Wikipedia’s three core content policies (NPOV, V, NOR) demonstrate what type of knowledge platform this is; an aggregator of existing knowledge. (Reagle) By consequence, this leads to the question of how to deal with existing bias feeding into the knowledge base, as portrayed by the readings ((Hill), (American Women Novelists)) and well pointed out by Sakina. Is not neutrality an obstacle to intervention when the playing field is unlevel, for example?

But to be fair, these norms which govern the collective process of Wikipedia are what distinguishes it from different types of collaboration like, say, Anonymous. (Collaborative Futures) What this specific kind of collaboration is is also captured in DGG’s comment that “just as we are not a place for original scholarship, or original fiction, we are not a place of original participatory art” on the discussion page regarding David Horvitz’s attempt to have his page deleted. I imagine these are codes which developed in the collective effort to maintain the stance of a democratic platform, and I should say it has done a good job at keeping that position on the internet, which is, you know, the internet. Scrolling through the CfD discussion on American Woman Novelists, however irritated I may be by some of what is written there, I am also amazed at the fact that there actually is a discussion which led to somewhere.

While achieving productive discussion on the internet is not something which happens exclusively in Wikipedia, I feel safe in saying it is neither something which happens in most big platforms for gathering people. What contributes to making Wikipedia a different platform than others; the big and small efforts from many people, the platform’s technical implementation, the visions which are promoted in and outside the community, broader social contexts? While the answer will be something similar to all of the above, one thing I am curious about is how the practice in Wikipedia differs from language to language.

Also, the assumption of “good faith” resonates with the democratic vision of collaboration between modern individuals, or Western liberal subjects—a term we examined through Haraway, and which kanarinka also points at. Among the many possible ways to think about this, I would like to ask what it means to assume good faith, with regards to automated processes of knowledge making. This also could mean a lot of things, but what I am picturing is the following. Even now there are many bots which are active in Wikipedia, though I imagine most are limited to trivial tasks, and for good reasons. However, as computer science fields like natural language processing keep growing and terms like automated journalism are moving from speculation to real things, I find it not too hard to imagine a piece of software which could do wikipedia edits in a more author-like way. Wikipedia policies like Verifiability and No Original Research help in making the editing process more standardized, which would also help in automating it. But what happens once bot-edits become as reliable as human-made edits in terms of accuracy? Do the bots pass the WikiTuring test and become part of the community? Can a script prove its not having Conflict of Interest? Or, in a less dramatic and more likely picture, editors might want to employ those scripts (just as the bots which are now active) to contribute more to the knowledge aggregation process which is Wikipedia. I wonder if and how the community’s social norms will change under such circumstances.

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