On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft, and everyone who came, for a really great time.

I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was lost too easily. This, despite efforts like the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive (which, incidentally, is kept in a shipping container).

William Gibson spoke recently at BEA. He said this:

“If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.”

Which struck me pretty hard, that bit about atemporality, and the flatness of digital memory, but particularly our lack of awareness of this situation. I talked about the Library of Alexandria, and the Yo La Long Dia, and the National Libraries of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq—all examples of cultural destruction caused in part by neglect and willful disregard for our shared patrimony.

These losses, despite their horror, will always happen: but what can we do to mitigate and understand them? In a world obsessed with “facts”, a more nuanced comprehension of historical process would enable us to better weigh truth, whether it concerns the evidence for going to war, the proliferation of damaging conspiracy theories, the polarisation of debate on climate change, or so many other issues. This sounds utopian, and it is. But I do believe that we’re building systems that allow us to do this better, and one of our responsibilities should be to design and architect those systems to make this explicit, and to educate.

One of the ways to do this might be to talk more not only about history, but about historiography. History not as a set of facts, but as a process, and one in which, whether we agree or not with the writers, our own opinions and biases are always to be challenged

I talked about Wikipedia because for me, Wikipedia is a useful subset of the entire internet, and as such a subset of all human culture. It’s not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot.

As is my wont, I made a book to illustrate this. Physical objects are useful props in debates like this: immediately illustrative, and useful to hang an argument and peoples’ attention on.

This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future.

More photos of the books are, as ever, available on Flickr.

UPDATE: You can listen to the whole talk, and me saying “um” a lot, over at Huffduffer. The slides are also available.

NOTE: Yes, the books are out of order in the photos. Kindly do not draw inferences from this. It’s just a photograph. Seriously.

Firstly, it became clear to the steering committee that they had to relinquish all control of the project to the community in order for the community to flourish. There can be no half-measures in crowd-sourcing: you either let people do exactly what they want, or they won’t do it. This was demanded by the users, and the original editorial board had no choice to go along with it. In the end, they realised that this did energise the project.

However, freeing up the community also meant that the final book was not acceptable on delivery: “To yield an acceptable business book, it would be necessary to hire an accomplished professional author who would also handle the fact checking process.” This is not that unexpected, but it is a problem – particularly if that editor has to negotiate edits with X hundred authors…

There are some other insights as well – not least that the originally intended participants, tenured professors at Wharton and MIT, refused to participate, and that this didn’t make any difference in the long run – that make the Gilbane report worth reading in full. But it’s interesting to compare too with the Million Penguins project, as the final reports on that make pretty much the same observation: the journey was more interesting than the destination. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a business book or a novel; for the participants, the act of creation is more important than the end result.

Is this, then, the central quality of the wikibook? Crowdwriting – or many-to-many publishing, as Gilbane puts it – is inherently selfish. It’s not in the individual author’s best interest to make their shard integrate well with others – in fact, the opposite may be true. Altruism exists, but it’s balanced with self-promotion, of one kind or another. But perhaps we should pick apart that phrase, ‘many-to-many publishing’ – something there resists the urge to put an end to the endeavour. Like Wikipedia, is a wikibook – by its very nature – permanently unfinished? One of the core perceived attributes of book 1.0 is that it represents the “one true version” – yet many of our most culturally important books – think of the Bible, or the works of Shakespeare – exist in multiple versions.

Perhaps, if we are to understand the wikibook, we need to place it in the context of mythical texts, like the Bible and other religious and historical works. They share the same core attributes: multiple authors, disputed authorship, multiple versions, endless potential versions, authors and versions distributed across time and space and filterable by the reader/editor’s prejudices. The only thing we can do is add metadata to aid historians, tracking changes and creating concordances.

With the need for a “one true version” removed, we promote the reader to editor, and the relationship graph becomes truly many-to-many, instead of passing through the editorial bottleneck. Combine this with innovative licensing which allows for-profit publication of remixed text (CC3.0 now available), and you have the seeds of a new literary culture…

And so it ends. But what a work of genius.

