Tekkie-Wiki Social Club

The "tekkie-wiki" (also written "tekki-wiki" or "tekki-wikinista") is another Second Life concept invented by Prokofy Neva. As he explained in an interview with Hamlet Au, Prokofy sees the tekkie-wiki as a "collective expert technical brainstorm to collaborate on projects outside of uninitiated scrutiny." Prokofy holds that tekkie-wiki is part of the ideology of the Feted Inner Core, which is a supposed group of talented content-creators, encouraged and subsidized by the Lindens, and forming the established and recognized elite at the world’s center.

Prokofy’s August 2005 post What is the Tekkie-Wiki? reproduces his original definition of the term on the SL forum, which can be summarized as follows: "Tekkie wiki is the technically elite subculture of SL that gets jazzed on showing off their skills in prim building and scripting, but doesn't get excited in delighting joe average user." The post then goes on to criticize the more general culture of wiki websites, among which the best known is Wikipedia.

A wiki is a website with pages that can be freely created and edited by anyone. The wiki principle probably inspired Linden Labs when they first decided to let residents create their own objects. Second Life is in fact a sort of wiki in three dimensions. There is however a key difference, in that Linden Labs also established individual ownership over objects, and residents can only edit objects that belong to them.

Prokofy's criticism of wiki websites, taking Wikipedia as a case in point, centers on lack of accountability, and on hidden control by an inside elite. Old-fashioned media had an educated editorial board and a director who was a tangible figure with social accountability. The accountability of a wiki is supposedly provided by its self-corrective nature: anyone can see and correct false information. But this mechanism has shortcomings, and wikis are notoriously unreliable. Wikis do however remove traditional obstacles that prevented all kinds of smart or helpful people from sharing their knowledge with others. But rather than being open and democratic, as they are touted to be, wikis tend to be dominated by insider groups, characterized by secrecy, apprenticing, hazing, and arrogance. For Prokofy, the basic problem is that a wiki is a collective, and that any collective tends to evolve towards the type of closed group-think that characterized the Soviet Union.

But what exactly does Prokofy mean by a "collective." Human society is by definition a collective endeavour, so the term needs honing down. I suggest that Prokofy is referring to a particular type of collective organisation, one which steamrollers over the individual and the individual's rights, in the name of the "common good."

Before I came to Second Life as Danton Sideways, I spent a few months contributing to Wikipedia, under the name of Redeyed Treefrog. I notably created a long article on the History of Wikis. I also created a number of shorter articles, some of which were deleted because the only sources they cited were web-based. One of these articles, on the subject of Sunir Shah - who is discussed further below - was deleted after minimal discussion by a self-appointed committee, assembled during the Christmas break, at a time when my attention was on other things. I logged on one day to find the debate closed, because the 5 day time limit set for the deletion discussion was over, and the article gone, without my having even had a chance to participate in the debate. With some difficulty I identified the administrator who had initiated the deletion, and left a message on his page saying I would like to discuss the matter by email, but there was no reply.

This whole proceeding reeks of "secrecy, apprenticing, hazing, and arrogance," to use Prokofy's words. Being relatively new to Wikipedia, I have neither expert knowledge of the arcane system, nor a social network of other contributors to turn to for help. The administrator in question is an anonymous contributor, with no visible hierarchical superior. I find myself in the position of a powerless individual crushed by a faceless bureaucracy, like the hero of a Kafka novel.

I nonetheless remain an enthusiastic fan of the wiki format. Danton Sideways is a self-proclaimed disciple of Ivan Illich, whose philosophy involved returning to people the control over knowledge and techniques. Wikis are a prime example of how this can be done. Of course Wikipedia is unreliable, and it is at present completely gangrened by an elitist inner core, but it is still an amazing repository of collective knowledge, and one that could only have been constructed through massively distributed collaboration.

My diagnosis is that the problem has relatively little to do with the wiki format per se, and everything to do with a deficiency of internal democracy and a lack of safeguards to protect individual rights. New technology engenders new social structures, which at first take haphazard, and typically elitist, forms. Specific efforts must be made to improve emerging social systems, and to make them more democratic. It took European culture some two thousand years to develop the forms of mass democracy we have today, and in view of their poor present performance in the matter of human rights, we can only hope that the job is still far from finished.

What can be done to improve the way wikis function? I might give an example taken from the bit of research I did on the subject. It seems to me that there are three key people in the history of wikis: Ward Cunningham, Sunir Shah and Jumbo Wales. Ward Cunningham invented the first wiki, called WikiWikiWeb, and Jimbo Wales founded Wikipedia . But who, you may ask, is Sunir Shah?

Sunir Shah is a young internet enthusiast and forum moderator who showed up one day on WikiWikiWeb and started writing on the subject of WikiOnWiki, which means thinking about wikis, what they are, how they work. But Ward Cunningham and his associates wanted to restrict WikiWikiWeb to specialized discussion of computer programming. So Sunir left in 2001 and created MeatballWiki, the first wiki devoted to thinking about wikis. Sunir and his friends at MeatballWiki developed a range of concepts that have become fundamental to wiki culture. The first is that a wiki is a community.

The idea of on-line communities is nothing new. As noted by Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, one of the seven design goals underlying the creation of the WELL in 1985 was that "it would be a community," and WELL participant Howard Rheingold first coined the term "virtual community" in 1987. But Sunir and friends were the first to apply the idea of community to wikis. To see what this produced, the best is simply to read the pages of MeatballWiki. One spin-off was the concept of barnraising, which is a concerted group effort to help an individual implement a project, which could even be the creation of a new wiki. Another innovation was the practice of awarding virtual barnstars in recognition of outstanding efforts on the part of individual contributors. The MeatballWiki team also extensively contributed to developing Interwiki, which denotes various methods for linking together existing wikis.

Wikipedia did take a number of ideas from MeatballWiki, such as Barnstars and Interwiki. But as my personal experience indicates, Wikipedia seems to have evolved more into a soul-less collective machine, instead of into a self-conscious community concerned about its individual members. The Wikipedia social system thus appears to be still in its infancy, and characterized by the type of elitist, insider manipulation that Prokofy denounces on Second Life.

The emergence of elites is natural, and there is nothing to gain from trying to prevent individuals or groups from achieving excellence. As suggested above, the solution to tekkie-wiki elitism may instead have something to do with developing community and democracy.

Do we foster community then by asking the elites to think more of the well-being of others, to be more concerned for "joe average user," as Prokofy puts it? That approach might move things a bit in the right direction, but creators and entrepreneurs are notorious for looking out for number one, and in general only seek to serve their customers to the extent that doing so increases their own business.

Another possible approach, and one which is in line with the philosophy of Ivan Illich, would be to focus one's efforts on increasing the tekkie-wiki capacities of all of the other users. This could be done for example by developing better user support systems, such as tutorials and on-line help, and by promoting the formation of social self-help groups for the uninitiated, throughout the many different virtual communities flourishing within Second Life. The possible implementation of this approach is a vast subject. To sum it all up in a simple formula: let’s create some Tekkie-Wiki Social Clubs for the rest of us.