According to Hoffman and Mehra’s empirical study, in cases when either impersonation or anti-social conduct like hateful attacks occur, the Administrative Committee will ban the user in 21% of cases.  Wikipedia’s more than 1,500 administrators, in turn, enforce those rules.  Wikipedia also permits users to report impolite, uncivil, or other difficult communications with editors in its Wikiquette alerts notice board.

Many of our nation’s landmark free speech decisions are not about heroes–several are about flag-burners, racists, Klansmen, and those with political views outside the mainstream. And yet we measure our commitment to freedom of speech, in part, by our willingness to protect even their rights despite disagreement with what they say, and why they say it.

The story of Wikileaks publishing U.S. diplomatic cables has become the story of Julian Assange: is he a hero or villain, a high-tech terrorist or enemy combatant? Should [...]]]> At Balkanization, Professor Marvin Ammori has a thoughtful post on the Wikileaks story.  Professor Ammori, who will be guest blogging with us soon, gave me the thumbs up on reproducing his post.  Hopefully, it will spark some interesting discussion on CoOp.  Here is Ammori’s post:

Many of our nation’s landmark free speech decisions are not about heroes–several are about flag-burners, racists, Klansmen, and those with political views outside the mainstream. And yet we measure our commitment to freedom of speech, in part, by our willingness to protect even their rights despite disagreement with what they say, and why they say it.

The story of Wikileaks publishing U.S. diplomatic cables has become the story of Julian Assange: is he a hero or villain, a high-tech terrorist or enemy combatant? Should the U.S., which may have already empanelled a grand jury in Virginia, prosecute him as a criminal under the Espionage Act of 1917 or under the computer fraud and abuse act?

Though I have spent years advocating for Internet freedom, I don’t think Assange is a hero for leaking these diplomatic cables.  According to plausible reports, the leaks have harmed U.S. interests, made the work of U.S. diplomats more difficult, likely endangered lives of allies, and may have set back democracy in Zimbabwe and perhaps elsewhere.  Even some of Assange’s friends at Wikileaks are doubting Assange’s heroism: a few left him to launch a rival site and to write a tell-all book.  Whatever the harms of secrecy and over-classification, Assange’s actions have caused tremendous damage.  No wonder polls show nearly 60% of Americans believe the U.S. should arrest Assange and charge him with a crime.

My initial reaction was similar.  I thought that if a case could be made against Assange, one should be made.

But, as time passed, the political and legal downsides of prosecution came into clearer focus, and I am rethinking that initial reaction.  Despite still believing Assange’s actions have been harmful, I have now come to the opposite conclusion—not for the benefit of Assange, but for the benefit of Americans and of the United States.

Prosecuting Assange could do more harm than good for our freedom of the press and would inflict further harm on diplomatic effectiveness.  Despite the appeal of prosecuting Assange, it is not worth the cost.  We will not get the cables back.  We will not deter aspiring Wikileakers, as both our allies and our enemies know.  We will, as Dean Geoffrey Stone has best articulated, likely sacrifice established principles of freedom of the press in doing so.

Here are some thoughts on why we should think twice about prosecuting Assange, categorized by harms to the U.S.’s freedom of the press and then harms to America’s diplomatic effectiveness. And, in advance, I thank the many scholars, policy experts, and friends who took the time to give me thoughts on earlier drafts of this post.

Harms to American Freedom of the Press

1. The balance between information security and freedom of the press generally permits both government secrecy and publication.

Geoffrey Stone, a leading speech scholar at the University of Chicago, recently explained to Congress how the Supreme Court has struck that balance between transparency and press freedom.

Transparency is not an unqualified good. While some information is overclassified, too much transparency has its own problems, as professors Larry Lessigand Tim Wu, among others, have pointed out.  Keeping some information private is sometimes essential for government and diplomacy.  Releasing information can be harmful; for example, releasing the names and addresses of all our covert spies or the world’s critical infrastructures harms US interests.

As Stone explains, the Supreme Court has recognized that government may overstate the harms of publication and underestimate the harms of secrecy.  The judiciary is not well equipped to second-guess this bias on a case-by-case basis.  So the Court struck this balance: government is allowed constitutionally to over-protect information and to secure it, while the press is perhaps over-protected to publish leaked information.  This is an obviously imperfect mechanism, but we live in an imperfect world, and other options are even more imperfect.

As a result, the burden of securing information falls on the government, not the press.  Jack Goldsmith reaches the same conclusion:

It is also important to remember, to paraphrase Justice Stewart in the Pentagon Papers, that the responsibility for these disclosures lies firmly with the institution empowered to keep them secret: the Executive branch.

This is not to blame the Executive branch; it is just to emphasize that securing information is the usual remedy to balance transparency, necessary secrecy, and a free press.  Prosecuting publishers and perceived journalists generally is not.

2. If the government can prosecute Assange for publishing illegally obtained information, then it can prosecute most journalists.

According to standard First Amendment doctrine, the press generally can publish truthful information leaked to the press, even if someone else acted illegally to obtain the information.  The Supreme Court said as much in Bartnicki v. Vopper and the Pentagon Papers case.

Administration officials and congressional staffs often leak information to the press for their own purposes—though they often leak to “friendly” reporters they hope to influence.  If the government could punish journalists for publishing classified information, Bob Woodward would be sitting in solitary confinement for the top-secret leaks in his last book alone.  Perhaps because of these realities, in 2000, President Clinton wisely vetoed a bill that would have criminalized all unauthorized disclosures.

Despite Woodward’s inside track to potentially over-classified information, Assange may be no less a journalist than someone like Woodward.

3. Assange looks more like a 21^st Century journalist than a terrorist.

The First Amendment protects a lot of potentially harmful speech, but does not and should not protect all speech. Some speech that encourages criminal behavior—like detailed “how-to” instructions on how to murder people or manuals for mixing homemade explosives—rightfully receive little First Amendment protection. Are Assange’s publications really not journalism, but more like this unprotected speech?

