“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”

Laws of quality

Two ideas are often invoked, either directly or indirectly, to defend the quality of peer production. The first is "Linus's Law" (Raymond, 1998). This holds that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." (The name is a tribute to Linus Torvalds, who initiated the Linux project). The idea that any problem is ultimately trivial comes from software development where, according to this law, the number of people contributing to a project provides a useful indication of its quality. Hence Linus's Law neatly bridges the gap between the quantitative assessments the Internet facilitates and the qualitative judgments people tend to make.

Raymond (1998) formalizes his aphorism to argue that "given a large enough beta–tester and co–developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone." This justification introduces some important limits to the law. First, it suggests a qualitative threshold for participation. The eyeballs of software beta–testers and co–developers are pre–selected for competence and often separated one from the other by the complexity of the systems they are working on [14]. Development is not a task for ordinary users. The law is further protected by another aspect of software coding: solutions must compile and run. Hence, while Open Source software has relied heavily on peer production and to a lesser extent on peer review, for quality, it relies as heavily though perhaps less obviously, on the chip and the compiler as ultimate arbiters. These two both identify problems with the code and reject inadequate solutions [15]. In the absence of such a stern gatekeeper, we have to ask what in other forms of peer production enforce Linus's Law. What might it mean to "compile" a Project Gutenberg submission? How might a Wikipedia entry be said to run? Or to crash? Finally, we should note that Linus's Law is primarily about debugging. It says little about building [16].

The second implied law of quality comes from Paul Graham who claims that "The method of ensuring quality" in peer production is "Darwinian ... People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored" (Graham, 2005). A surprising inversion of Gresham's Law (that bad money drives out good), this claim deserves to be known as Graham's Law. Like all laws, it is an assertion, not an argument. And like all such laws, it needs to be bounded. Gresham limited his law to money; Moore limited his to microprocessors. Does Graham's Law apply to all peer production? Wikipedia implicitly invokes Graham's Law when it urges readers to trust articles because they are subject to "potentially constant improvement over a period of months or years, by vast numbers of experts and enthusiasts, possibly updated mere minutes before you read it." [17] The Wikipedia entry on Project Gutenberg makes a related argument, "A marked improvement in preserving such text can be seen by comparing earlier texts with newer ones." [18]

Such assertions reflects an optimistic faith that the "truth will conquer." While this optimism has roots in Milton's Areopagitica, it is perhaps a particularly American, democratic belief, enshrined in the First Amendment. Such optimism no doubt makes good political principle, but it does not dictate political process. Freedom of speech is not the same as the freedom to replace other's versions of the truth with your own. The authors of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights may have believed that open debate leads to political truth, they did not believe that the Constitution would improve were it changed at the whim of each citizen's changing view of truth. Consequently, the U.S. Constitution has significant built–in inertia. Committing bug fixes is intentionally a complex process. As this example may suggest, Graham's implication that continuous tinkering only makes things better is highly suspect. It is hard to see why entropy would be indefinitely suspended by peer production. In areas of "cultural production," in particular, progress is not necessarily linear, and neither the latest (nor the earliest version) of a work always the best. As Miles Davis had occasionally to persuade John Coltrane, a good deal of art is the outcome not of ceaseless work, but of knowing when to stop and recognizing when, as Shakespeare put it (anticipating the notion of the "tipping point") "a little more than a little is by much too much."

~ From: Limits of self-organization: Peer production and "laws of quality" by Paul Duguid ~