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The following conversation with Umberto Eco happened April 24th 2010, in Milan. 
Professor Eco welcomed the researcher for an interview on collaboration, Internet and Wikipedia, 
under the project \texttt{Wiki@Home}, powered by \texttt{Wikimedia Italy}. 
The Italian transcript of the interview is available online at the URL \url{http://it.wikinews.org/wiki/Intervista_a_Umberto_Eco},
while the English translation will be available at the URL \url{http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Interview_with_Italian_professor_and_writer_Umberto_Eco}.
The interview is released with a the Creative Commons license \texttt{CC-BY-SA 3.0}\footnote{This license allows you to share, remix and use for any purpose the transcription, 
under the condition of attribute the work to the author and distribute you eventual derivative work with the same license. More information at \url{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/}.}.

The researcher wants to thanks again professor Eco for his availability and kindness.  

\section{Interview}
\textbf{R.}: \textit{Thank you very much for the opportunity you gave us. Our community really wanted to interview you, especially since you are one of the very few important exponents of Italian cultural world who approached Wikipedia without bias, describing and criticizing, but nevertheless using it. You wrote several articles about it, the latest in 2009 if I remember well. Could try to re-explain your views about Wikipedia?}

\textbf{Eco}: I am a compulsive user of Wikipedia, also for \textit{arthritic} reasons: the more my back hurts, the more it costs me to get up and go to check the Treccani, so if I may find someone's birthday on Wikipedia it's all the better.

I am a car user and I could not live without it, but this does not prevent me from stating all the defects and the troubles of cars.

I once made a distinction between things good for the \textit{poor} and things good for the \textit{rich}, where rich and poor have no immediate connotation in terms of money, but in terms, say, of cultural evolution{\dots} A graduate is a rich, an illiterate is poor. There can obviously be a big entrepreneur who is poor and a little clerk who is rich.

Television thus is good for the poor and bad for the rich: it taught the poor to speak Italian, it is good for old women who sit alone in the house. And it harms the rich because it prevents him to go out and see things more beautiful at the cinema, it narrows his ideas.

The computer in general, and the Internet in particular, is good for the rich and bad for the poor. That is, Wikipedia is good for me, because I an able to find the information I need, I do not trust it, because everyone knows that as Wikipedia grows, \textit{the errors also grow}. I found steep follies written about me, and if no-one pointed me at them, they would stay there still.

The rich are grown people, they can compare the information. I look at Wikipedia in Italian, I'm not sure that the news is correct, then I go to check the English version, then yet another source, and if all three tell me that this gentleman died in 371 AD I begin to believe it.

The poor picks the first data that he gets, and that's all folks.
So Wikipedia, as the whole Internet, has the problem of \textit{filtering the news.} 
It keeps both false and real news; but the rich knows filtering techniques at least for the areas they know how to check. 
If I have to do a search on Plato, I have no problem in pointing immediately out the sites written by madmen, but if I make a research on stem cells it's not 
certain that I can identify the wrong sites.

So there's this huge problem of filtering. Collective filtering is useless, since it could yield to fluctuations. 
I noticed that in a certain period of Berlusconi's triumph people went looking for information about me on the right-winged books and placed them in Wikipedia: 
as correctness prevents me from changing them directly, I left them on. But obviously it was an entry made by the winners of the moment.

The collective control is therefore useful up to a certain point: it is conceivable that if one gives a false length of the equator, sooner or later someone comes 
and corrects it, but correction of more subtle and difficult issues is more complicated.

