Openness and transparency are central to the functioning of the Wikipedia project. As a matter of Wikipedia policy, anyone, including an anonymous user, is permitted to directly edit any module on any subject. Wikipedia participants, like free and open source software hackers, are personally motivated to contribute. Participation is voluntary and is the sole condition for membership in the community. Instead of going through a moderation process, contributions become immediately visible on the site, providing immediate satisfaction for participants. Ownership of the work is distributed throughout the community. Contributor names do not appear on entries, although discussion and history layer entries are typically signed with user names.
Contributions are recorded in the history section of a module. They are peer-reviewed and either contribute directly to an iteration of an entry, are modified or are deleted. Reviewers debug edits according to consensus recorded on the discussion layer of each module. Because the discussion layers are the only forum for dialog (a benefit of geographically distributed, asynchronous, networked collaboration on a dedicated platform), discussion is open to all participants and decision–making is transparent.
Transparency is important to the success of Wikipedia because it allows participants to understand the reasoning behind decisions, contributing to trust in the Wikipedia process. It also allows newbies a means to understand informal community protocol and culture, as well as reduce abusive practice. While formal procedures exist to limit members who violate project mores, these measures are rarely necessary. Peer pressure typically regulates behaviour before administrative actions are needed. Participants self–manage and are usually not subjected to organizational authority.
Openness and transparency contribute to the success of the project in additional ways. Schlock and chaos are avoided due to the watchful eyes of the many, exemplifying Linus’ Law, coined and articulated by hacker Eric Raymond as “Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow? (Raymond, 2000). As anyone can edit Wikipedia, vandalism does occur. On the other hand, because anyone can edit Wikipedia, Wikipedia is robust. IBM’s Collaborative User Experience Research Group found that most Wikpedia pages have been vandalized. These researchers also found that most pages were repaired through version rollback using the module histories so quickly that most users would never see the effects (IBM). This phenomenon is called soft security in the free software, open source and wiki communities.
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