The Boy Who Could Change the World by Aaron Swartz Read Free Book Online

neutral—after all, improvements are improvements—but becomes rather more problematic if technical choices have political effects. Should executives and venture capitalists be calling the shots on some of these issues?
    The Wikipedia community is enormously vibrant and I have nodoubt that the site will manage to survive many software changes. But if we’re concerned about more than mere survival, about how to make Wikipedia the best that it can be, we need to start thinking about software design as much as we think about the rest of our policy choices.

(The Dandy Warhols) Come Down

    http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/comedown
    September 22, 2006
    Age 19
    Well, the Wikipedia election has finally ended. The good news is that I can now talk about other things again. (For example, did you know that Erik Möller eats babies?) I have a backlog of about 20 posts that I built up over the course of the election. But instead of springing them on you all at once, I’ll try to do daily posting again starting Monday. (Oooh.)
    The actual results haven’t been announced yet (and probably won’t be for another couple days, while they check the list of voters for people who voted twice) but my impression is that I probably lost. Many wags have commented on how my campaign was almost destined to lose: I argued that the hard-core Wikipedia contributors weren’t very important, but those were precisely the people who could vote for me—in other words, I alienated my only constituency.
    â€œAaron Swartz: Why is he getting so much attention? ” wrote fellow candidate Kelly Martin. “The community has long known that edit count is a poor measure of contributions.” Others, meanwhile, insisted my claims were so obviously wrong as to not be even worth discussing.
    Jimbo Wales, on the other hand, finally sent me a nice message the other day letting me know that he’d removed the offending section from his talk and looked forward to sitting down with me and investigating the topic more carefully.
    And for my part, I hope to be able to take up some of the offers I’ve received for computer time and run my algorithm across all of Wikipedia and publish the results in more detailed form. (I’d also like touse the results to put up a little website where you can type in the name of a page and see who wrote what, color-coded or something like that.)
    As for the election itself, it’s much harder to draw firm conclusions. It’s difficult in any election, this one even more so because we have so little data—no exit polls or phone surveys or even TV pundits to rely upon. Still, I’m fairly content seeing the kind words of all the incredible people I respect. Their support means a great deal to me.
    The same is true of the old friends who wrote in during my essays along with all the new people who encouraged me to keep on writing. Writing the essays on a regular schedule was hard work—at one point, after sleeping overnight at my mother’s bedside in the hospital, I trundled down at seven in the morning to find an Internet connection so I could write and post one—but your support made it worth the effort.
    I hope that whoever wins takes what I’ve written into consideration. I’m not sure who that is yet, but there are some hints. I was reading an irreverent site critical of Wikipedia when I came across its claim that Jimbo Wales had sent an email to the Wikipedia community telling them who they should vote for. I assumed the site had simply made it up to attack Jimbo, but when I searched I found it really was genuine :
    I personally strongly strongly support the candidacies of Oscar and Mindspillage.
    [. . .]
    There are other candidates, some good, but at least some of them are entirely unacceptable because they have proven themselves repeatedly unable to work well with the community.
    For those reading the tea leaves, this suggests that the results will be something