And it seems to me that the internal control is minimal, that is, it cannot control the millions of news flowing in. At most, it can check if a madman wrote that 
Napoleon is a racehorse, but there's not too much it can do.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{There is a particular filter. The community organizes itself in groups of people who spontaneously look at the list of 
\texttt{Recent Changes} and try to pay attention to serious errors, vandalisms, people who delete paragraphs, etc. 
There are various quantitative software tools that help.}

\textbf{Eco}: There's assistance in case of insults, right. But those are the big things.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{You are right, they are the easiest ones. Dealing with subtler things is much more complicated. 
Some research supports the finding that the more there is a community of people (a group of people) interested in a topic, the better. 
Indeed, such people save pages in a personal favorite list (\texttt{watchlist}, as they are called in Wikipedia jargon). 
For example, if I have your page in my watchlist I got a report when someone changes it, and I can check what happened: through a \texttt{diff} mechanism, 
a sort of collation, I see what has changed and I can see if it is correct or not.}

\textit{The principle of Wikipedia, in a certain sense, is that most people there are, the more they are interested, the better the work is done. 
This is a bit of a paradox. There has been some research on it, the last I remember was in February 2007, from HP Labs in Palo Alto. 
It was purely quantitative and statistical, based on the English Wikipedia; it found out that the pages with more changes are on average those with the highest quality. 
The more people there are, the better it is. Then there's the actual problem of the long tail. There are so many pages just fairly important or problematic or debatable. 
The page about you, for example, may fall into this set of pages, and besides it's a biography. Biographies of living are the most problematic, because of 
recentism (adding useless tidbits which happened just now), identification of the sources, etc. 
All biographies are generally a problem, although in the case of historical figures there is more agreement. 
I find it interesting to look at the pages which in theory should be the most problematic, with issues such as creationism, intelligent design. 
In the English language Wikipedia they are abysmally log, because people often quarrel not just over whole paragraphs, but over individual words, 
or the starting sentence. It's better to have more eyes, like the \textquotedblleft wisdom of crowds\textquotedblright theory by Surowiecki, that says 
that when there are 4 parameters} (independence, diversity of opinion, aggregation, decentralization), \textit{on average, judging by a crowd is better than 
that of the experts.}

\textbf{Eco}: I don't quite agree with this. I am a disciple of Peirce, who argues that scientific truths are, ultimately, approved by the community. 
The slow work of the community, through revisions and errors, as he put it in the nineteenth century, carries out \textquotedblleft the torch of truth\textquotedblright. 
The problem is the definition of truth.

If I were forced to replace \textquotedblleft truth\textquotedblright with \textquotedblleft crowd\textquotedblright, I would not agree. 
If you make a statistical analysis of the 6 billion inhabitants of the globe, the majority believes that the Sun revolves around the Earth, there's nothing to do. 
The crowd would be prepared to justify the wrong answer. This also happens in a democracy: we are noticing it these days, the crowd votes for Bossi. 
To carry on his coup d'état, Napoleon III broadened out the electorate and included the peasants, because the crowd of the countryside was more reactionary than crowd 
of the cities.

We must therefore find another criterion, which I think is the \textit{motivated crowds}. People who work on Wikipedia are not just an aristocracy, just professors, 
but they are not the indiscriminate crowd either: they are the part of the crowd who feels motivated to work with Wikipedia. 
Here it is: I'd replace the theory of \textquotedblleft wisdom of crowds\textquotedblright with the theory of the \textquotedblleft wisdom of the motivated crowds.\textquotedblright 
The general crowd says that we should not pay taxes, the motivated crowd says that it's fair to pay them. 
In fact, it is not a digger or an illiterate who contributes on Wikipedia, but someone who already belongs to a cultural crowd for the very fact of using a computer.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{I found very interesting the sentence you quoted from Peirce, which you used also in an article\footnote{\url{http://espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio/ho-sposato-wikipedia/2108845/18}} 
from the newspaper \textquotedblleft Unità\textquotedblright.
You said you should switch the word \textquotedblleft truth\textquotedblright with \textquotedblleft crowd\textquotedblright; 
I'd rather think about definition of \textquotedblleft community\textquotedblright. Who's the \textquotedblleft community\textquotedblright?}

\textbf{Eco}: Peirce was thinking at the scientific community, of course; especially at his time, it was definetely separated from the common crowd. 