In thinking about this question, I have found Eugene Volokh’s analysis of “crime-facilitating speech” immensely helpful. I will not summarize his 100-page argument, which examines many speech areas. I will simply note that he ends up proposing a standard that, while speech-protective, strikes a balance that captures truly dangerous speech unworthy of protection. For him, this category includes speech, if published, with almost no non-criminal value or leading to plague or atomic explosions. Nobody has made the case that Assange’s speech falls in those categories.

Wikileaks looks less like a hit man manual and more like the journalism of tomorrow (or yesterday). Dozens of traditional and new publications (and TV channels) have experimented with user-generated news content, including uploaded video and stories. Assange has recently been clothing his actions as journalism. Rather than engaging in a document dump, Assange has released less than 1% of the 250,000 cables, and is working with several newspapers (The Guardian, Der Speigel, El Pais, Le Monde, the New York Times) to vet and redact every cable before publishing it.  His practices and those of journalists are converging. As online news models evolve and change, prosecuting Assange may set a precedent for limiting some beneficial experimentation with these new models.

4. If the government can prosecute Assange for “conspiring” with his source, all journalists are conspirators.

According to Justice Department leaks to the New York Times, the Justice Department is considering bringing a case based on Assange conspiring with his source.  As law professor Jack Balkin observes, if Assange conspired, many journalists “conspire” with their sources, sometimes over drinks at the Mayflower Hotel, sometimes by email. Even if the standard for conspiracy is higher than “doing drinks” at a hotel, it would sweep up at least some journalists, who no doubt worked with their sources as closely as Assange did with his source. Such conspiracy claims could burden freedom of association, including anonymous association, which receives constitutional protection.

5. If the First Amendment doesn’t protect Wikileaks, it doesn’t protect The Economist or Roberto Benigni.

Some argue that Assange has no First Amendment right because he is an Australian non-resident. But, whatever Assange’s rights as speaker, Americans have rights as readers. The Supreme Court has held (in Lamont v. Postmaster General) that Americans, like Wikileaks defender Ron Paul, have free speech rights, including the right to access unprotected international speech.

Taking it one step further, to extradition and arrest, I doubt the U.S. government could arrest executives at publications like The Economist, The Guardian, BBC, and Le Monde, or movie makers like Roberto Benigni, without burdening the speech rights of American citizens.  As a practical reality, if not as a matter of formal doctrine, prosecuting popular foreign speakers burdens American speakers.  Plus, prosecuting Economist.com for something NYTimes.com can publish would arguably violate some of our trade commitments.  And do we want to encourage China to use the same logic of extradition and prosecution against American and European publications, websites, and executives that allegedly violate Chinese law?

6. If the government can pressure private companies to silence Wikileaks, it can silence anyone.
Senator Lieberman’s staff seemed to apply some governmental pressure to Amazon, which found a violation of its broadly worded “terms of service” to remove Wikileaks from Amazon servers. (The administration has not applied similar pressure, to my knowledge.)  Paypal and Mastercard refused to process donations, applying a standard far lower than the standards applying to government.

I agree with those who view these moves as an Internet “tax on dissent.” To put this in perspective, what if Amazon interpreted its terms of service to kick controversial politicians off its servers?  What if Paypal stopped processing payments to controversial newspapers, political blogs, or … Klansmen and flag burners?  What if Mastercard, after receiving calls from a Senator, refused to process donations to the Palin or Romney campaigns, while processing donations for the Obama reelection?  The affected speakers would be harmed and would have no legal means to defend themselves by challenging the government’s attempt to silence them.

The New York Times has raised concerns about these actions: “A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.”

U.S. administration officials should not help set a dangerous precedent of enlisting private parties to kick the legs out from political opponents.  Again, what would we think if the Chinese government engaged in similar activity with their financial intermediaries and their disfavored sites?

Harms to American Diplomacy

1. We will possibly fail to convict Assange, while handing autocrats an argument to justify politically motivated prosecutions.

It doesn’t really matter if the (dedicated, brilliant) lawyers at the Department of Justice come up with a compelling case that has eluded law professors like Jack Balkin, Jack Goldsmith, Geoffrey Stone, and Steve Vladeck.

As these professors and others have noted, the legal case faces several potential hurdles: First Amendment issues, Espionage Act issues, conspiracy law issues, and extradition law issues for “political” crimes.

If the lawyers at Justice build a credible case, what follows will be a highly controversial and politically charged extradition proceeding that will draw out negative consequences for our foreign policy and international credibility—regardless of the ultimate outcome.

And then, at the end of this controversial process, after months or years, Assange comes to trial in a U.S. court.  Then, even in a best-case scenario, the case might fail for any of a dozen reasons.  Even if a conviction is achieved, at what cost?  And to what end?  Will a single piece of data be recovered?  Will the martyrdom of Assange deter others from following in his footsteps? The long-term impact of this effort will likely come out badly for our nation, no matter what the outcome of the legal proceeding.

2. We will look weak and hypocritical, affecting our moral standing abroad and at home. Could we really tell autocrats in other countries that they shouldn’t prosecute journalists or political critics? Perceptions will be a key factor.  Prosecuting Assange would validate an international perception, whether accurate, among allies and foes alike that America operates on a double standard—a perception the Obama administration has taken great pains to reverse.  The decline in credibility triggered by apparently validating that perception will ripple across our international relations. As Clay Shirky notes, autocrats will certainly use our actions to justify political prosecutions.

Conclusion
I could be wrong; this controversy does not have easy answers.

I end up, with Assange, where I do with racists and Klansmen. Despite the damage he has caused, the costs to our nation of prosecuting his speech outweigh the benefits. I hope our nation’s lawyers consider the merits of this position in determining how best to respond to Assange and Cablegate.

