The libertarian movement for immutable truth on web3
“The internet stood for a plethora of independent voices. We trusted these Web2 giants with our data, and gave them the power to take over the world; we trusted with our liberty and privacy, and then they stabbed us in the back.” —— From Wikipedia Founder Larry Sanger
Who are we and what is the movement for?
Wikipedia is one of the top 10 most visited websites globally, where the largest collection of knowledge collaboratively accumulated is gathered.
As team of long term Wikipedia hardcore users, fans and contributors, who all have been indebted to the amazing free service, we're more concerned than anyone when the initial mission of establishing a free, community-managed online encyclopedia is fading away.
We initiated with this "white knight endeavor" to rescue Wikipedia from where it's been stuck.
This is a libertarian movement for the immutable truth on Web3, building highly trustworthy but in fact trust-less, permission-less and censorship resistant encyclopedia.
Value doesn't have to last forever to be valuable, but truth has to be immutable to be truthful.
Stunning facts of Wikipedia's plight & structural problems
To start with, we'd like to quote Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who has warned that the website has betrayed its original mission by "giving an establishment point of view rather than the diverse range of opinions it was set up to give."
Below are listed some evidence of its obfuscation and malfunction, which is endangering and damaging its contents, community and the organization itself.
Notorious Bureaucracy and severely polluted Community:
(1) Complete lack of incentives
Volunteers participate for the value of self-actualization and knowledge-sharing, but leave with disappointment of non-sustainable incentive and increasing bureaucracy.
Editing participation declines significantly (over 50%) since 2007 and 1% of editors make 70% of the edits.
(2) Administrator domineering and Rigid community
The narrow partisan and insider culture of Wikipedia is making it impossible to attract and keep the new editors the site needs.
In addition, Knowledgeable people who do not conform to certain beliefs that administrators hold are more likely to be "banned" or "blocked" by administrators or a community vote.
(3) Hostile editing environment
The English Wikipedia along has more than 50 official policies and regulations with a word count close to 150,000 as of 2014.
Wikipedia's evolved terms and conditions bar people from editing by setting rigid approval process, stratified structure, and a large number of complex rules.
Entrenched flaws in content production system:
(1) Defected anonymous and seemingly democratic editing process
Anonymous editing is both its strength and its biggest weakness, for it results in massive vandalism, factual reliability and political bias. Redundant bureaucratic procedures and tracking tools are introduced to solve problems, which, in turn, undermine the editing system and shrink the community.
Privacy of editors are not respected at all and anyone who is trying with anonymous editing won’t be able to hide entirely thanks to device fingerprinting and IP address tracking.
(2) Manipulation on public opinion
Wikipedia prides itself for “neutral point of view” while biases of its few, but powerful administrators may be shaping the information and mold public opinions on many of the most sensitive topics on Wikipedia.
(3) Notable systemic bias and restriction on freedom of speech Described as an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia, Wikipedians have to face numerous restrictions on freedom of speech and write without any editorial bias.
Threats and warning against conservatives who edit their liberally-biased article have been listed in articles of deletions and examples of conservatives repairing this bias labelled as disruptive editing have been known.
(4) Abusive use of ruling elites and dedicated PR companies to influence listings
Wikipedia now becomes a tool of the ruling elite and is also heavily influenced by paid public relations professionals, with paid editors introducing biased content, or removing any negative or controversial facts, especially for social and political heated topics.
Wikipedia does little to enforce its rules against such abusive use of paid editing, not to mention questionable financial ties of donation from the establishments.
Pathological organization function and governance mechanism:
(1) Unsustainable and unitary fundraising
Though Wikipedia is funded by the foundation, its fundraising source is fairly unitary: In 2021, Wikipedia’s revenue is $157m, of which $154.7m raised from over 7.7 million donors, namely $20 per donors. It depends almost entirely on donation made by its millions of readers.
Relying on donation from its users to sustain a Top-10 website business is definitely not the best practice in the ecosystem.
(2) Ineffective operation mechanism
While the foundation gets to expand its treasury, the systemic problems are left unresolved and major contributors who are basically maintaining and literally producing the contents are ignored to be incentivized. The centralized ownership hampers the community operation and on the other hand, snatches most of its resources.
(3) Low consensus between foundation and community
Foundation pays for the legal and technical infrastructure supporting Wikipedia, while it attempts to adjust the way how volunteer community operates. It seems those two parties can hardly make consensus on the site’s problem and ideas for addressing them.
Why does it need to be decentralized?
Wikipedia, as a centralized organization and project, has developed excessive workflows and dictative guidelines hindering publication participation and diversity, established bureaucratic hierarchy contaminating community democracy, and functioned dependent on its foundation with constant divergence.
All of above structural and deep-rooted obstacles can be tackled by a decentralized autonomous organization with cryptonomics on Web3.
- To make it community-driven and collaborative in co-creation. Collective community ownership is what we believe to be the key of Wiki renewing and upholding ecosystem vitality.
- To eliminate bias and regain its assertion of neutral point of view. Centralized administration criteria shall be substituted with diverse and plenary consensus.
- To fulfill the mission of the open-source knowledge utopia, inhabiting and thriving collective intelligence. A WikiDAO on Web3 with designed token economics and proof of contribution rewards is undoubtedly attracting all intelligence and participation.
- To correct its problems of rigid approval process and redundant editorial rules. When governance belongs to the community collectively, hierarchy of administration and the toxic side effects diminish and vanish consequently.
- To prevent proliferation of professional wiki PR and paid copy writers for narrative control. Traditional centralized management either results in conflict of interest, or breeds corruption.
- To make it free from censorship resistance and be trusted again as a single source of truth. Freedom of speech and diversity of opinions can be protected by decentralized organization.
Where is the rescue going?
In order to pay homage to Wikipedia contributors and celebrate Wikipedia's 21th anniversary, we’re initiating this libertarian movement for immutable truth on web3, with a renewed trustworthy encyclopedia.
This movement is to build an Exobrain on web3, a true immutable truth ledger, aiming to build the world’s largest database of information with people from all over, scaling collaboration and knowledge exchange, sustaining organic flourishing growth of community with collective ownership, and maintaining operation independence with ecosystem fund.
(1) To collecting knowledge and encouraging participation, we value all of our community members and advocate to bring on new collaborators with incentives and proof of work rewards.
Tokens of WikiDAO will be distributed to all previous contributors who supported Wikipedia and also the early participants of this project.
(2) There would be a transparent revision history for each article and every editing on this “reborn Wiki”.
Editorial rules and tracking mechanism built for vandalism problems will be improved and hence the bureaucratic bottleneck of too many rules and rigid process will be resolved.
(3) A community owned DAO is going to be initiated, where every community member can own a piece of this Wiki together, where all changes of this platform will be collectively suggested, reviewed or even reverted.
(4) A WikiDAO on Web3 is going to be organized with designed token economics, circulating tokens with efficiency and transparency, providing sustainable funding sources and ensuring it to function independently from elites and politics.
It will be much more resilient to safeguard the encyclopedia's lasting independence from influence, and ensuring funding stability which individual donation patterns aren‘t providing.
Furthermore, with decentralized incentive system which is encouraging content creators and rewarding community contributors, WikiDAO will be empowered towards becoming effectively well-functioning community for immutable truth.
We're so grateful for and so indebted to the 20 years of free content and the amazing service that we need to remain committed to save this ultimate human knowledge graph and make sure it everlasting and thriving for the next 20 years.