\textbf{R.}: \textit{I think that in a world like ours it's more difficult to discriminate between \textquotedblleft real\textquotedblright experts: 
often a degree does not make a real expert from an expert. Maybe there are some hardcore fans who have more expertise on a topic than the alleged experts. 
There has been on Wikipedia, at least at its beginning, a shift of the meaning of} authoritative\textit{, from }mighty\textit{ to }influential. 
\textit{Wikipedia community is much \textquotedblleft flatter\textquotedblright compared with the academic or scientific hierarchy, 
there is no hierarchical authority like we are used to. What \textquotedblleft you\textquotedblright say at one time in a given context, and everything you said before, 
vouches for \textquotedblleft your\textquotedblright authority. Many times people listen to the content of a message, without looking at the sender. 
In such a sense, this can lead to a different mechanism that carries on the torch of truth. A mechanism where we look at the information, at the message, not at those 
who sent it. Even in science and the scientific community there are fashions, forcing (think at our barons): in fact, we study the sociology of science. 
In this sense, Wikipedia perhaps led, or perhaps gave some glimmer of something new. I do not know if you agree with this.} 

\textbf{Eco}: Wikipedia has two unrelated functions in my opinion. The first one is to allow fast search of information, and it is just the multiplication 
of \textit{Garzantine} [a popular Italian series of compact encyclopediae], period. 
The other, and this is what we are talking about now, 
is whether the control from below can be many times more successful than the control from above. 
Since the world is full of expert idiots, certainly it can be.

Just an example: some days ago I was correcting an essay about Benedetto Croce. Croce, building on its authority, spread false ideas for 50 years in Italy, and 
everyone in Italy have accepted them, without considering that he knew nothing about art. 
He was the aesthetics master for two or three generations without having understood anything about art. So you see, sometimes the authority{\dots} Responses of artists, children, students would have been really more useful.
This control by the mass can, produce a development in the long run, as Peirce said.

But I keep saying that I am increasingly exposed to the risk of my inability to filter the news. 
Lately I started writing down some false information, some errors that one can find in Wikipedia. 
In the same article, for example, there were two contradictory reports, a sign that there had been an amalgam.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{So you don't edit the pages of Wikipedia?}

\textbf{Eco}: Not in that case. 
I don't edit pages, except for the page about me when I found it written that I married the daughter of my publisher, since \textit{as a matter of fact} I didn't. 
Poor soul, she ran such a risk!\textit{[laughs, N.d.R]} Another time I was indicated as the eldest of 13 brothers.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{That was your father, right?}

\textbf{Eco}: Yes. If the error is of another person, I don't see why I should waste my time to correct it. I am not the Red Cross. \textit{[laughs, N.d.R]}

Thus, I actually noticed that there was a contradiction, within the same article. The problem is that I'm good, I can notice the error, because that's my job; another person, less competent, could read just half of it and take the first version.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{I just wanted to understand if you did not edit and correct errors for a matter of time, or if there was another reason. Maybe you did not want to be recognized\dots}

\textbf{Eco}: Of course, it's a matter of time. When I write, I go on Wikipedia 30-40 times a day, because it is really helpful.
When I write, I don't remember if someone was born in the VI century or the VII; or maybe how many \textit{n} are in \textquotedblleft Goldmann\textquotedblright \dots
Just few years ago, for this kind of things you could wast do much time.
Nowadays, with Wikipedia and Babylon, which checks the spelling, you can save it a lot.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{According to you, how much is the wiki model \textquotedblleft exportable\textquotedblright? Here the term} wiki \textit{is indicating a strong collaboration, 
in which there is collaborative editing. That means having a text that is collectively edited.
Furthermore, this is implies often the text itself to be free, meaning released with a free license.
This mechanism obviously is related to several issues: the issue of the filter, the issue of bottom up vs top-down process, as well as the issue of having a community 
of peers with different values and motivations than a scholar community.}

\textit{The wiki world developed different projects: for example, Wikiquote, a free quote compendium (many are yours), or Wikisource, a wiki digital library.}

