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无论你接受与否,Web 2.0—第二代互联网,由被动接收互联网信息变为主动创造互联网信息,其代表有维基百科、Youtube、MySpace等等—现在正不断动摇传统媒体的地位。很多人可能还在遥想当年,那时资讯的享用被垄断了,它们需要编辑、审批、甚至定性,才能够有限度、有范围地公布,那时的话语权掌握在极少数的“精英分子”上;只是几年的工夫,我们就进入了一个全新的世界:各类信息几乎毫无保留地冲向我们眼帘,专家和权威的信用被不断挑战,每个人可以说都得到了最大的信息接放自由,甚至思想自由。这难道不是好事吗?因为某程度上人们得到了最大的平等—达到了理想的大同境界!
传统媒体却在这时逆风而行、振臂高呼:这样做是不对的!你们忽略了问题的核心!没有了权威的引领,会导致信息灾难,最后引致社会秩序大崩盘;因为这世上有很多思想尚未成熟、心智尚未开发的人们,他们很容易被利用、被糊弄,他们需要精英们的指引。
到底这东风和西风,谁将会压倒谁呢?近期美国有一个很有意义、很成功的探讨引起了大家对这个问题广泛深刻的思考。本文只是选取了他们讨论的一小部分,希望能起到抛砖引玉的作用,让大家也来思考和讨论一下传统媒体和Web 2.0各自的定位。
David: Good evening. I’m David Ewing Duncan, Chief Correspondent of NPR’s Biotech Nation. I welcome you to this meeting.
In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where
1)amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion can post a video on YouTube, change an entry on Wikipedia or publish reviews on Yelp, we increasingly turn to the collective intelligence of large numbers of people. Should we rely on “The Wisdom of the Crowds”, trusting that they’re smarter than the expert few, or is Web 2.0 weakening traditional media to the point where we only have opinion and chaos?
Tonight I’m joined by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, and Andrew Keen, Wikipedia critic and author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.
I don’t think I really need to introduce these guys, you know, with too much fanfare here, but Wales was ranked 12th in Forbes magazine’s Web Celebs 25, and listed in 2006 in Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. And I do want to add here that Wikipedia…is it the nineth most viewed…visited site on the…?
Jimmy: Eighth.
David: Eighth. Oooh, okay they moved up a notch.
Jimmy: Hmm hmm.
David: 9.2 million articles and 253 languages; is that…?
Jimmy: Yes, as of this morning.
David: (laughing) Okay. A whole heck of a lot of stuff.
Andrew, over here, is British/American
2)entrepreneur [sic] and former member of the pioneering generation of Silicon Valley visionaries, and he’s since done a U-turn, both self-described and, I suppose, real, given his book, and is now the leading contemporary critic of sites like YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia.
Please welcome Jimmy Wales and Andrew Keen.
(applause)
David: I’m going to ask a couple of, kind of, warm-up questions, here, and we can start with you, Jimmy. I’m gonna ask both of you, from your point of view, what is Wikipedia?
Jimmy: So, Wikipedia is a charitable effort to…with the goal of creating a free encyclopedia in all the languages of the world. So, by “free” we mean free, in the sense of open-source software, so it’s freely licensed; people can copy it and modify it, 3)redistribute it; all those things. By “encyclopedia” we mean a high quality reference work. And by “all the languages of the world”, we mean exactly that. We mean for every person on the planet to have their own encyclopedia.
David: Okay. Andrew.
Andrew: I wouldn’t call Wikipedia an encyclopedia, and that’s not a criticism. An encyclopedia is something where you have centralized editors, who make calls on whether something’s more important than something else. So they’ll decide that, you know, Henry VIII deserves a larger entry than Henry III or Henry II or Henry the nothing. Wikipedia is an editorless information resource in which anyone is free to enter what they consider to be important information and other people are free to edit that information.
David: Jimmy, should all knowledge be free, or most of it?
Jimmy: I don’t think the question “Should all knowledge be free?”, is really the right question to ask. I don’t think “should” has very much to do with it. I think that, given the new technologies that we have, the ability to share knowledge, the ability to copy things, the ability to transmit knowledge is radically increased. And so for certain types of knowledge it is possible for the first time to make it available for very, very close to free.
