Tim Lee at Princeton’s Freedom to Tinker blog has been writing a lot about Wikipedia, and it’s sparked a series of interesting debates. A lot of great discussion in the comments, too. I want to highlight one particular back-and-forth in the comments on Tim’s post about why he thinks free-riding isn’t a problem on Wikipedia.

The argument is a pretty common one when it comes to online collective action, and it comes down to this: Wikipedia shouldn’t exist at all. At least if we accept traditional economic models. Here’s this from commenter Mitch Golden:

The issue with Wikipedia (and Firefox, and Linux, and all the other open source software) isn’t the free rider problem, it’s the fact that it disproves the model of homo economicus that is the basis for classical economics and the political philosophy of Libertarianism. There is just no rational reason for people to contribute to Wikipedia - they aren’t paid anything, and the value of any benefit they might be getting from the trivial publicity associated with making an edit is overwhelmed by the cost of the often significant time it takes to do the work. So the question isn’t one of free riding, the issue is to explain why Wikipedia exists at all. (It is, after all, the free riders that are behaving rationally!)

(link)

Mitch goes on in an interesting back-and-forth with Frater Plotter here, here, and here. In this play, Mitch is in the part of the typical economist, and Frater is in the part of the wise foil for narrow and outdated economic theories. It’s really very entertaining.

But, Mitch makes a good and economic point: looking purely at tangible or monetary gain, it would seem like Wikipedia ‘breaks’ the economic model in which individuals are rational, self-interested people who therefore should free-ride all the time.

Here’s how I respond. First, as an aside, the homo economicus model seems a little outdated to me. Most reasonable observers of public goods and collective action these days admit that bounded rationality is more like it. People use a variety of mechanisms other than pure self-interested cost / benefit analysis to make decisions in the real world. They act on biases, preferences, values, and norms. No surprises there. It’s just that idealized economic models don’t usually account for these distinctly messy, human, social factors.

But anyway, we have Mitch’s main question to answer: what is different about writing information versus digging coal? (for example) Well, the example isn’t quite right, because coal isn’t a public good. But in the spirit of the question, I say there are two main differences that make Wikipedia work:

1. On the internet, the costs of participation can be extremely small. In fact, once you account for fixed costs like your computer and the internet connection, the marginal cost of contributing is just time. And the risk of carpal tunnel. You may choose to devote a huge amount of time and effort, but you sure don’t have to. There’s lots you can do at a very low cost. Not only that, but the massive communication network makes the costs of aggregation, coordination, and distribution similarly small. 1,000,000 people writing one word each can be as efficient as a few people writing it all.
2. When the costs are tiny, even small rewards can tip the balance towards participation. This is the key point. One of the commenters linked above points out some of the social psychological rewards people get from contributing: fun, feeling smart, status, power, reputation, group belonging. These may, on average, provide only very small rewards. On Wikipedia, that’s ok because a very small reward is enough to offset a very small cost. Certainly some people will get far larger rewards from these things. Some people will develop reputations that they can later convert to material gain. Some people are rational zealots who believe so powerfully in open knowledge that they’ll spend all their time working on Wikipedia. But for most people, the small rewards will do the trick.

So, what happens if we take this ’small costs, small rewards’ point of view and apply it to Wikipedia? We find out that the traditional model actually does a pretty good job of explaining things. If, that is, we’re taking a wider view of what benefits are in the real world.

Even this isn’t a complete answer to the question, though. I think the larger project should be really coming up with a good answer to the question ‘What makes Wikipedia work?’ It’ll be lots of things, but I think we know a lot about that. I’ll be testing a lot of ideas about this in my dissertation work, and I’ll be posting about it here.