Summer 2024 has brought about the release of the W3C's Ethical Web Principles, which were briefly touched by the wiki community. This page reinforces voices from the community and adds context from the wiki way to the conversation.
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When discovering the link to the principles, which Brian shared, Ward looked at the graph of contributors on GitHub 
, which contains a timeline with a graph of activity over time. Looking at it tells us that the document has been in the works for five years.
It was on this page where Jon noted that the author Amy Guy had provided valuable preliminary work with her dissertation on « The Presentation of Self on a Decentralised Web » .
Following the references
Given this information, Ward went on to look at Amy's thesis and after that more carefully revisited the ethical web principles, which made him see her hand in them more strongly.
More reading followed to understand the W3C policy on the note track , which led to discovery of the GitHub issues called for by it. The issue regarding no ownership of the Web links to an article by Nick Jarvis about Why certain things shouldn’t be “owned” , licensed itself under CC BY-ND 4.0. The argument in the article uses Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Marx, Rand and Kant to state that for “things of shared value, while they can be owned in a legal sense, ownership should be more of a role of caretaking”. The article closes with:
> Perhaps our whole definition of private ownership needs a contemporary rethink when it comes to these objects, resources and ideas of inherent common value. We don’t need to abolish private ownership, but we do need to re-establish rights and responsibilities of use within the concept of the “common good”.
One intermediary conclusion at this point was, that there is also some tension in the work on the Federated Wiki that might benefit from a consideration of ethics.
A side-conversation sparked around Criticising the Internet as a Superhighway.
It helped frame the space of ethical enquiry for wiki.
- A founding principle of wiki is: your space is yours and no one else will "push" content into your property. - It lies in a sweet spot at the intersection of JSON, CORS and CC.
There are three things currently tugging at this sweet spot. We are only now trying to articulate the exact nature of these pressures and the ultimate consequences of the adjustments they require. Forgive us if we describe them poorly:
- People need an easier way to get a space they own - People need a way to maintain private conversations - People need a way to enforce process without programming
Work in each of these areas show promise but are probably insufficient in many cases: