On Hayek and Wikiworlds

My dad just sent me this Washington Post article on Hayek, Wikis, and the dispersion of information:

In the past year, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," has been cited four times as often as the Encyclopedia Britannica in judicial opinions, and the number is rapidly growing. In just two years, YouTube has become a household word and one of the world's most successful Web sites. Such astounding growth and success demonstrate society's unstoppable movement toward shared production of information, as diverse groups of people in multiple fields pool their knowledge and draw from each other's resources.

Developing one of the most important ideas of the 20th century, Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek attacked socialist planning on the grounds that no planner could possibly obtain the "dispersed bits" of information held by individual members of society. Hayek insisted that the knowledge of individuals, taken as a whole, is far greater than that of any commission or board, however diligent and expert. he magic of the system of prices and of economic markets is that they incorporate a great deal of diffuse knowledge.

Wikipedia's entries are not exactly prices, but they do aggregate the widely dispersed information of countless volunteer writers and editors. In this respect, Wikipedia is merely one of many experiments in aggregating knowledge and creativity, that have been made possible by new technologies.

As the article says, Wikis are a great means of aggregating disperse information. It relies on no central organizing authority and yet produces a wealth of useful information readily accessible to millions of users. Wikipeida is a great example of how, given the right institutional structure, an emergent order can emerge that no one directly planned or anticipated. Of course, Wikipedia imposes some constraints in the form articles take, but no one could guess the extent of resulting conent or exactly what articles would appear beforehand.

The advent of the internet is a a wonderful analogy to the marketplace and how trying to directly control it would be disastorous. Imagine if 20 years ago the internet was regulated and rather than allowing individuals and organizations to create web pages, the government selected who would build webpages and what the function of webpages would be. Not only would there never have been Yahoo, Google, or Amazon, but the web would never have gained the wide use it now enjoys nor would the innovations of YouTube, Wikis, Flash, etc. have ever emerged. The same is true in the general marketplace. The more regulation and government control there is, the less innovation and prosperity will be had.

Here is Wikipedia on Hayek, Wikipedia, and Wikis.

The article also mentions the CIA's Intellipedia based on Wikipedia software. Read Alex Tabarrok's comments on Intellipedia here.