Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [27]
When this pattern of conscious, relentless modularity isn’t used, open source collaboration doesn’t scale. There have, for example, been many failed attempts to use wikis and an open source approach to write a good quality novel. One high-profile attempt was the Million Penguins project, run by the book publisher Penguin in February and March of 2007. The idea was to recruit writers to produce a collaborative novel using wiki software. Judged by the number of people who contributed (1,500), the project was a success. But those people never managed to work effectively together, and as a work of literature the result was a failure. Early on in the project, one of the coordinators, Jon Elek, wrote, “I’ll be happy so long as it manages to avoid becoming some sort of robotic-zombie-assassins-against-African-ninjas-in-space-narrated-by-a-Papal-Tiara.” The actual novel was far stranger. Here’s a short sample to give you the flavor:
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day . . . a swim, perhaps, but not a walk—for Artie was a whale, a humpback whale, to be precise, at least in these moments. It was a sunny day, and Artie would have worn his sunglasses, but being a whale meant he didn’t have ears, which made it difficult for his sunglasses to stay on. No matter, he thought, at least he was young and strong.
It’s easy to see why Penguin carried out this experiment. Wikis have been successfully used to produce not just an encyclopedia, but also many other reference works, from the fabulous Muppet Wiki (muppet.wikia.com) to the US Intelligence Community’s Intellipedia (no publicly accessible URL for that one, sorry!). Superficially, a novel looks quite similar to an encyclopedia or other reference work. But the degree of modularity sufficient to produce an encyclopedia is not sufficient to write a first-rate novel, because it leaves some essential tasks unperformed. Every sentence in a novel has a potential relationship to every other sentence, a potential relationship to each story arc within the novel, and a relationship to the overall story arc. A good author is aware of all these relationships, and uses them to achieve resonance and reinforcement between different parts of the story, and to avoid dissonance and incoherence. To write a good novel, one of the tasks always before you is to compare the sentence you’re writing right now to all these other parts of the novel, thinking about whether it enhances or detracts from the whole of the novel. For collaborative writing to succeed, someone must keep track of all these possible relationships. Yet wikis don’t provide any natural way of breaking down the problem of keeping track of these relationships. So while wikis may work well for short, independent articles such as appear in a reference work, they don’t work as a collaborative medium for longer pieces of writing. Still, collaborative technology is in its early days. My bet is that one day soon a technology for online collaboration will be developed, probably not too dissimilar from a wiki, but making it easy to keep track of relationships between different parts of a novel. That will be a big step toward the first good novel written by an open source collaboration. (Of course, managing these relationships is only part of the challenge; in the next chapter we’ll meet more difficulties.)
We’ve seen how Wikipedia and similar reference wikis use a carefully chosen page structure to modularize. Another approach to modularity is illustrated by the way work on the Firefox web browser is organized. If you’re not familiar with Firefox, it’s a popular alternative to the Internet Explorer web browser. Like Linux, Firefox is an open source project. But the Firefox developers organize their work using a different approach from that of both Linux and Wikipedia. In particular, they organize much of