David: A response, Andrew?
Andrew: I mean, we’d all obviously love knowledge to be free. I mean, it’s given that, just as we’d love food or drink or this building to be free, but [sic] the realities of our economic system is that nothing is really for free. My biggest 4)critique, not necessarily of Wikipedia though Wikipedia would be included in this, of the Web 2.0 movement is it undermines the value of intellectual labour. It’s premised on the idea that there is some virtue in giving away one’s intellectual labour without monetary reward. Virtue does not pay mortgages; it doesn’t put food on the table.
David: Let’s jump to another subject here, which is accuracy. Last night at the dinner table I asked my kids, “Are you allowed to use Wikipedia, you know, for school projects as sources?”, and they said “No”, and I know I’m not, as a journalist. You know, we all use as guides—I guess that’s a good word—I certainly do, but where you’re not entirely sure it’s accurate.
Jimmy: I think what’s important here is I think it’s a great step forward for us all that we finally realize that we have to be careful about accuracy. One of the interesting things that people don’t realize or don’t really understand is that Britannica, a product for which I have very great respect, the finest encyclopedia in the English language for many, many years, is 5)riddled with errors. And that’s not a criticism of Wikipedia. The traditional processes of the encyclopedia, of the New York Times, of Andrew and his publisher and the editors who reviewed his book before they published it, are good processes. They work pretty well, but they still leave us with works that are absolutely riddled with errors. With Wikipedia, it’s a really great thing that people understand there are errors.
Andrew: I think that we’re all naturally 6)skeptical. We’re all…we’re all media-literate people; we all know how to be skeptical. We all understand that Wikipedia is the consequence of the so-called, you know, “wisdom of the group” or “the crowd”—Jimmy isn’t so crazy on the “wisdom of the crowd”—certainly the wisdom of some sort of collective group as opposed to an individual. we know how to use Wikipedia. I know how to use it, that’s why I use it. It’s a…it’s a great first step for those people who are media-literate, who know how to be skeptical, who understand that it’s a window into the world of knowledge, of information.
The problem with Wikipedia is that for kids—and this is what’s really scary—it’s for kids who don’t have that kind of media-literacy. It’s not so much that Wikipedia is wrong; I think Jim is right, I think whether or not, you know, Wikimedia makes six or seven or four or three more times or less times errors than Britannica isn’t the issue. My biggest problem with Wikipedia is it doesn’t create a
7)hierarchy of knowledge. There is no one at the heart of Wikipedia—and maybe Jimmy should be that person—there is no one at the heart of Wikipedia saying that the entry on Pamela Anderson should be shorter or, excusing the 8)vulgar metaphor, longer than that on Hannah Arendt. So, I may seem old-fashioned, but I believe in knowledge hierarchies. There has to be someone who makes a call on whether Pamela Anderson is more or less important than Marie Curie or Hannah Arendt. And ultimately, when Jimmy stands back and says, “Well that’s none of my business. You know, I…who am I to say that Pamela Anderson or 9)Truthiness is less or more important than the concept of truth or Marie Curie or Hannah Arendt?” Ultimately, for those people who go to Wikipedia, who have no media-literacy, who lack the skepticism, the education which we all have, I am fearful that, in this open source free knowledge universe, we are gonna be educating people who are not able to evaluate, not so much to the accuracy of information but the importance of information.
Jimmy: So, that’s a really strange argument. (Andrew: Strange?)Questions about the length of articles strikes [sic] me as profoundly bound to a view of the world that has something to do with the economic limitations of print, and even there I don’t quite understand it. It’s a, you know, Harry Potter, last I checked, is longer than Hamlet. Should someone have said, someone top down directed to say, “Actually Harry Potter’s not as important as Hamlet, therefore it should be shorter than it”, we, well; we reject that immediately. That makes no sense. That’s a completely separate question. The length question is a completely separate question from the question, “Should there be a thoughtful process that goes into ensuring the quality, the comprehensiveness, the appropriate coverage?” There should be a thoughtful process, and the real question is “Does that process need to be centralized?” Do I have to become the 10)tzar of all human knowledge, which is a job I, frankly, don’t want. So…
Andrew: We need to give context to people, we need to help them navigate this remarkably, sort of, dizzying world of information.