I can’t help but hear a rueful quality in the words of Penguin’s Chief Executive: ‘not the most read, but possibly the most written novel in history’. Basically, that’s a publisher’s worst nightmare.

Nevertheless, it’s impressive that Penguin have stuck to it, and not thrown their hands in the air when the going got sticky – then again, they haven’t been showered with goatse images either. Instead, they’ve instigated a number of techniques, such as locking the wiki for a few hours each day to catch their breath, without interrupting the flow of the project. Preliminary results suggest that the open wiki as it stands is not the best vehicle for such an endeavour, but there’s no reason it wouldn’t work for smaller-scale projects – as indeed, projects like We>Me seems to suggest. The collaborative novel is off to a rocky start, but it’s not over yet.

This morning, Penguin announced the launch of A Million Penguins, a wikinovel project in association with De Montfort University.

Students from De Montfort’s MA in creative writing form the basis of the projected community of writers, which will edit and expand upon the short first chapter provided over a period of six weeks. (I think six weeks – the timescale is a little unclear. Rather sweetly, they’ve left lots of setup notes on their blog, such as the inspiration gained from this Lost fan wiki.) The students will also form the core moderators of the project, which should help prevent edit wars.

The project is another brainchild of Penguin’s Digital Publisher Jeremy Ettinghausen, who’s also behind Penguin’s extensive Second Life presence and other forward-thinking projects. Viking editor Jon (no surname given) will be guiding the project, acting as a regular editor, giving ideas on direction and revision. Knowing what editing one author’s work is like, I don’t envy the job of doing the same for a potentially massive authorbase (we need some new mass nouns here). He’s certainly open-minded about the end product, as long as it doesn’t turn out to be a “robotic – zombie – assassins – against – African – ninjas – in – space – narrated – by – a – Papal – Tiara type of thing”. Shame.

The Guardian obviously obviously got the wrong end of the stick as it reports that “Ettinghausen is emphatic that the experiment has not been set up by Penguin as an online literary Pop Idol,” and Editor John also stresses that “the wikinovel experiment is not a place to prove to Penguin we should publish your book.” This is clearly more in the spirit of the networked book (or, dare we say it, Booktwo’s own, terminally alpha projects), and it seems unlikely that Penguin will get a novel out of it that they would consider publishing in the mass market – “To be honest, we don’t know exactly what is going to happen or how this will turn out”- all the more kudos to them for trying it, then.

I’ll be keeping a regular eye on the project, and trying to make sense of it as it evolves. I’m still looking forward to the network novel that won’t play merely with authorship but with structure too; that explores the potential of technology to change not just how novels are written, but how they are read. In the end, the product of A Million Penguins is unlikely to look very different to a regular novel – but it’s a great place to start.

“Since the beginning of publishing, books have been written by individuals or by small groups of people (experts). This has even applied to recent books that describe the power of community intelligence. We Are Smarter Than Me will test this paradox, and determine whether a community of authors can write a compelling book better than individual experts.” – WeMe FAQ

WeMe neatly sidesteps the issue of author royalties by proposing a system in which all the authors, including those cut from the final edition, will be given an equal vote on the distribution of book royalties to charity, with the sweetener that “All contributors will be listed, in print, as authors. You’ll be able to take a copy of the book and show it to your friends, colleagues and family.” How lovely.

Such an approach would not be thought to encourage contributions according to the traditional publishing model, but WeMe is inspired first and foremost by Wikipedia, an enterprise which proves that people are far more willing to share information for the greater good than history, and copyright law, has supposed. They also cite Google as an inspiration – an organisation which has not been shy in making clear its legal ownership of all content stored on its servers, despite its “Don’t Be Evil” motto. But then Web 2.0, even more than 1.0, is all about trust.

The WeMe model is the next iteration of that explored by The Institute for the Future of the Book in their collaboration with author McKenzie Wark, GAM3R 7H30RY, a website that will one day be a book – once a community of readers have given their two cents on the posted draft. This is the dream of most publishers: full audience feedback before the book hits the market (and you can bet every one of those who comment will be buying the book, an attempt to formulate a critical theory of computer games, once it hits the shelves).