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

like: Eloquence, Oscar, Mindspillage. But we’ll see.
    The letdown after the election is probably not the best time to make plans, but if I had to, I’d probably decide to stay out of Wikipedia business for a while. It’s a great and important project, but not the one for me.
    Anyway, now everyone can go back to vandalizing my Wikipedia page . Laters.

Up with Facts: Finding the Truth in WikiCourt

    http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001175
    February 19, 2004
    Age 17
    I’m an optimist. I believe that statements like “Bush went AWOL” or “Gore claims to have invented the Internet” can be evaluated and decided pretty much true or false. (The conclusion can be a little more nuanced, but the important thing is that there’s a definitive conclusion.)
    And even crazier, I believe that if there was a fair and accurate system for determining which of these things were lies, people would stop repeating the lies. I would certainly try to. No matter how much I wanted to believe “Dean’s state record sealing was normal” or “global warming does exist,” if a fair system had decided against it, I would stop.
    And perhaps most crazy of all, I want to stop repeating falsehoods. I believe the truth is more important than particular political goals, so I want to build a system I can trust. I want to know that when I make claims, I’m not speaking out of political distortion but out of honest truth. And I want to be able to evaluate the claims of others too.
    So how would such a system work? First, large claims (“Gore is a serial liar,” “Ronald Reagan was a great president”) would be broken down into smaller component parts (“Gore claimed to have invented the Internet,” “Ronald Reagan’s economic plan created jobs”). On each small claim, we’d run The Process. Let’s take “Gore falsely claimed to have invented the Internet.”
    First, some ground rules. Everything is open. Anyone can submit anything, and all the records are put on a public website.
    We’d begin with collecting evidence. Anyone could submit helpful factual evidence. We’d get videotape from CNN of what exactly Gore said. We’d get congressional records about Gore’s funding of the Arpanet. We’d get testimony from people involved. And so on. If someone challenged a piece of evidence’s validity (e.g., “that photo is doctored,” “that testimony is forged”), a Mini-Process could be started to resolve the issue.
    Then there’d be the argument phase. A wiki page would be created where each side would try to take facts from the evidence and use them to build an argument for their case. But then the other side could modify the page to provide their own evidence, expand selective quotations, and otherwise modify the page to make it more accurate and less partisan. Each side would continue bashing the other side’s work until the page gave the best arguments from each side, presented in such a way that nobody could object. (You may think that this is impossible, but Wikipedia has ably proven that it can work.)
    Finally, there’d be the adjudication phase. This is the hard part. A group of twelve fair-minded intelligent people (experts in the field, if necessary) would agree to put aside their partisanship and come to a conclusion based on the argument. Hopefully, most of the time this conclusion would be (after a little wiki-rewriting from both sides) unanimous. For example, “While Gore’s phrasing was a little misleading, it is clear Gore was claiming to have led the fight for providing funding for research that was later developed into the Internet—a claim that is mostly true. Gore was one of the research’s major backers, although others were involved.”
    The panel would be assembled by selecting people widely seen as fair-minded and intelligent, but coming from different sides of the