Jimmy: So, I agree we need to help them navigate, but I think that’s a very different thing from suggesting that a limitation on comprehensiveness is what makes an encyclopedia an encyclopedia. I would rather say Wikipedia…I mean, if we want to say something dramatic about the word encyclopedia, I would say Wikipedia is finally the first realization of the dream of an encyclopedia.
大卫:晚上好。我是美国国家公共广播电台《生物科技国度》栏目首席记者大卫·尤文·邓肯。欢迎参加这个会议。
今时今日,播客文化风行,业余涉猎大行其道,任何人有什么想法都可以往YouTube上传视频,也可以在维基百科上改写词条,或者在Yelp上点评商铺服务,大家越来越习惯群策群力求助于众人来解决问题。我们应否依赖所谓的“群众智慧”,能不能相信他们比那些精英专家们要聪明?还是说,Web 2.0对传统媒体的削弱破坏已经到了这么个地步——人人各执一词,视听混乱无章?
今晚我们请来维基百科及维基媒体基金的创办人吉米·威尔士,还有维基百科的批评家安德鲁·基恩,他著有《门外汉的崇拜:当今互联网如何扼杀我们的文化》。
我相信实在不用大张旗鼓地介绍这两位了,他们都已声名远播。威尔士在《福布斯》杂志的“25位网络名人”榜中排行第12,还曾经在2006年入选《时代》杂志的“100位最具影响力人士”。我还想补充说句,维基百科是最多人看的……访问的第九大网站吧?
吉米:第八大。
大卫:第八,噢,又上升一级了。
吉米:嗯嗯。
大卫:920万篇文章,253种语言,对吧?
吉米:是的,截至今天早上。
大卫:(笑)行了,总之是浩如烟海。
另外,这边的安德鲁是涉足英美两国的企业家,曾经是硅谷的第一批科技创投先驱,之后他自称180度掉转方向,不过,我想也的确如此,看他写的书就知道了。现在,他是专攻YouTube、 MySpace 、Wikipedia等网站的现代知名评论家。
让我们来一起欢迎吉米·威尔士和安德鲁·基恩。
(掌声)
大卫:我想问几个问题,算是热热身吧,先从吉米开始。其实两位我都要问,从你们的角度看来,维基百科究竟是什么?
吉米:维基百科是一项善举……目的是要创造出具备全球各种语言版本的自由百科全书。所谓“自由”,就是自由,是开源软件意义上的自由,所以它是版权不限的,大家可以复制、修改、再发布,诸如此类。所谓“百科全书”,就是指高质的参考资料。而“全球各种语言”就如字面意思那样。我们要让世界上每一个人都拥有自己的百科全书。
大卫:好,安德鲁,你怎么看?
安德鲁:我不觉得维基百科是百科全书,我这么说不是贬它。百科全书应该是那种有集中的编辑来决定题材词条孰重孰轻,然后他们会裁断,比如说,亨利八世要比亨利三世或亨利二世或随便某某亨利来得重要,词条解释得详尽些。维基百科则是个无编辑的信息库,任何人都可以输入他们认为重要的信息,而其他人也可以自由地编辑那些信息。
大卫:吉米,所有知识都该不受限制地传播吗?还是说只是大部分知识该这么做?
吉米:我觉得这问题问得不对。不是“该不该”的问题。我认为,我们现在有着各种新科技,大家分享、复制、传播知识的能力激增。所以,就某些类型的知识而言,我们确实有可能史无前例地近乎自由不受限地获取。
大卫:安德鲁,你的回应?