Goldsmith, who takes cybersecurity very seriously, nevertheless finds himself “agreeing with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified.” He believes that “it is not obvious what law he has violated,” and Geoff Stone today said that many Lieberman-inspired efforts to expand the Espionage Act to include Assange’s conduct would be unconstitutional. Goldsmith asks:

What if there were no wikileaks and Manning had simply given the Lady Gaga CD to the Times? Presumably the Times would eventually have published most of the same information, with [...]]]> Don’t worry, it’s not another prolix post from me, just commentary on Jack Goldsmith’s Seven Thoughts on Wikileaks and Lovink & Riemens’s Twelve theses on WikiLeaks. (And here’s an FAQ for those confused by the whole controversy.)

Goldsmith, who takes cybersecurity very seriously, nevertheless finds himself “agreeing with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified.” He believes that “it is not obvious what law he has violated,” and Geoff Stone today said that many Lieberman-inspired efforts to expand the Espionage Act to include Assange’s conduct would be unconstitutional. Goldsmith asks:

What if there were no wikileaks and Manning had simply given the Lady Gaga CD to the Times? Presumably the Times would eventually have published most of the same information, with a few redactions, for all the world to see. Would our reaction to that have been more subdued than our reaction now to Assange? If so, why?

Lovink & Riemens provide something of an answer:

Traditional investigative journalism used to consist of three phases: unearthing facts, crosschecking these and backgrounding them into an understandable discourse. WikiLeaks does the first, claims to do the second, but omits the third completely. . . . What WikiLeaks anticipates, but so far has been unable to organize, is the “crowd sourcing” of the interpretation of its leaked documents. That work, oddly, is left to the few remaining staff journalists of selected “quality” news media.

Later, academics pick up the scraps and spin the stories behind the closed gates of publishing stables. But where is networked critical commentariat? Certainly, we are all busy with our minor critiques; but it remains the case that WikiLeaks generates its capacity to inspire irritation at the big end of town precisely because of the transversal and symbiotic relation it holds with establishment media institutions. . . .Therein lies the conflictual terrain of the political.

Perhaps the difference between the treatment of Assange and the NYT is a widespread sense that the “paper of record” simply must publish important news once it’s been revealed. But the Wikileaks situation confounds any model of objective journalists “finding facts” in the world. As the FAQ explains, “Wikileaks is only releasing cables in coordination with the actions of . . . five selected news organizations.” Like search engines, it challenges the traditional distinctions between conduit and content-provider that have governed our thinking about communications. As L & R put it,

One of the main difficulties with explaining WikiLeaks arises from the fact that it is unclear (also to the WikiLeaks people themselves) whether it sees itself and operates as a content provider or as a simple conduit for leaked data (the impression is that it sees itself as either/or, depending on context and circumstances). This, by the way, has been a common problem ever since media went online en masse and publishing and communications became a service rather than a product. . . . This might be why Assange and his collaborators refuse to be labelled in terms of “old categories” (journalists, hackers, etc.) and claim to represent a new Gestalt on the world information stage.

I have to admit, my initial read of this story was over-influenced by media reports that described Wikileaks as “dumping” documents. In fact, they have been selective; as Glenn Greenwald explains, “They have not released “thousands” of cables; they’ve released 1,193 — less than 1/2 of 1% of the total they possess.”

But I do think I was right about one thing: the Wikileaks story reveals a dangerously overstretched “superpower.” When Russia recommends a Nobel Prize for Assange, you know that they are pretty confident in their ability to decouple from the US’s overindebted, hollowed out economy. Just as trillions of dollars in war spending have emptied our coffers, military prerogatives also led to the DOD’s “data deluge blowback.” As Lovink puts it:

In the ongoing saga called “The Decline of the US Empire”, WikiLeaks enters the stage as the slayer of a soft target. It would be difficult to imagine it being able to inflict quite same damage to the Russian or Chinese governments, or even to the Singaporean – not to mention their “corporate” affiliates. In Russia or China, huge cultural and linguistic barriers are at work, not to speak of purely power-related ones, which would need to be surmounted. Vastly different constituencies are also factors there, even if we are speaking about the narrower (and allegedly more global) cultures and agendas of hackers, info-activists and investigative journalists. In that sense, WikiLeaks in its present manifestation remains a typically “western” product and cannot claim to be a truly universal or global undertaking.

The irony, of course, is that in its quest for openness, Wikileaks is likely to provoke extraordinary responses from government that make our security apparatus more like that of Russia or China. Lovink notes some uncomfortable parallels between Wikileaks and those it opposes:

WikiLeaks displays a stunning lack of transparency in its internal organization. Its excuse that “WikiLeaks needs to be completely opaque in order to force others to be totally transparent” amounts, in our opinion, to little more than Mad magazine’s famous Spy vs. Spy cartoons. You beat the opposition but in a way that makes you indistinguishable from it.

WikiLeaks is also an organization deeply shaped by 1980s hacker culture, combined with the political values of techno-libertarianism that emerged in the 1990s. . . . Lack of commonality with congenial, “another world is possible” movements drives WikiLeaks to seek public attention by way of increasingly spectacular and risky disclosures, thereby gathering a constituency of often wildly enthusiastic, but generally passive supporters.

Assange reminds me a bit of the obsessed protagonist of Samuel Delany’s sci-fi novel Nova, with sensitive information playing the role in the Wikileaks drama that Illyrion plays in Delany’s work: a resource that can utterly shift the balance of power if it comes into the right hands. Assange sees an utterly corrupt status quo, and wishes to upset it. Projects like Wikileaks may well succeed in doing so. But, if the status quo could speak, it might warn, “Après moi, le déluge.” (And Zhou Enlai is probably still correct to say that it’s “too soon to tell” what the impact of that power shift was.)

I have three brief points, involving a comparison with Japan, some thoughts about competition, consumer protection and innovation, and finally, a somewhat different take on the lessons of Wikipedia.