\textit{In your opinion, this experience is exportable to other writing mechanisms not aimed to collective knowledge production, as Wikipedia is?
Wikipedia, in fact, was born as an encyclopaedia developed within a wiki, a specific software, and has been a great success, against all odds. 
They tried several times to build similar projects: the Los Angeles Times, once, tried to aggregate} collective editorials\textit{, it was a failure. Thus, it seems that some projects can be collaboratively developed, meanwhile some others don't.} 

\textbf{Eco}: You are now talking about collective collaboration. Well, there are few things tha Internet provides: the first are mere data, as the train schedule that no one can correct.
The other, are encyclopaedic information, that can always be corrected, because the author could be wrong or simply haven't said all yet. 
The third, are texts: should I edit other's texts?
Moreover, there is the whole universe of blogs and Facebook; but it doesn't matter right now, they are people talking to each other, conversate.

In these very days I had to debate on Ipazia: I looked for some information on Internet, and I found interesting and less interesting texts. But they are texts.
Internet provides us classical and contemporary texts, but if they are wrong or I do not agree with them I surely don't edit them.
I cannot say \textquotedblleft Your opinion on Aristotle is wrong\textquotedblright.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Sure. So I correct myself: someone's interpretation is his own, nad it has a value in its own.}

\textbf{Eco}: More, it is signed. In fact I found many interesting documents that are not signed, I never understood why.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{I had this idea, regarding texts. It is what in the scholar environment are called }collaboratory digital library\textit{, namely digital libraries for philologists, Italian and Middle age studies scholars\dots}

\textbf{Eco}: Do you mean bibliographies?

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Not necessarily. For example, I was thinking at the} Perseus Project\footnote{\url{http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/}}\textit{, a Tufts University project. 
The scholar community is provided with tools to work on ancient Greek texts, as linguistic analysis tools, collations, statistical analysis. 
A project where people collaborate together for a critic edition\dots}

\textbf{Eco}: I stumbled upon some of them. Actually regarding Ipazia, I found a project where different scholars collaborate to translate a text from Xth century.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{What is your opinion about scholar collaboration in humanities?}

\textbf{Eco}: This is another topic yet. Congresses were made by ecdotic scholars to investigate this topic. These are truly auto-controlled communities.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Communities of practice.}

\textbf{Eco}: Yes, but where we know that a single scholar belongs to a single university, we know where he comes from. In this case,
it happens something similar to when people used to collaborate in writing a book, and they needed to take the train once a week to meet and discuss.
It is a collaborative team work that is controlled by someone. It is not the wisdom of the crowds.
It is simply the scaling and the semplification of a collective research work that once required filthy travels and nowadays it can be done online daily\dots 
I'd rather call them uncontrollable and controlled communities.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{It is very interesting when these controlled communities (which are granted and comes from determined institutions) do not have a hierarchy or 
a chief, but they auto-control themselves.
For examples, I was thinking at a project for the Italian studies community, which could be granted from institutions and still let the community free to auto-control itself.
In your opinion, is this auto-organization possible also in these scholar communities?}

\textbf{Eco}: I recall a conference in Bologna, about ecdotic studies, that was dedicated mainly to digital humanities projects and text research environments and 
functionalities.
Evidently, this was an headless community, auto-controlled and headless. But \textquotedblleft headless\textquotedblright is a phrase:
because in scientific communities which self-legitimate there's always someone who gains more authority: if an important philologist propose an interpretation, 
the others will follow.