安德鲁:我说,我们显然都很愿意看到知识可以予取予求,就像能任吃任喝,随便使用这个场馆,谁不喜欢?但现实是,在我们的经济体系里,没有什么是真的免费的。我对整个Web 2.0运动的最大质疑是——不一定是针对维基百科,虽然维基百科是该包含在内的——它扼杀了智力劳动的价值。Web 2.0运作的前提在于一种理念,认为贡献出自己的智力劳动而不求金钱回报具有某种美德。但是,美德不能换来面包。
大卫:我们聊聊别的方面吧,来看看“准确性”的问题。昨晚和家人吃饭的时候我问我的孩子们:“学校布置的那些研究计划,允许你们引用维基百科的资料吗?”他们说“不行。”而作为记者,我知道我也是不能用的。不过,我们都会用它来做“导引”——用这个词来形容应该比较准确——我是会用,但就是不太能确定内容的准确性。
吉米:我看这里面最重要的是,我们终于意识到要关注准确性,这对我们所有人来说已经是一大进步。有意思的是,大家没意识到或者根本不理解,《大英百科全书》——尽管我对其崇敬有加,多年来其可谓英文版百科全书里最上乘之作——其实也错漏百出。因而不该只怪维基百科。传统的编撰出版程序,无论是百科全书、《纽约时报》、安德鲁的书——他的出版商和编辑在书本出版前的检查校对,都是细致有序的。程序既好,但我们还是眼见诸多纰漏错谬。对于维基百科,大家能明白其中有错,这是非常好的。
安德鲁:我觉得我们(与会的人士——有数码、媒体业界背景的人)会很自然地抱有怀疑的态度。我们都是懂媒体的人,都知道不能尽信媒体所言。我们都知道维基百科是所谓“组群智慧”或者“群众智慧”——吉米不太喜欢“群众智慧”这个说法吧——反正是非个人的某种群体组织智慧造就出来的。我们懂得怎么利用维基百科。因为我懂得怎么用,所以我会去用。对懂媒体的人、懂得怀疑质问的人、懂得维基百科只是进入知识资讯世界的一扇窗户的那些人来说,这是很好的第一步。
但小孩用起维基百科来就出问题了——这是最可怕的——不懂媒体运作内幕的小孩。不是说维基百科有什么错,我觉得吉米的观点是对的,维基百科和《大英百科全书》相比,错多错少,是六倍七倍还是四倍三倍,这些都不是重点。我认为维基百科的最大问题是它没有一个层级性的知识流体系。维基百科的中枢并没有任何人——也许吉米该担当这一角色——没有任何人在中央发号施令说帕米拉·安德森(《花花公子》封面常客,著名艳星)的词条要比汉娜·阿伦特(原籍德国的政治理论家,以其关于极权主义的研究著称西方思想界)的词条短或者长,请原谅我粗俗的比方。我也许显得守旧古板,但我坚信知识流是需要有层级性体系的。必须得有个人来定夺究竟帕米拉·安德森、居里夫人、汉娜·阿伦特三者孰重孰轻。吉米也许会退闪说:“那不是我要管的事,我……哪里轮到我去说:‘帕米拉·安德森’还是‘伪真知’这词重要,是‘真实’这概念还是‘居里夫人’或是‘汉娜·阿伦特’的词条重要?”这样的话,最终,上维基百科的人,那些缺乏媒体素养、不懂得存疑、没有我们那种教育背景的人,对他们来说,我担心,在如此一个开源的知识库里,我们让那些没有判断力的人看到学到的倒不是信息的准确性,而是信息的重要性。
吉米:那真的是个很奇怪的观点。(安德鲁:奇怪?)我感觉文章长短的问题应该是跟有关印刷的经济限制的某种观念紧密相连的,即使这么说,我也不太懂其中的缘由。上次我查过,发现维基百科上“哈利·波特”的词条解释要比“哈姆雷特”的要长,那是不是说,本该有个人,某个上级人物站出来指令说“实际上哈利·波特没有哈姆雷特重要,所以前者词条篇幅要比后者短”,我们马上会反对。说不通的。这根本就是两回事。篇幅长度和“该不该好好考虑设定一个确保高质量、高涵盖度、释述恰如其分的编辑流程?”根本是两个不同的问题。没错,我们需要一个精心设计的流程,而真正的问题在于“那流程需要统一管理吗?”我要当全人类知识的沙皇吗?老实说,我可不想做……
安德鲁:我们要让大众了解背景,帮助他们在这个相当令人目眩神迷的资讯世界里找到方向。
吉米:我认同要给他们领航,但那跟提出“要给信息的多元性设限才能算是百科全书”有着天渊之别。我反而会说……如果要就百科全书这个名堂说些什么惊人言论,我会说,维基百科才是首个实现我们百科全书梦的创建。
传统媒体却在这时逆风而行、振臂高呼:这样做是不对的!你们忽略了问题的核心!没有了权威的引领,会导致信息灾难,最后引致社会秩序大崩盘;因为这世上有很多思想尚未成熟、心智尚未开发的人们,他们很容易被利用、被糊弄,他们需要精英们的指引。
到底这东风和西风,谁将会压倒谁呢?近期美国有一个很有意义、很成功的探讨引起了大家对这个问题广泛深刻的思考。本文只是选取了他们讨论的一小部分,希望能起到抛砖引玉的作用,让大家也来思考和讨论一下传统媒体和Web 2.0各自的定位。
David: Good evening. I’m David Ewing Duncan, Chief Correspondent of NPR’s Biotech Nation. I welcome you to this meeting.