This symposium is incredibly timely, particularly given the concern in recent weeks about [...]]]> First off, thanks to Concurring Opinions and Danielle Citron for hosting this online symposium on Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop it.  Before I launch into my own thoughts, I want to add my own version of the praise that the book has already won.  It is an immensely readable work that succeeds in showing us where we’ve been, how we got to where we are, and the steps to take to avoid going where we’d rather not be.

I have three brief points, involving a comparison with Japan, some thoughts about competition, consumer protection and innovation, and finally, a somewhat different take on the lessons of Wikipedia.

This symposium is incredibly timely, particularly given the concern in recent weeks about the Google/Verizon agreement.  In TFOTI, Zittrain highlights the risks that threaten the Internet’s future, and explains how the net neutrality debate is in some ways a mismatch for those risks.  For example, he points out that the migration from the Internet to, in his words, tethered appliances like the iPhone and TiVo, ultimately provide an end-run around net neutrality on the Internet (pp. 177-185).  Accordingly, he argues that preserving generativity is a better-tailored principle.

The lead in The Economist this week also takes on the Google/Verizon agreement, and critiques net neutrality from a different angle calling America’s “vitriolic net-neutrality debate” “a reflection of the lack of competition in broadband access.”  If you’re reading this symposium, you probably already know, possibly because you read this, that in many other industrialized countries incumbent telcos were forced years ago – and not just in a superficial way – to open up wholesale broadband to competitors.

I’m in Tokyo this academic year thanks to Temple’s long reach across the globe and to my gracious hosts at Keio University Law School.  I’ve been travelling to Japan repeatedly since the late 1980s, and one of the changes I’ve been  struck by is how a country that in the 1990s was generally held to be well behind the U.S. in telecommunications now seems ahead in broadband and mobile Internet. 

Indeed, this is more striking given that the Japan’s lagging telcos used to fit a pattern, still observable in Japan, in which non-tradeable domestic sectors generally seem relatively inefficient.  However, the Japanese government not only required NTT, the monopoly domestic telephone company, to sell wholesale broadband to ISPs, but also prevented NTT from competing with the ISPs by prohibiting NTT from bundling in services with broadband Internet and thus becoming both supplier and competitor.  The result was an explosion in activity by new entrants, with significant consumer benefit.  I’ve always wondered how this policy came about, and the best account I’ve found, suggesting that it was parts happy accident and parts good intention, is this one by Takanori Ida.  As Ida observes, network economics is not yet so well understood that you can accurately predict the result of policy, though you may be able to design a better policy if you assume you cannot predict the future (p.78).

This brings me to my second point, about competition policy and innovation.  If you’ve followed the Supreme Court’s antitrust opinions over the past decade, after Trinko and LinkLine, you would be forgiven for laughing at the idea that antitrust could have a role in opening up access to rivals to the incumbent telcos.  (Although you could read Trinko as suggesting that if you want an Aspen Highlands-like forced access for rivals to network incumbents, you should get it from the FCC, not the Sherman Act.)   Similar to Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s point about taking steps to benefit from unanticipated positive “black swan” events, Zittrain makes the point that generativity allows disruptive innovation to benefit us in ways we cannot anticipate.  As a result, policies oriented at the future of the Internet should focus on how to preserve our opportunity to benefit from, particularly, user-generated innovation.

One of Zittrain’s biggest fears is the ability of manufacturers of tethered devices or providers of “walled garden” services on the Internet to make their products less generative after the fact.  In short, instead of planned obsolescence, there is remote-controlled sterilization.  Consumer protection may have a role to play here, though it may not be a panacea.  Disclosure regimes, rules giving users the opportunity to opt out and “de-tether” at a future point in time, and rules requiring portability of user-generated content may provide comfort, albeit imperfect, to users.   Platform operators and users have come to see the value in generativity – witness how the “tethered appliance” iPhone now sells itself based on the compatible work of others in the App Store.  However, the potential for exploitation after the fact will continue to exist.  And opportunism and its potential can impose costs by deterring user generated innovation.  This is important, since if users become leery of participating on dominant platforms for fear of having the rug pulled out from them, they may participate less, or not at all, and we won’t know what we will have lost as a society in terms of innovation.

Finally, Zittrain points to Wikipedia and how it gets its users to work well together in generating content as a model for how to solve some of the Internet dilemma of security versus generativity..  My colleague David Hoffman and I did a study in which we looked at the decisions of Wikipedia’s arbitration committee.  We found that their dispute resolution system did not actually resolve disputes about “correct” content on Wikipedia.  Rather, the focus of their dispute resolution system was to create and highlight norms of behavior and good faith for the community to follow – and to ban those who could not or would not at least try to be part of the community.  As George Costanza would say, “you know, we’re living in a society.”  A Wikipedia-like solution for problems that Zittrain sees would have to involve greater mass recognition that there ought to be civic virtue and social responsibility on the Internet.  In addition to providing us with useful insights, The Future of the Internet exhorts us all to take a constructive role in maintaining our power to take a constructive role.

The designers and makers of the Internet and PC platforms did not expect to come up [...]]]> I wrote the Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, and its precursor law review article the Generative Internet, between 2004 and 2007. I wanted to capture a sense of just how bizarre the Internet — and the PC environment — were.  How much the values and assumptions of, metaphorically, dot-org and dot-edu, rather than just dot-com, were built into the protocols of the Internet and the architecture of the PC.  The amateur, hobbyist, backwater origins of the Internet and the PC were crucial to their success against more traditional counterparts, but also set the stage for a new host of problems as they became more popular.

