Courtesy of Penny Arcade

In my experience on the internet (and let’s be honest, I’ve spent a lot of time on the internet), 90% of people come off as complete idiots.  And I don’t mean just unintelligent, I mean deliberately offensive, unfocused, repulsive, staggeringly stupid people.

Internet communities always start as these fresh, new, clean landscapes.  The occupants are all like-minded individuals who share clear, common interests and are capable of intelligent discussions.  But as the community begins to grow, average people start going to the site and invoking John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.  That is that a normal person, in combination with anonymity and an audience, will turn into a complete and total fuckwad.  As newcomers permeate the community, they begin spewing their toxic crap on everything and the content degenerates exponentially into a series of lolcats posts and flame wars.  As the site rises in popularity, the spammers show up and further block any meaningful comment with porn or political messages.

A prime example of this phenomenon is Youtube.   What was once a great site filled with humorous videos has now degenerated into mostly softcore porn, reposts of previously popular videos, and music videos.  On the page of most viewed videos of all time, only 3-4 are not music videos or reposts.

Digg is also in a state of degeneration.  The site started as a social news service featuring stories related to the technology industry.  Users submitted content and then the most popular stories rose to the front page where they received the most views.  The system works – as long as the community has a like-minded desire to see high quality tech stories reach the front page.  Once Digg started becoming more popular (a process that really took hold when Digg went to version 2.0 and created categories for news of all types, with tech being only one of many), the goal of seeing good articles was replaced with the goal of becoming a popular submitter.  Services surfaced by which a submitter could pay a spammer to create a bunch of dummy accounts to vote up a story and get it on the front page faster.  One user attempted to expose this downfall of quality by posting a series of pictures of crowds on a fake blog and then paying to have the story upvoted.  The story quickly rose to the Top 10 list, and no one could figure out why a bunch of pictures of people standing in crowds doing nothing was so popular.  It wasn’t popular, it was evidence of a broken system.

It seems clear to me that a large group of anonymous submitters are incapable of consistently contributing quality material to a publicly accessible medium.  Even with governing systems in place (Digg stories still rely on approval by users, etc), internet communities eventually degenerate into illegible drivel.

So here is my question:  Why is it that Wikipedia has such high-quality content?  Any person with an internet connection can add, delete, or edit any article on the site.  And yet every page reads like a classy academic encyclopedia.

True, Wikipedia has strict governing rules and a central core of community editors (that have occasionally come under fire for being too strict about the rules), but that doesn’t change the fact that the site is a bunch of anonymous people contributing to a universal audience.  It would seem Wikipedia is the exception to the rule.