Page:E-government 2.0 - Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access.pdf/28

 article is kept in the database with very rare exceptions. Occasionally, we completely delete things from the database, privacy violations or other legal reasons. But typically if it is simply a bad version of an article or something like that, the old versions are there. And so if somebody comes in and begins to damage an article, it is typically one click for anyone to go back in and save the previous version as the current version. And so it is hard to do any damage at Wikipedia. Whenever you come in and make a change, you are actually just creating a new version. And if you have done some harm, someone can quickly come behind you and fix it.

Chairman. Very interesting. I presume though, it is a different kind of activity that you would say some of those methods you have for protecting the integrity of the system are also relevant for collaborative technologies used by the Federal Government?

Mr. . Absolutely. Some of these techniques are not necessarily as useful in internal facing wikis. If you have an internal wiki and everybody who is editing it is logged in and they are an employee, typically you do not need to block them from editing. You fire them or whatever you need to do to tell them to stop misbehaving.

But other of the tools, for example, the history. You can easily have people who disagree and someone will say you made these edits to this article, but I do not feel that it really improved it. I am going to go back to the previous version and then let us go to the talk page and hash this out.

So these kinds of tools are applicable for internal wikis and external, but a lot of the concepts may be valuable outside even the wiki framework. The idea of understanding that if you can generate a thoughtful community, you can have that community do a lot of the policing that otherwise it would not be cost effective to do.

A similar example would be Craig’s List. People post advertisements there, free advertisements. And the staff at Craig’s List is really too small to really supervise and monitor everything. But their community can simply, if you see something that is spam or is somehow inappropriate, they can simply flag it and if it gets flagged a certain number of times it just disappears. Overall, this does a pretty good job. And those are the kinds of techniques that I think we are going to be exploring in the industry over the next few years.

Chairman. That is fascinating and encouraging because there is a kind of confidence there based on some experience you have had that in the end the better part of human nature prevails.

Mr. . Well, one of the classic examples I always give is to imagine that you are going to design a restaurant. And you think to yourself in this restaurant we are going to be serving steak. And since we are serving steak, the customers will have access to knives. And when people have access to knives, they might stab each other. So to design our restaurant, we are going to put everybody inside a cage.

Well, this makes a bad society. That is not the kind of open society we want to live in. But unfortunately, when people are engag-