The designers and makers of the Internet and PC platforms did not expect to come up with the applications for each — they figured unknown others would do that.  So, unlike CompuServe, AOL, or Prodigy, the Internet didn’t have a main menu.  And once for-profit ISPs started rolling the Internet out to anyone willing to subscribe, there came to be a critical mass of eyeballs ready to experience varieties of content and services — the providers of which didn’t have to negotiate a business deal with some Internet Overseer the way they did for CompuServe et al.  Some content and services could be paid for, at least as soon as credit cards could function cheaply online, and other could be free — either because of a separate business model like advertising, or because the provider didn’t feel inclined to monetize visiting eyeballs.  Tim Berners-Lee could invent the World Wide Web and have it run as just another application, seeking neither a patent on its workings nor an architecture for it that placed him in a position of control.  Today, of course, the Web is so ubiquitous that people often confuse it with the Internet itself.

When bad apples emerge on an unmediated platform — and they do as soon as there are enough people using it to make it worth it to subvert it — it can be difficult to deal with them.  If someone spams you on Facebook, the first step is to make it a customer service issue — complain to Facebook, and they can discipline the account.  If someone spams you on email, it’s much trickier, because there’s no Email Manager — just lots of email servers, some big, some little, and many of them with accounts hacked by others.  That’s one reason why a newer generation of Internet users prefers Facebook or Twitter messaging to old fashioned email.  Same for the PC itself: with no PC Manager, there’s no easy way to get help or exact justice when exposed to malware.  I worried that malware in particular, and cybersecurity in general, would be a fulcrum point in pushing “regular” people away from the happenstance of generative platforms designed by nerds who figured they could worry about security later.  Hence a migration to less generative platforms managed like services rather than products.

I understand and sympathize with that migration.  But it’s important to recognize its downsides — particularly if one is among the libertarian set, which has been comprised some of the most vocal critics of the Future of the Internet.  Whether software developer or user, volunteering control over one’s digital environment to a Manager means that the manager can change one’s experience at any time — or worse, be compelled to by outside pressures.  I write about this prospect at length here.  The famously ungovernable Internet suddenly becomes much more governable, an outcome most libertarian types would be concerned about.  Many Internet freedom proponents aren’t willing to argue for or trust those freedoms to a “mere” political process; they prefer to see them de facto guaranteed by a computing environment largely immune to regulation.

Lessig now seems to disagree with that; his view in Code 2.0 is that:

citizens of any democracy should have the freedom to choose what speech they consume.  But I would prefer they earn that freedom by demanding it through democratic means than that a technological trick give it to them for free.

It’s an interesting bookend to a small gem of an article he wrote in 1999, where he said:

The architecture of cyberspace embeds a set of values, as it embeds or constitutes the possible. But beyond the values built into this architecture, there are values that are implicated by the ownership of code. Its ownership can enable a kind of check on government’s power-a separation of powers that checks the extent that government can reach. Just as our Constitution embeds the values of the Bill of Rights while also embedding the protections of separation of powers,[] so too should we think about the values that cyberspace embeds, as well as its structure.

Randal Picker, in a terrific article revisiting the famed Sony case that upheld the right of manufacturers to make and sell VCRs, despite the fact that surely many people were using them to infringe copyright by recording shows for their personal libraries, outright welcomes new forms of regulation made possible by software becoming a service.  My brief response to (and disagreement with) his article is here, but both of us agree that new kinds of regulation lie in our future.

So, has the future happened?  Certainly young coders today are writing for the Facebook and iPhone apps platforms more than they are for Windows, OS X, or GNU/Linux.  Those platforms haven’t been “sterile” — e.g. resistant to all outside development, as the book’s introduction feared.  Rather, they’re what I called “contingently generative” and what Sarah Rotman Epps more pithily calls “curated computing.”  The idea is the same: to be generative enough to welcome outside coders — indeed, if wildly successful, to turn other platforms into ghost towns — but to be able to modify what they do at any time, before or after the fact.  Not only does that set the stage for monopolistic behavior — developers, many coding for fun, build empires that are then hard to move to a new platform when the rules change — but also for new regulation.  Android is an interesting development here — a sort of canary in the coal mine, as the Android platform contemplates more “off roading” by users, running unapproved apps, than the iPhone does.  It’s too early to say which model will prevail, especially as either one, being contingent, can evolve towards the other.  Steve Jobs could announce freedom to run outside code on iPhones tomorrow, and Google could revise Android so that only apps from the official Android store can persist.  Either vendor can kill an app, or the entire phone, at a distance, if it detects jailbreaking, or for any other reason.

In 2004, the Web was going strong, but much of our time was spent outside a browser: email was Outlook or Eudora, word processing was Word, spreadsheets were Excel, etc.  If you were given only a browser, there’s a lot of work you’d have a hard time doing.  Today that’s simply not true.  Google docs and spreadsheets are spreading, and Microsoft is hastening to catch up with Windows Live.  Yet some have trumpeted the end of the open Web, and cited the Future of the Internet to buttress their claims.  They have a point.  Just because something can be accessed by a Web browser doesn’t make it part of the Web.  (You can even just open a file on your hard drive using your browser, most easily if it ends in .html.)

If the services we migrate to online are still controlled and curated by only a handful of gatekeepers, we run all the risks, and stand to lose many of the benefits, of the generative Internet.  I’m not ready, as others may be, to say that essentially every new technology has its infancy and adolescence, where it’s chaotic and there are lots of players and lots of innovation, to be followed by boring adulthood as the losers lose and the few winners win and consolidate.  My hope was, and is, to be able to take on the “bad apples” problem in a way that doesn’t terribly compromise generativity — the way that Wikipedia, so far, has managed to stop spammers and vandals without wholesale abandoning the precept that anyone can edit a page, whether registered or not.  I wrote some thoughts on how to do that in the book, and have since followed up with a piece called “The Fourth Quadrant.”  It seems all the more pressing to me as concerns about cybersecurity, and now cyberwarfare, are very much on the mind of governments around the world.