Therefore [online collaboration within scholar projects] it is not the same thing of Wikipedia.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{So you make it a question of }limits\textit{, that communities more organized and communities less organized exist. 
The difference of a wikipedian community is to have both univeristy professors and teenagers inside.}

\textbf{Eco}: Let's take as example the magazine \textit{Nature}. In the scientific world, if a paper appeares on \textit{Nature} - where a \textit{peer review} 
has been carried out and there's a wide control - it's taken seriously. 
It's anyway possible that \textit{Nature} can make a mistake and reject a brilliant paper: nonetheless \textit{Nature} is considered a center of reliability, 
with fringed boundaries.
Because an error, or a small academic revenge, can always happen\dots

Now take me as example: with my age and my body overweight I entered the high-glycaemia phase of a type II diabetes. 
Once, the limit for defining glycaemia \textquotedblleft high\textquotedblright was 140, today it's 110: we all know that this new limit has been set by the 
pharmaceutical companies for selling their products. So, 140 is risky, maybe 110 is too low, one can get along  with, say, 120. 
Maybe in a decade the limit will be adjusted to 120, or they'll decide that 110 is good in terms of preventive medicine.  \textit{[he laughs]}
We realized that the swine flu was partly rubbish, spiced up the vaccine manufacturers. 
We realized it late, billions have been spent, we realized that much less people than expected died, that they maybe overstated it.

In a way or another things fall into place: these are the controlled communities, not anarchical, but  with a fringed authority.
That  have nothing to do with Wikipedia, where the anarchy is bigger.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{This difference of fringes, limits and, in a sense, also of scale is very interesting. 
In a type of community the collaboration is truly anarchical, in the other there's an adjustment\dots}

\textbf{Eco}: There is an adjustment. Galileo, Tycho Brahe and Keplero at the end agreed that Keplero was right. 
The infinitesimal calculus has been discovered both by Newton and Leibniz but at the end everybody agreed for Leibniz. \textit{[he laughs]}

They might have been the wrong choices, but they've been made that way.

There wasn't any authority, the emperor, who decided it. It's been a collection of habits and applications.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{In your opinion there is difference between} hard \textit{and} soft \textit{sciences in approach towards collaboration?}

\textbf{Eco}: Right now, yes, We all know this. In hard sciences there is measurability of data that is absent in soft sciences, unless soft sciences are a parody of hard sciences, as in analytic philosophy. 

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Talking about the collaboration, before, you said \textquotedblleft this is fabulously interesting, but not surprising.\textquotedblright}

\textbf{Eco}: Sure. The Accademia del Cimento began first! And without the Internet.  \textit{[he laughs]}

\textbf{R.}: \textit{But now the scale is different.}

\textbf{Eco}: First there  was a few of them in Florence, then a few more at the Royal Society; now it's a crowd.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{A crowd that can collaborate with Thai people, with American people, in a synchronous or asynchronous way, in an} ubiquitous \textit{place like the internet. 
The possiblities are different.
Back to the previous point, in Wikipedia also we can notice a cultural difference between the articles about technology, science, maths, physiscs and the articles about humanistic topics. Humanistic articles are much less (phylosophy, hystory, literature).
This in Wikipedia. Within the academic communities, in a similar way, there's a different impulse to the collaboration. In the \textquotedblleft soft\textquotedblright sciences, the \textit{authorship}, the authoritativeness and even the interpretation, matter more.}

\textbf{Eco}: For what are soft sciences, there is absolutely less impulse to collaboration.
There is much more interest to be the main character of an idea, than being just a \textquotedblleft water carrier\textquotedblright.

That's for sure. A scientist in these cases is used to not being mentioned and to know that however is carrying forward a fundamental research.
In soft sciences, this happens only to the exploited student who is sent to gather data that the professor will sign and profit by.

That's an old story, there's no escape from that\dots

\textbf{R.}: \textit{It would be important to understand it this is a \textquotedblleft natural\textquotedblright or cultural consequence. Could this Humanities approach really change?}

\textbf{Eco}: I don't believe so. Think about ancient Greece. Plato and Aristotle, being one the other's disciple, developed two opposite philosophies. On the other hand, Euclid came and it is still discussed, his fifth postulate survived for two thousand years.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Thus it's a natural issue. Right?}

\textbf{Eco}: Science is \textit{cumulative-destructive}, it stores what it needs and throw away what it doesn't require.
Humanities are totally cumulative, they don't throw away anything: in fact, there is always a return to the past.