In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where
1)amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion can post a video on YouTube, change an entry on Wikipedia or publish reviews on Yelp, we increasingly turn to the collective intelligence of large numbers of people. Should we rely on “The Wisdom of the Crowds”, trusting that they’re smarter than the expert few, or is Web 2.0 weakening traditional media to the point where we only have opinion and chaos?
Tonight I’m joined by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, and Andrew Keen, Wikipedia critic and author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.
I don’t think I really need to introduce these guys, you know, with too much fanfare here, but Wales was ranked 12th in Forbes magazine’s Web Celebs 25, and listed in 2006 in Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. And I do want to add here that Wikipedia…is it the nineth most viewed…visited site on the…?
Jimmy: Eighth.
David: Eighth. Oooh, okay they moved up a notch.
Jimmy: Hmm hmm.
David: 9.2 million articles and 253 languages; is that…?
Jimmy: Yes, as of this morning.
David: (laughing) Okay. A whole heck of a lot of stuff.
Andrew, over here, is British/American
2)entrepreneur [sic] and former member of the pioneering generation of Silicon Valley visionaries, and he’s since done a U-turn, both self-described and, I suppose, real, given his book, and is now the leading contemporary critic of sites like YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia.
Please welcome Jimmy Wales and Andrew Keen.
(applause)
David: I’m going to ask a couple of, kind of, warm-up questions, here, and we can start with you, Jimmy. I’m gonna ask both of you, from your point of view, what is Wikipedia?
Jimmy: So, Wikipedia is a charitable effort to…with the goal of creating a free encyclopedia in all the languages of the world. So, by “free” we mean free, in the sense of open-source software, so it’s freely licensed; people can copy it and modify it, 3)redistribute it; all those things. By “encyclopedia” we mean a high quality reference work. And by “all the languages of the world”, we mean exactly that. We mean for every person on the planet to have their own encyclopedia.
David: Okay. Andrew.
Andrew: I wouldn’t call Wikipedia an encyclopedia, and that’s not a criticism. An encyclopedia is something where you have centralized editors, who make calls on whether something’s more important than something else. So they’ll decide that, you know, Henry VIII deserves a larger entry than Henry III or Henry II or Henry the nothing. Wikipedia is an editorless information resource in which anyone is free to enter what they consider to be important information and other people are free to edit that information.
David: Jimmy, should all knowledge be free, or most of it?
Jimmy: I don’t think the question “Should all knowledge be free?”, is really the right question to ask. I don’t think “should” has very much to do with it. I think that, given the new technologies that we have, the ability to share knowledge, the ability to copy things, the ability to transmit knowledge is radically increased. And so for certain types of knowledge it is possible for the first time to make it available for very, very close to free.
David: A response, Andrew?