I’m not exactly a pessimist.  I recognize, and celebrate, the fact that the digital environment of 2010 is the coolest, most interesting, most option-filled it’s ever been.  In that sense, mirroring the situation with Internet access despite censorship around the world, the slope of the generative curve is positive.  But, also mirroring the situation with censorship and filtering, I see the pieces further moving into place for a step change in how the Internet works.  In where new innovations come from.  And in how readily regulators can pull the plug on services and content they don’t like.  At its core, the Future of the Internet is an argument against complacency, and against the simplicity of thinking that if only market forces are allowed to work their magic, everything else we care about will more or less fall into place.

I look forward to the week’s discussions.  …JZ

Wiki’s DR process continued to fascinate me, and I eventually teamed up with Temple’s Salil Mehra, a comparative IP scholar, to write about the system. We’ve finished just finished a draft, which starts with the following snippet: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on February 12, 1809. When some individuals hear about this coincidence, it seems remarkable. [...]]]> Almost four years ago, I blogged at Prawfs about a weird dispute on Wikipedia about the Kelo case. I wrote that “[t]here is a whole ADR and conflict resolution system being set up behind the scenes, in the absence of (a) money; (b) the Bar; or (c) personal contact. And we don’t have to go to Shasta County for months on end to see it.”

Wiki’s DR process continued to fascinate me, and I eventually teamed up with Temple’s Salil Mehra, a comparative IP scholar, to write about the system. We’ve finished just finished a draft, which starts with the following snippet:

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on February 12, 1809. When some individuals hear about this coincidence, it seems remarkable. To others, it is mundane. To Wikipedia editors working on the encyclopedia’s articles about Darwin and Lincoln, the factoid was the subject of a contentious dispute resolution process that encompassed two polls, outside editor comments, a request for mediation, and a formal arbitration proceeding that generated over 30,000 words in evidentiary submissions and thousands of volunteer man-hours.

The problem motivating the fracas was whether or not the shared birthday merited inclusion in the Wikipedia’s biography of Darwin. Because Wikipedia’s editing process is open, editors who disagree might endlessly recycle their views, leading to unstable articles, entrenched disagreement and a loss of initiative, altogether destroying the site’s utility. In response, Wikipedia has developed a volunteer-run, highly articulated, dispute resolution system. That system starts with the informal, guided, exchange of views, muddles through mediation, and terminates in an Arbitration Committee, which hears evidence presented by the parties before issuing findings of fact and conclusions of policy and law. Such decisions, organized by volunteer arbitration clerks and disseminated by volunteer reporters, have created a virtual Wiki-common law.

As the result of the binding arbitration in the Darwin Birthday Dispute, two editors were banned from the site for a month for their lack of cooperation with others, and one was further prohibited from editing either Darwin’s or Lincoln’s article. A third individual was formally thanked by the arbitrators for his work as a counselor to one of the banned parties. The Arbitrators, per their usual rule, did not resolve the content of the dispute: non-banned parties were free to continue testing whether the Emancipator and the Scientist’s shared birthday was worthy of note.

There are at least two separate levels of strangeness about this story.

• Why do people spend time editing Wikipedia articles and why they would care enough about this particular fact to disagree?

• Why does Wikipedia have a dispute resolution system that doesn’t resolve disputes?

Interested in reading more? Download our draft, which just went up on SSRN. Or, if you are a law review editor, check your inbox. We’re in there!

I recently placed Chapter 1 of my new book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (Yale Univ. Press, 2007) on SSRN. It can be downloaded for free.

If these data are reliable, you’ve got to wonder what happened. Is it the Essjay-related credibility problem, as the author of [...]]]> This newsgroup post, and its accompanying graphical material, makes the surprising claim that the Wikipedia community is less healthy than it used to be:

Since early this year, and for the first extended period in Wikipedia’s history, the activity rate of the Wikipedia community has been declining. This can be seen in the rate of editing articles (-17%), the rate of new account registration (-25%), blocks (-30%), protections (-30%), uploads (-10%), article deletions (-25%), etc. Some exceptions are the article creation rate (+25%) and image deletions (+80%), but overall the community appears to be doing less now than it was 6 months ago.

If these data are reliable, you’ve got to wonder what happened. Is it the Essjay-related credibility problem, as the author of the post suggests, or is it a breakdown of Wikipedia’s dispute resolution system? I’m tempted toward the latter explanation as at least a contributing factor, not least because it fits part of the story I’m writing in a jointly authored article about Wikipedia’s dispute resolution process. (Previewed in this blog post.) In particular, the number of “reverts” is on the rise, reducing the value of thoughtful editing and community involvement. Revert wars, as a form of unproductive low-level conflict between users, are just what the dispute resolution system was designed to ameliorate.

Update: For more evidence of the thesis, check out this post from later in the same thread (emphasis added):

Personally, I would suggest that Wikipedia has indeed become more bureaucratic, and it will progress little further until a rethink of the core ideology is considered, particularly wrt. to how to derive/amend policy, core policy issues, handling bias or concepts of truth, dispute resolution and what to do when there isn’t consensus (i.e. no consensus for the status quo, no consensus for proposed or active changes). The whole idea that Wikipedia acts by consensus is a sham. It’s not a democracy of course either, it’s not even anarchy, or specifically authority-driven(dictatorial). In individual cases it’s whatever people can get away with. That’s not a good concept of consensus (i.e. “what sticks is there by tacit agreement”); it ignores the fact that rational people will eventually give up rather than deal with bullies and morons.

From the book jacket:

Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else [...]]]> I‘m very excited to announce that my new book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy, is now hot off the presses! Copies are now in stock and available on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble’s website. Copies will hit bookstores in a few weeks.

From the book jacket:

Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.

Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cybermobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance between privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free.

For quite some time, I’ve been thinking about the issue of how to balance the privacy and free speech issues involved with blogging and social networking sites. In the book, I do my best to propose some solutions, but my primary goal is to spark debate and discussion. I’m aiming to reach as broad an audience as possible and to make the book lively yet educational. I hope I’ve achieved these goals.