On the other hand, they are totally destructive in the way, as Maritain stated regarding to Descartes,  \textquotedblleft a philosopher is a novice in the Absolute\textquotedblright.
For Descartes, everything that philosophy stated before him was false. If a mathematician did that, it would be the end of mathematics.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Back to the theme of the \textquotedblleft strongly collaborative\textquotedblright projects, where there's a \textit{collaborative editing}, what do you think of the authorship, of recognizing the intellectual property?}
\textit{In volunteer-based projects like Wikipedia, the problem matters less, but given that the scientific world is moving toward a more and more intense collaboration (and the humanistic world as well, although more slowly) we have to face the fundamental question of the }copyright\textit{.  }
\textit{In Wikipedia it's been solved by adopting free licenses, and the culture of the nicknames -- or no names -- helps; in the academic and scientific world the culture of the name, related to important things such as a personal career, leads us to a complex problem of recognition of the intellectual property. }

\textbf{Eco}: This is certainly coming out, also in the world of books; I think that in 50 years we'll have a very deep mutation. We'll probably have a cultural situation similar to the one in the Middle Ages, where comments and comments were produced, and the authoriality was lost. Then, from the Romanticism on, the authoriality became excessive.
But I cannot say up to which point we can reach a total anonymity. Although it can look democratic, the total anonymity gives the idea that just one and only thruth exists. Can we have a moment in a future where Wikipedia itself, on certain articles (not the one about the pitagoric table, of course), can open sections called \textquotedblleft Conflicts\textquotedblright  where -- signed -- can appear different thesis in opposition?
In spite of the always present denying madman, we're certain that Napoleon died in Saint Helens. That Pius XII did the right thing during the Holocaust, it's an open debate. What does Wikipedia do? It says that Pius XII did not enough (irritating millions of catholics)? It says he did (irritating millions of non-believers)? Or does it open an appendix in which a series of authors, each assuming responsibility for their words, expose in twenty rows the conflict of interpretation?

\textbf{R.}: \textit{(Unfortunately without the internet we cannot check the article about Pius XII  and the Holocaust), Wikipedia, that is following the principle of the }neutral point of view\textit{, which is not the truth, but an unbiased point of view that can always be perfectioned, usually publishes a version of an article that includes the critics to that version. Following a principle of }synthesis\textit{ there are -- unsigned -- sections that might embody what you just said. As example, the page about Silvio Berlusconi is problematic.} 

\textbf{Eco}: I never went to see it.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{It's almost always semi-protected, being it often theathre of quarrels. Anyway, we try to report both the positions. Of course there's an hierarachy: there's always a dominant postition, introduced first, but followed by  the second one. An example coming to my mind is the article about Beppe Grillo, where there's his  biography and then a section of critics, with the sources duly cited.}
\textit{The aim, then, is to report and synthetize on a page (or more, should it grow too much) what other people said. Wikipedia integrates, it's a being that feeds from the outside, because it's a }teritiary source\textit{, not a }primary source\textit{, and this is often forgotten. I don't know whether a traditional encyclopaedia defines itself as primary or tertiary. For Wikipedia  the sources are somewhere else, we just take from them. We cite them; if they say wrong things, we just cited them. There's always bias in the choice of what to cite, where to cite and how to cite but, at the end, Wikipedia tries to report -- with all its limits -- the reality as faceted by the other sources. The problem of the hierarchy of the page is still present, and the fact that \textquotedblleft there are no fact, but only interpretations". In this sens there's a very evident and aware temporariness. }

\textbf{Eco}: Of course, everything can change  tomorrow.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Wikipedia guidelines say that \textquotedblleft }A final version does not exist\textit{". An article is always amendable. Culturally, maybe a Treccani doesn't see its work this way.}

\textbf{Eco}: No, because Treccani has very signed articles. The article \textquotedblleft Fascismo", written by Gentile, cannot be modified; either you delete it and substitute it, or you leave it like it is.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Article that, besides, was affected by its context: today, after seventy years, we'd say that the Treccani  was }biased\textit{.}

