The plight of Wikipedia growing from small community to larger digital metropolis is something both Joseph Reagle in his Ph.D. work on Wikipedia and Steven Johnson in Emergence note as being similar to problems of urban planning. There is no better historical example than that explored in Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her critique of the modernist planning policies of the 1950s and 1960s, an era when New York City developer Robert Moses was razing entire swaths of neighborhoods for planned housing projects and communities. Jacobs argued for preserving her small neighborhood on Hudson Street and resisting massive urban renewal, because the intimate sidewalks served an important social function. She argued that sidewalks provided three important things: safety, contact, and the assimilation of children in the community. In the summary of Jacobs’s vision of the sidewalk, there are parallels to wikis and how to build community:
Street safety is promoted by pavements clearly marking a public/private separation, and by spontaneous protection with the eyes of both pedestrians and those watching the continual flow of pedestrians from buildings. To make this eye protection effective at enhancing safety, there should be "an unconscious assumption of general street support" when necessary, or an element of "trust." As the main contact venue, pavements contribute to building trust among neighbors over time. Moreover, self-appointed public characters such as storekeepers enhance the social structure of sidewalk life by learning the news at retail and spreading it. Jacobs argues that such trust cannot be built in artificial public places such as a game room in a housing project. Sidewalk contact and safety, together, thwart segregation and racial discrimination.35
Similarly, a wiki has all its activities happening in the open for inspection, as on Jacobs’s sidewalk. Trust is built by observing the actions of others in the community and discovering people with like or complementary interests. Some Wiki-pedia users take up editing; others emphasize new article creation, or map creation. But each Wikipedian self-identifies for tasks, much like what Jacobs describes as the "self-appointed public characters."
A final function of sidewalks is to provide a non-matriarchy environment for children to play. This is not achieved in the presumably "safe" city parks—an assumption that Jacobs seriously challenges due to the lack of surveillance mechanisms in parks. Successful, functional parks are those under intense use by a diverse set of companies and residents.
It is perhaps an interesting coincidence that the wiki page where new users are encouraged to experiment and "play" safely is called the Sandbox. Johnson perhaps put it most eloquently when he said, "Sidewalks work because they permit local interactions to create global order. . . . The information networks of sidewalk life are fine-grained enough to permit higher-level learning to emerge."