Andrew: I mean, we’d all obviously love knowledge to be free. I mean, it’s given that, just as we’d love food or drink or this building to be free, but [sic] the realities of our economic system is that nothing is really for free. My biggest 4)critique, not necessarily of Wikipedia though Wikipedia would be included in this, of the Web 2.0 movement is it undermines the value of intellectual labour. It’s premised on the idea that there is some virtue in giving away one’s intellectual labour without monetary reward. Virtue does not pay mortgages; it doesn’t put food on the table.
David: Let’s jump to another subject here, which is accuracy. Last night at the dinner table I asked my kids, “Are you allowed to use Wikipedia, you know, for school projects as sources?”, and they said “No”, and I know I’m not, as a journalist. You know, we all use as guides—I guess that’s a good word—I certainly do, but where you’re not entirely sure it’s accurate.
Jimmy: I think what’s important here is I think it’s a great step forward for us all that we finally realize that we have to be careful about accuracy. One of the interesting things that people don’t realize or don’t really understand is that Britannica, a product for which I have very great respect, the finest encyclopedia in the English language for many, many years, is 5)riddled with errors. And that’s not a criticism of Wikipedia. The traditional processes of the encyclopedia, of the New York Times, of Andrew and his publisher and the editors who reviewed his book before they published it, are good processes. They work pretty well, but they still leave us with works that are absolutely riddled with errors. With Wikipedia, it’s a really great thing that people understand there are errors.
Andrew: I think that we’re all naturally 6)skeptical. We’re all…we’re all media-literate people; we all know how to be skeptical. We all understand that Wikipedia is the consequence of the so-called, you know, “wisdom of the group” or “the crowd”—Jimmy isn’t so crazy on the “wisdom of the crowd”—certainly the wisdom of some sort of collective group as opposed to an individual. we know how to use Wikipedia. I know how to use it, that’s why I use it. It’s a…it’s a great first step for those people who are media-literate, who know how to be skeptical, who understand that it’s a window into the world of knowledge, of information.
The problem with Wikipedia is that for kids—and this is what’s really scary—it’s for kids who don’t have that kind of media-literacy. It’s not so much that Wikipedia is wrong; I think Jim is right, I think whether or not, you know, Wikimedia makes six or seven or four or three more times or less times errors than Britannica isn’t the issue. My biggest problem with Wikipedia is it doesn’t create a
7)hierarchy of knowledge. There is no one at the heart of Wikipedia—and maybe Jimmy should be that person—there is no one at the heart of Wikipedia saying that the entry on Pamela Anderson should be shorter or, excusing the 8)vulgar metaphor, longer than that on Hannah Arendt. So, I may seem old-fashioned, but I believe in knowledge hierarchies. There has to be someone who makes a call on whether Pamela Anderson is more or less important than Marie Curie or Hannah Arendt. And ultimately, when Jimmy stands back and says, “Well that’s none of my business. You know, I…who am I to say that Pamela Anderson or 9)Truthiness is less or more important than the concept of truth or Marie Curie or Hannah Arendt?” Ultimately, for those people who go to Wikipedia, who have no media-literacy, who lack the skepticism, the education which we all have, I am fearful that, in this open source free knowledge universe, we are gonna be educating people who are not able to evaluate, not so much to the accuracy of information but the importance of information.
Jimmy: So, that’s a really strange argument. (Andrew: Strange?)Questions about the length of articles strikes [sic] me as profoundly bound to a view of the world that has something to do with the economic limitations of print, and even there I don’t quite understand it. It’s a, you know, Harry Potter, last I checked, is longer than Hamlet. Should someone have said, someone top down directed to say, “Actually Harry Potter’s not as important as Hamlet, therefore it should be shorter than it”, we, well; we reject that immediately. That makes no sense. That’s a completely separate question. The length question is a completely separate question from the question, “Should there be a thoughtful process that goes into ensuring the quality, the comprehensiveness, the appropriate coverage?” There should be a thoughtful process, and the real question is “Does that process need to be centralized?” Do I have to become the 10)tzar of all human knowledge, which is a job I, frankly, don’t want. So…
Andrew: We need to give context to people, we need to help them navigate this remarkably, sort of, dizzying world of information.
Jimmy: So, I agree we need to help them navigate, but I think that’s a very different thing from suggesting that a limitation on comprehensiveness is what makes an encyclopedia an encyclopedia. I would rather say Wikipedia…I mean, if we want to say something dramatic about the word encyclopedia, I would say Wikipedia is finally the first realization of the dream of an encyclopedia.
大卫:晚上好。我是美国国家公共广播电台《生物科技国度》栏目首席记者大卫·尤文·邓肯。欢迎参加这个会议。
今时今日,播客文化风行,业余涉猎大行其道,任何人有什么想法都可以往YouTube上传视频,也可以在维基百科上改写词条,或者在Yelp上点评商铺服务,大家越来越习惯群策群力求助于众人来解决问题。我们应否依赖所谓的“群众智慧”,能不能相信他们比那些精英专家们要聪明?还是说,Web 2.0对传统媒体的削弱破坏已经到了这么个地步——人人各执一词,视听混乱无章?
今晚我们请来维基百科及维基媒体基金的创办人吉米·威尔士,还有维基百科的批评家安德鲁·基恩,他著有《门外汉的崇拜:当今互联网如何扼杀我们的文化》。
我相信实在不用大张旗鼓地介绍这两位了,他们都已声名远播。威尔士在《福布斯》杂志的“25位网络名人”榜中排行第12,还曾经在2006年入选《时代》杂志的“100位最具影响力人士”。我还想补充说句,维基百科是最多人看的……访问的第九大网站吧?
吉米:第八大。
大卫:第八,噢,又上升一级了。
吉米:嗯嗯。
大卫:920万篇文章,253种语言,对吧?
吉米:是的,截至今天早上。
大卫:(笑)行了,总之是浩如烟海。
另外,这边的安德鲁是涉足英美两国的企业家,曾经是硅谷的第一批科技创投先驱,之后他自称180度掉转方向,不过,我想也的确如此,看他写的书就知道了。现在,他是专攻YouTube、 MySpace 、Wikipedia等网站的现代知名评论家。
让我们来一起欢迎吉米·威尔士和安德鲁·基恩。
(掌声)
大卫:我想问几个问题,算是热热身吧,先从吉米开始。其实两位我都要问,从你们的角度看来,维基百科究竟是什么?
吉米:维基百科是一项善举……目的是要创造出具备全球各种语言版本的自由百科全书。所谓“自由”,就是自由,是开源软件意义上的自由,所以它是版权不限的,大家可以复制、修改、再发布,诸如此类。所谓“百科全书”,就是指高质的参考资料。而“全球各种语言”就如字面意思那样。我们要让世界上每一个人都拥有自己的百科全书。
大卫:好,安德鲁,你怎么看?
安德鲁:我不觉得维基百科是百科全书,我这么说不是贬它。百科全书应该是那种有集中的编辑来决定题材词条孰重孰轻,然后他们会裁断,比如说,亨利八世要比亨利三世或亨利二世或随便某某亨利来得重要,词条解释得详尽些。维基百科则是个无编辑的信息库,任何人都可以输入他们认为重要的信息,而其他人也可以自由地编辑那些信息。
大卫:吉米,所有知识都该不受限制地传播吗?还是说只是大部分知识该这么做?
吉米:我觉得这问题问得不对。不是“该不该”的问题。我认为,我们现在有着各种新科技,大家分享、复制、传播知识的能力激增。所以,就某些类型的知识而言,我们确实有可能史无前例地近乎自由不受限地获取。
大卫:安德鲁,你的回应?