I welcome any feedback. Please let me know what you think of the book, as I’d be very interested in your thoughts.

There is no necessary reason that Wikipedia’s continual revisions enhance knowledge. It is quite as conceivable that an early version of an entry in Wikipedia will be written by someone who knows the subject, and later editors will dissipate whatever value is there. Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus, and like an interminable political meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices.

This is a good (if a bit grumpy) criticism of the [...]]]> Dave’s post on WikiScanner reminds me of an article last week in The Times about the other juicy revelations that Wiki-Scanner has uncovered, such as self-editing by the CIA, the Vatican, the British Labour Party, and a number of big corporations. The article goes on to argue:

There is no necessary reason that Wikipedia’s continual revisions enhance knowledge. It is quite as conceivable that an early version of an entry in Wikipedia will be written by someone who knows the subject, and later editors will dissipate whatever value is there. Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus, and like an interminable political meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices.

This is a good (if a bit grumpy) criticism of the Wiki model. Wikis do seem to gravitate towards consensus, and as such are really efficient aggregators of facts. Where facts are not in dispute, Wikis do a fantastic job. For example, if you wish to learn about The Simpsons, Doctor Who, or the geneaology of the House of Windsor, Wikipedia is a great resource.

But for the important questions, it is quite different. Any time judgment or contested notions of truth come into play, people are quite naturally going to assert their own view of reality. Wikipedia is just another context (albeit a highly-manipulable one) in which these fights play out. In addition to consensus, money, energy, and persistence can affect how the “truth” is presented. It probably shouldn’t be surprising that Wikipedia entries are being manipulated in this way. If anything, it’s more surprising that people seem to believe that Wikipedia entries can give them easy truth on complicated questions that require judgment, reflection, interpretation, and thought. Even Encyclopedia Britannica can’t do that, though it may be a little less subject to manipulation in the name of good PR. But then again, Britannica is probably not as strong on Gary Coleman’s appearance on the Simpsons (episode 235, in case you were wondering).

WikiScanner is this week’s killer-app. Prompted by a short post on Xoxohth, I decided to see whether our nation’s busy law firm lawyers are spending their downtime editing Wikipedia entries. And, of course, they are. Of the thousands of edits I saw, I decided to focus on one topic matter: editing law firm webpages. Not surprisingly, law firms are using Wikipedia to burnish their reputations and trash their competitors. Here are a few examples:

Wachtell’s edits (Editing Kramer Levin, Cravath, and Wachtell)

S&C’s edits (editing S&C)

Skadden’s edits (editing Jones Day and Skadden)

Baker’s edits (editing Baker)

Jones Day’s [...]]]> [UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit and AbovetheLaw readers. While you are here, read some of my co-bloggers' great stuff on pirate politics, carbon off-sets, and Max Roach.]

WikiScanner is this week’s killer-app. Prompted by a short post on Xoxohth, I decided to see whether our nation’s busy law firm lawyers are spending their downtime editing Wikipedia entries. And, of course, they are. Of the thousands of edits I saw, I decided to focus on one topic matter: editing law firm webpages. Not surprisingly, law firms are using Wikipedia to burnish their reputations and trash their competitors. Here are a few examples:

Wachtell’s edits (Editing Kramer Levin, Cravath, and Wachtell)

S&C’s edits (editing S&C)

Skadden’s edits (editing Jones Day and Skadden)

Baker’s edits (editing Baker)

Jones Day’s edits (editing Jones Day)

Latham’s edits (editing Latham and Cravath)

Sidley’s edits (editing Ropes, Sidley, and asserting that Sidley is a white shoe firm)

Shearman’s edits (editing Shearman)

White and Case’s edits (adding W&C as a white shoe firm)

Morgan’s edits (editing Morgan)

Mayer Brown’s edits (adding Mayer as a part of “Big Law”)

Davis Polk’s edits (editing Davis)

There is quite a bit more in these records. Honors go to the first reader who can find an edit by a lawfirm of a client’s webpage that either deals with a then-pending legal dispute or offers a critique or negative comment.

Believable? Who knows. I’ve got to think that a spy agency that spends its human capital editing wikipedia entries instead of, say, finding the nation’s enemies and introducing them to targeted justice, has a misplaced set of priorities. Even if the agency were to suppress, in one medium, some aspect of the “truth” about its activities, the internet is like a vast gopher game: suppress a fact here, and it pops up there.

(h/t: Slashdot)

Investigators are looking into who altered pro wrestler Chris Benoit’s Wikipedia entry to mention his wife’s death hours before authorities discovered the bodies of the couple and their 7-year-old son.

Benoit’s Wikipedia entry was altered early Monday to say that the wrestler had missed a match two days earlier because of his wife’s death.

A Wikipedia official, Cary Bass, said Thursday that the entry was made by someone using an Internet protocol address registered in Stamford, Connecticut, where World Wrestling Entertainment is [...]]]> One of the virtues of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is that it can reflect new information very quickly after it becomes known. But there’s a rather odd development in the case of wrestler Chris Benoit’s murder of his family and suicide. From the AP:

Investigators are looking into who altered pro wrestler Chris Benoit’s Wikipedia entry to mention his wife’s death hours before authorities discovered the bodies of the couple and their 7-year-old son.

Benoit’s Wikipedia entry was altered early Monday to say that the wrestler had missed a match two days earlier because of his wife’s death.

A Wikipedia official, Cary Bass, said Thursday that the entry was made by someone using an Internet protocol address registered in Stamford, Connecticut, where World Wrestling Entertainment is based.

An IP address, a unique series of numbers carried by every machine connected to the Internet, does not necessarily have to be broadcast from where it is registered. The bodies were found in Benoit’s home in suburban Atlanta, and it’s not known where the posting was sent from, Bass said. . . .