\textbf{Eco}: Yes, that's why it remains and is not modifiable, because that is the article and is not reprinted. They create an appendix, of course. The destiny  of the Treccani is to \textit{wikipedize} itself.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Do you think they'll do it?}

\textbf{Eco}: With the current speend of renewal of the culture, if an encyclopedia doesn't go online for being updated month by month, is doomed forever. Even when it talks about Parmenides, because even tomorrow a book casting a new light on him can be published{\dots} but never mind of Parmenides. Take \textquotedblleft Aeroplane", as example: who knows what the article about the \textquotedblleft Concorde\textquotedblright said before the Concorde crashed.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Besides, Treccani tried to \textquotedblleft wikipedize\textquotedblright itself. They opened some articles, asking the users to send some edits in{\dots}}

\textbf{Eco}: It's a propostal for the \textit{Dizionario degli Italiani} \textit{[a collection  of biographies]}, but it's being withdrawn. Since writing articles is too expensive, they asked the readers to \textquotedblleft donate\textquotedblright some, not considering that revising those donations takes such a group of \textit{editors} that the costs are higher than simply paying for the articles.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{It doesn't look easy at all to find a solution to join a traditional model (authors, publishers, redations) with something  as }anarchical\textit{ as Wikipedia. One survives because takes it all: it always has an input from the users, because it picks everything up. And it's free, for everybody: for those who make it and for those who read it. The other has a traditional model that cannot quantitatively stand the comparison and is hardly looking for an equilibrium, taking external contributions (without motivation, taking them and giving back absolutely nothing). Wikipedia is all for free, it's a mutual donation, there's a strong ethic thrust. The clash between these two worlds is not at all a banal question. }

\textit{Changing topic, I found it interesting that the process of the \textquotedblleft classification\textquotedblright did not have a big success in the collaborative environments. Except for the folksonomies, with people tagging sites and photos, on Wikipedia as well the categorization of the topics is definitely incoherent and incomplete. It's noteworthy that a process as important as the classification/categorization tends to be }authorial\textit{, personal. In the internet I find few examples of complex categorizations done with a collaborative approach.}

\textbf{Eco}: I'm not sure I understood well what you said, but if I did, all of this depend on the fact that -- apart of botanic and zoologic taxonomies -- a \textit{global} classification does not exist, but only a \textit{local} does. In my last book \textquotedblleft From the tree to the labyrinth", I wrote a 100-pages essay exactly about the history of the classification, from Porphirius' tree to what we today dumbly call \textquotedblleft ontologies".

The problem here is that centuries have been spent in trying to make a total classification, but it's impossible, it's always local and in perspective. Consequently, it can be authorial and not collective. It's a goal attainable in certain fields only, as example animals and trees, as they are universes somehow finite. And it leaves anyway big  problems in the classification of the insects. And there's the famous example of the ornithorhynchus, for which it took them eighty years, but they found an agreement, all together.

Animals then are finite and -- one way or another -- can be categorized. In those cases where elements are more disperse, instead, the total and collective categorization is impossible.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Back to something more trivial, in \textquotedblleft }Sei passeggiate nei boschi narrativi\textit{", you talk about the book \textquotedblleft }Sylvie\textit{\textquotedblright by Nerval as a sort of destiny book, that you studied hundred times. }

\textit{The idea that one book corresponds to one person is very striking. Do you still believe in it?}

\textbf{Eco}: Yes, although probably there's more than one book for each person. Yes, I do. But this question is like \textquotedblleft Why did you care about the Middle Ages?", that it's like asking \textquotedblleft Why did you marry that one and not another?\textquotedblright \textit{[he laughs]}
If you're interested, I made the translation of that book and talked about it in a collection of essays about literature{\dots} but this has nothing to do with the question.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Do you know the world of the free licenses? They were born in the '80s and allow the re-using, the sharing, also the editing of the content; very important characteristics in the digital world. Wikipedia too was born within this world and releases its content under a free license. How do you see the world of the intellectual property today, in the age of the internet?}

\textbf{Eco}: I am very empirical. I make my living on the gains of the intellectual property, but every time I've been object of piracy I got off cheaply. It happened that my American publisher sued an university for having made thirty copies of a book of mine, and I protested.
It's fine for me like this, at least 3 or 4 of my books can be downloaded through eMule{\dots} Why am I so careless about this? Considering that I live with  that, I should be worried. One answer might be that I'm earning enough this way, the other is  that I am a good democrat.