安德鲁:我说,我们显然都很愿意看到知识可以予取予求,就像能任吃任喝,随便使用这个场馆,谁不喜欢?但现实是,在我们的经济体系里,没有什么是真的免费的。我对整个Web 2.0运动的最大质疑是——不一定是针对维基百科,虽然维基百科是该包含在内的——它扼杀了智力劳动的价值。Web 2.0运作的前提在于一种理念,认为贡献出自己的智力劳动而不求金钱回报具有某种美德。但是,美德不能换来面包。
大卫:我们聊聊别的方面吧,来看看“准确性”的问题。昨晚和家人吃饭的时候我问我的孩子们:“学校布置的那些研究计划,允许你们引用维基百科的资料吗?”他们说“不行。”而作为记者,我知道我也是不能用的。不过,我们都会用它来做“导引”——用这个词来形容应该比较准确——我是会用,但就是不太能确定内容的准确性。
吉米:我看这里面最重要的是,我们终于意识到要关注准确性,这对我们所有人来说已经是一大进步。有意思的是,大家没意识到或者根本不理解,《大英百科全书》——尽管我对其崇敬有加,多年来其可谓英文版百科全书里最上乘之作——其实也错漏百出。因而不该只怪维基百科。传统的编撰出版程序,无论是百科全书、《纽约时报》、安德鲁的书——他的出版商和编辑在书本出版前的检查校对,都是细致有序的。程序既好,但我们还是眼见诸多纰漏错谬。对于维基百科,大家能明白其中有错,这是非常好的。
安德鲁:我觉得我们(与会的人士——有数码、媒体业界背景的人)会很自然地抱有怀疑的态度。我们都是懂媒体的人,都知道不能尽信媒体所言。我们都知道维基百科是所谓“组群智慧”或者“群众智慧”——吉米不太喜欢“群众智慧”这个说法吧——反正是非个人的某种群体组织智慧造就出来的。我们懂得怎么利用维基百科。因为我懂得怎么用,所以我会去用。对懂媒体的人、懂得怀疑质问的人、懂得维基百科只是进入知识资讯世界的一扇窗户的那些人来说,这是很好的第一步。
但小孩用起维基百科来就出问题了——这是最可怕的——不懂媒体运作内幕的小孩。不是说维基百科有什么错,我觉得吉米的观点是对的,维基百科和《大英百科全书》相比,错多错少,是六倍七倍还是四倍三倍,这些都不是重点。我认为维基百科的最大问题是它没有一个层级性的知识流体系。维基百科的中枢并没有任何人——也许吉米该担当这一角色——没有任何人在中央发号施令说帕米拉·安德森(《花花公子》封面常客,著名艳星)的词条要比汉娜·阿伦特(原籍德国的政治理论家,以其关于极权主义的研究著称西方思想界)的词条短或者长,请原谅我粗俗的比方。我也许显得守旧古板,但我坚信知识流是需要有层级性体系的。必须得有个人来定夺究竟帕米拉·安德森、居里夫人、汉娜·阿伦特三者孰重孰轻。吉米也许会退闪说:“那不是我要管的事,我……哪里轮到我去说:‘帕米拉·安德森’还是‘伪真知’这词重要,是‘真实’这概念还是‘居里夫人’或是‘汉娜·阿伦特’的词条重要?”这样的话,最终,上维基百科的人,那些缺乏媒体素养、不懂得存疑、没有我们那种教育背景的人,对他们来说,我担心,在如此一个开源的知识库里,我们让那些没有判断力的人看到学到的倒不是信息的准确性,而是信息的重要性。
吉米:那真的是个很奇怪的观点。(安德鲁:奇怪?)我感觉文章长短的问题应该是跟有关印刷的经济限制的某种观念紧密相连的,即使这么说,我也不太懂其中的缘由。上次我查过,发现维基百科上“哈利·波特”的词条解释要比“哈姆雷特”的要长,那是不是说,本该有个人,某个上级人物站出来指令说“实际上哈利·波特没有哈姆雷特重要,所以前者词条篇幅要比后者短”,我们马上会反对。说不通的。这根本就是两回事。篇幅长度和“该不该好好考虑设定一个确保高质量、高涵盖度、释述恰如其分的编辑流程?”根本是两个不同的问题。没错,我们需要一个精心设计的流程,而真正的问题在于“那流程需要统一管理吗?”我要当全人类知识的沙皇吗?老实说,我可不想做……
安德鲁:我们要让大众了解背景,帮助他们在这个相当令人目眩神迷的资讯世界里找到方向。
吉米:我认同要给他们领航,但那跟提出“要给信息的多元性设限才能算是百科全书”有着天渊之别。我反而会说……如果要就百科全书这个名堂说些什么惊人言论,我会说,维基百科才是首个实现我们百科全书梦的创建。