Benoit’s page on Wikipedia, a reference site that allows users to add and edit information, was updated at 12:01 a.m. Monday, about 14 hours before authorities say the bodies were found. The reason he missed a match Saturday night was “stemming from the death of his wife Nancy,” it said.

So I started a place where folks could work together to create a public good: lawreviews.wikispaces.com

A reader who is “a bit of a wiki-cynic” reminded me of the project recently. The page seems to have withered on the vine. What happened folks? Is this project less socially useful than, say, a description of the cell nucleus, today’s featured Wikipedia article?

For what it is worth, Michael Froomkin’s Law Review Copyright Wiki, while significantly better than my page in every way, also has been relatively under-edited.

Should the mainstream media adopt similar norms? Consider the case of a recent WSJ commentary entitled “The Innocence Myth,” arguing that the rate of false convictions is very low. You can find critiques [...]]]> One of the things I love about the blogosphere is the way that comments let readers correct you or turn your attention to something you may have missed. One of my recent posts on copyright law illustrates how this process can work. James Grimmelmann has suggested that this right to comment, and to trackback to one’s own post upon linking to another’s post, is a big victory for free speech. While right-of-reply laws may be stymied by Miami Herald v. Tornillo, these innovations let everyone have their say.

Should the mainstream media adopt similar norms? Consider the case of a recent WSJ commentary entitled “The Innocence Myth,” arguing that the rate of false convictions is very low. You can find critiques of it online if you google “innocence myth,” and the WSJ does publish some skeptical letters to the editor. But my colleague Michael Risinger is about to publish a piece that he believes definitively refutes the WSJ piece. As he argues:

If one is at all serious about trying to determine the empirical truth about the magnitude of the wrongful conviction problem, one must make an attempt to associate the denominator with the same kind of cases represented in the numerator. . . . In an article now in galleys at Northwestern Law School’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, I have tried to do just that. Using only DNA exonerations for capital rape-murders from 1982 through 1989 as a numerator, and a 407-member sample of the 2235 capital sentences imposed during this period, this article shows that 21.45%, or around 479 of those, were cases of capital rape murder. Data supplied by the Innocence Project of Cardozo Law School and newly developed for this article show that only two-thirds of those cases would be expected to yield usable DNA for analysis. Combining these figures and dividing the numerator by the resulting denominator, a minimum factually wrongful conviction rate for capital rape-murder in the 1980’s emerges: 3.3%.

The WSJ has so far failed to publish Prof. Risinger’s letter to the editor, and claims a policy against allowing responses to commentaries. But would it at least behoove the Journal to provide a link to Risinger’s work after this opinion piece? I don’t see how this could hurt. . . . especially given time already devoted to screening letters to the editor. The Journal could make the links inobtrusive, as it does in this fantastic article on predatory debt collectors.

I hope that more of the mainstream media (MSM) follows the lead of the Washington Post, which provides great links to blogs (and opportunities for comment) on virtually all of its online articles (including editorials). Perhaps “opening up” the letters to the editor section in this way will be a bit of a burden at the beginning. But as technology makes these online forums more permeable, the usual excuse of “space constraints” (for shutting out diverse views) will be less and less convincing.

Wikipedia’s advocates like to tout its dynamic nature: Volunteers can quickly respond to new developments and errors in the collaborative online encyclopedia by adding or changing entries themselves.

So it may seem odd that Wikipedia volunteers are now working on a static version on CD, a preliminary version of which was released earlier this month.

The goal is to extend Wikipedia to those with limited or no Internet access. Success with the CD could ultimately lead to Wikipedia in book or other forms. . . .

The development comes as the Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that 36 percent of U.S. adult Internet users have consulted Wikipedia — [...]]]> Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, is coming out in a static version on CD. According to the AP:

Wikipedia’s advocates like to tout its dynamic nature: Volunteers can quickly respond to new developments and errors in the collaborative online encyclopedia by adding or changing entries themselves.

So it may seem odd that Wikipedia volunteers are now working on a static version on CD, a preliminary version of which was released earlier this month.

The goal is to extend Wikipedia to those with limited or no Internet access. Success with the CD could ultimately lead to Wikipedia in book or other forms. . . .

The development comes as the Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that 36 percent of U.S. adult Internet users have consulted Wikipedia — 8 percent on any given day. The telephone-based study issued Tuesday also found Wikipedia usage higher among college graduates and younger Internet users. . . .

Since its founding in 2001, the reference has grown to more than 1.7 million articles in the English language alone.

The Wikipedia CD will have only a subset of that — about 2,000 articles, with a heavy emphasis on geography, literature and other topics that won’t change much the way current events and controversial subjects might.

This development got me thinking of an idea that could help solve two of the biggest problems of Wikipedia: (1) since anybody can edit an entry, there’s often information of dubious reliability; and (2) entries frequently change as they are edited and updated, thus making any citation (gasp!) to Wikipedia even more problematic since the facts being cited to might no longer exist in the entry.

These problems are especially important because Wikipedia is being widely cited in scholarship and judicial opinions.

The solution?

Wikipedia should create “approved” static versions of certain articles, which do not readily change and which are reviewed and approved by a professional editor or expert. In other words, Wikipedia could select special editors with expertise in certain areas, vet their credentials, and have them do a thorough edit of an entry. The entry would then be frozen as a special version. People could still edit and change the entry, but the special version would be readily available for those who wanted to rely on the entry for citation purposes.

Wikipedia already comes close to doing this. It has certain trusted editors and it does archive older versions of entries. But to make Wikipedia reliable enough to cite, some changes have to be made. A good system must be developed to ensure that trusted editors have the appropriate expertise — Wikipedia must avoid being conned by a charlatan. And it must be easy to find the expert-approved entry, which must be stable and free from modification after the expert reviewer has edited and approved it. With these changes, these special Wikipedia entries might be reliable enough to cite.