Let me make an example. When the newspaper \textit{La Repubblica} decided to distribute books with the paper, they began with \textit{Il nome della Rosa}, giving me a modest flat sum. And then they sold two million copies that day. I decided not to mind, I didn't  earn anything  but it was all right. Six months later I checked the reports of my publisher and the sale of the \textit{paperback}  wasn't changed at all. That is, those two million people were people that never would have bought my book in a bookstore. I didn't lose a sale. This means that the \textquotedblleft space\textquotedblright is such big that [the piracy] doesn't look like a tragedy to me. It's the author that sells a thousand copies that gets angry if a hundred of them are bootlegged.

Up to the 17th and 18th centuries, a writer made his living from a benefactor's will. Maybe we'll return there, we won't be paid by the audience, but by a patron. Ariosto got off well, why shouldn't I? \textit{[he laughs]}

They got off even before. Then the 18th century revolution -- when the storyteller went around selling his own books -- gave birth to the rights. In a sense, this democratize that work, because the writer and the philosopher did not have to lick the benefactor's ass any longer.

Well, nothing changed that much between the way that Ariosto licked the Estensi's ass and the way a lot of people lick everybody's ass. \textit{[he laughs]}

Arioso doesn't interest us less because writes two octaves to thank the Estensi.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{About books and rights, it's Google Books\footnote{\url{http://books.google.com}} that lately caught big attention.}

\textbf{Eco}: I don't understand all these protests against Google Books. Honestly, I get angry because I can see two pages and I cannot buy the book. The publishers should be enthusiastic, I don't understand. It's like the pedestrian areas: when you close a road to the cars, all the shopkeepers protest, although it's scientifically demonstrated that such an action increases the sales.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{It's a theme entwined with the one about the} public domain. \textit{Both in US and in Europe there are pressures to lengthen the copyright times, reducing the \textquotedblleft area of the public domain". There's much fuss and much fear about the intellectual property.}

\textbf{Eco}: Each writer lives a conflict about this: on a side he's fine that his book is read, on the other he's sorry that his grandchildren won't earn anything from the rights.
Now, my publisher said he'll give the rights of \textit{Il nome della rosa} for making an eBook for the Kindle, I think. The percentage is much lower than for normal books, but it's all right. I personally don't believe in it, I think that people still wants paper for reading a book, but I have no problems, it's correct that people asking for an electronic version might have it. It doesn't look complicated, they pay for the rights, although less because the eBook is cheaper. Either it'll be a \textit{smash} and you'll sell millions, or you'll sell few copies, and it'll be all right anyway.

I think that everybody is overreacting, just like the publishers against Google. Google Books is for selling books, not for selling less books. It plays the same role a bookshop does, when you go to browse the books. You can buy them, or just read a couple of pages, or read the index. Just as with Google.

And there's the trend to give more and more things for free. I cannot stand Adobe, that every year asks me to pay for reading the PDFs. In few minutes I found programs that do the same for free. I don't understand where's the return for the developers{\dots}

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Often, nothing. Open-source software is often written by people for personal use (maybe people that didn't want to pay Adobe's license like you) and freely released. And if someone makes it better, the  creator itself  has a return. It's a virtuous circle.}

\textbf{Eco}: There's also OOorg\footnote{\url{http://www.openoffice.org}}, that substitutes Word. It's very good and it works very well.

\textbf{R.}: \textit{Besides, Wikipedia comes right from the open-source world, that is developing in years its own philosophy about the free culture. They are linked.}

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