Wikipedia through the Looking Glass

Founder and co-founder with Wikipedians

Wikipedia through the Looking Glass is the working title for a book about Wikipedia, by Edward Buckner, co-written with Eric Barbour.

I think this is going be a blockbuster, not just because it is the first critical book about Wikipedia to be published, but because it is so well-written and well-researched. It’s going to embarrass a lot of people who richly deserve to be embarrassed. The trouble for the defenders of the Wikipedia establishment is that the evidence itself, the facts themselves, are damning. – Larry Sanger

It is the story of the dark side of Wikipedia. The book reveals, for the first time, the truth behind the origin of Wikipedia, its spectacular growth into one of the world's most visited websites, the struggles to control it, and the covert agenda and political ambitions of those who now run it, including its relations with vested interests such as the technology and public relations industries. It is more than just a catalogue of the scandals – sexual, ethical and financial – that have afflicted Wikipedia from its beginning. The book aims to explain why Wikipedia is the way it is, through an examination of its origins, its history, its design, its governance and culture.

The book relies on extensive research, previously unpublished archive material, interviews with supporters - including those closest to Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales - and critics, such as disaffected Wikipedians who lost power in the successive purges of its leadership. The people and the events that shaped Wikipedia are tied together in a fast-paced narrative that takes us from Chicago to San Diego, San Francisco, Tampa and London, England.

The authors

Edward Buckner is a philosopher and historian based in London. His most recent book (Time and Existence: Duns Scotus' Questions on Aristotle's Peri Hermenias), written with Jack Zupko, has now been approved for publication by CUA press.

Co-author Eric Barbour, based in California, is the former co-founder of Vacuum Tube Valley magazine, and has won awards for his writings on the early history of electronics. He is the owner and founder of Metasonix, the world's only company making music synthesizers out of vacuum tubes.

The market

People who liked like Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution and Charles Matthews' How Wikipedia Works, which are adulatory and almost entirely uncritical accounts of Wikipedia, will certainly buy this book out of curiosity, although they will probably not like it. People who bought or viewed the following works, which are highly critical of the myths of Web 2.0 and the belief in the redeeming power of the Internet, will like this book a lot.

• Rob Levine's Free Ride, which makes the powerful and compelling case that culture costs money, and should not be free.
• Evegeny Morozov's The Net Delusion, and his more recent To Save Everything, Click Here. Morozov is a sardonic critic of techno-utopianism. His second book is a scathing critique of what he calls 'solutionism' – the tendency to identify simple answers, especially in the technology sector, before the problem has even been properly articulated.
• Truth In Numbers, which takes a largely critical view Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, depicting him as an intellectual lightweight, obsessed with his image as a sort of spiritual leader of Web 2.0.
• Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur, an extended complaint against the culture of online amateurism, which he believes has had a destructive impact on our culture, economy and values.

Wikipedia Through the Looking Glass will be the first book to take a critical and analytical view of Wikipedia as such, and the first to include material entirely omitted from previous books, such as the influence of the pedophile movement and the pornography industry, as well as archive material once thought lost.

Chapters

Edit war

1. 1994 Jimbo, the Chicago futures markets and how Wikipedia was intended to work. 10 pages - First draft complete.
2. 1996 The early days of Bomis. What it was, and its influence on Wikipedia. 10 pages - First draft complete.
3. 1998-2000 The move to San Diego, Larry Sanger is hired, the early days of Nupedia. 15 pages - First draft complete.
4. 2000-2001 The birth of Wikipedia (the true story). 12 pages - First draft complete.
5. 2001 (March-July) The growth of the wiki. The influence of Richard Stallman. Free software and open source software. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 14 pages - First draft complete.
6. 2001-2002 The Slashdot invasion, and what 'The Internet' really is. The Cunctator and the leadership crisis. 17 pages - First draft complete.
7. 2002 The Spanish Fork and advertising on Wikipedia. First draft complete.
8. 2002-3 The rise of the Robots – Wikipedia as 'aggregation engine' not 'crowdsourcing'. First draft complete.
9. 2003-2012 The community Second draft complete.
10. 2003 Michael Davis moves from Chicago to Florida. His role in the Wikimedia Foundation. Advertising. Started, looking good.
11. 2003 Edit wars Why conflict of interest is endemic in Wikipedia. First draft complete.
12. 2004 Jon Schillaci starts the "Wikipedia campaign". The problem of conflict of interest and advocacy. First draft complete.
13. 2005-7 The Wikipedia 'golden age': the rise and fall of the 'content contributors'. First draft complete.
14. 2005 John Seigenthaler and Daniel Brandt and why Wikipedia is still vulnerable to malicious biography. The problem of anonymity and conflict of interest. First draft complete.
15. 2006-7 The Essjay affair and the lessons that failed to be learned. 16 pages - First draft complete.
16. 2007 – The problem of Philosophy on Wikipedia. Why crowdsourcing will never write the Critique of Pure Reason. 16 pages - First draft complete.
17. 2005-2008 Morrow gets out of jail. His history and how the WMF fail to address the problem of the mentally ill on Wikipedia. First draft complete - looking good.
18. 2008 The Anvil email and its aftermath. The Wikipedia 'security police'. First draft complete.
19. 2010 Why Wikipedia must not be censored, and how Jimbo was nearly removed as founder. Why there must be as much pornography as possible on Wikipedia. First draft nearly complete.
20. 2011 - Mountain View California. The internet lobby fight back, and the war between 'big content' and 'big tech' evens out. First draft complete.
21. 2012-13 - Marylebone, London. Jimmy remarries, Tony Blair comes to his wedding, and Jimmy woos an Asian dictatorship. Well under way

Reactions

Larry Sanger:

The book, from what I’ve seen of it, is FANTASTIC. It’s a page-turner, for me anyway, and it will make a huge splash. The narratives are extremely well-drawn, the points extremely salient. It does not come across as a mean-spirited polemic. It reads more like a somewhat biased but well-written journalistic type piece. It doesn’t lay out a systematic case for anything (as far as I can tell so far). It simply tells a series of stories, each with a moral or two to them. They’re well-researched.

While it is polemical, and has a definite point of view, it is also an excellent piece of research. My general impression is that they do not draw conclusions where unwarranted; they stick to the evidence. The trouble for the defenders of the Wikipedia establishment is that the evidence itself, the facts themselves, are damning.

I think this is going be a blockbuster, not just because it is the first critical book about Wikipedia to be published, but because it is so well-written and well-researched. It’s going to embarrass a lot of people who richly deserve to be embarrassed”.

Andreas Kolbe:

Readable, engaging, makes you want to turn the page and read on ... which is quite an achievement for something about Wikipedia.

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>* http://www.nupedia.com/ *
>* The Ever Expanding Open Source Encyclopedia *
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See also

• Another suggested outline
• Agencies

Copyright Edward Buckner and Eric Barbour, 2013