My interest in Wikipedia is truly growing, to my own surprise. The series of articles about Wikipedia assigned this week further contextualize/illuminate this growing interest in the medium-platform-community that is Wikipedia. Most people that I know believe that Wikipedia is not a good source of information or knowledge because it is TOO democratic, TOO open, and teachers + professors always caution against its use in academic work. I’ve never held this belief strictly, but I also did not realize that behind the front-end of a page is a back-end where information and knowledge are critically negotiated, contested and mediated by a diverse (?) community of people who spend unpaid time building the informationscape in piecemeal.
What quickly came to the forefront for me is the problem of the shape and color of that landscape, as well as the diversity of the community that constructs it. Specifically, while barriers to entry to Wikipedia as a contributor/editor is theoretically low, the space is still predominantly white and male. As such, the informationscape tends to reflect that, and emerges as a reflection of the power dynamics within a larger social context. This is one entry into the conversation about why edit on Wikipedia.
The precursor to this conversation is to contextualize Wikipedia within a political economy of ideas and principals about who we are as a society. The issue of democracy, openness and value/validity is essential to theorizing this space in relation to our conceptualization of civil society. It isn’t an accident that resistance to Wikipedia often comes in the forms mentioned above (ie. that it is overly democratic, overly open and not a great source for information). With relation to democracy and openness I will make the argument that mainstream social values, relations and practices are actually not built on democratic principles or principals of openness as one might venture to think within the parameters of discourse around American civil society. Our legal system and constitutional infrastructure is built on principals of individuality and private property as shaped by political modernity. Encoded into our subject-position in relation to the law and to ideologies of citizenship is the idea of a sovereign self and the sanctity of private property. What that looks like in reality is far from this blanket statement I’ve made. We are not all positioned, from the get-go, as equals. Some sovereignties are protected more than that of others, and are conceptualized by different terms (think of same-sex relationships, alternative family structures, immigration regulations, criminality etc). However, the concept of a ‘free’ individual and private property are basic elements/components of how we organize ourselves in the social-political-economic sphere for better or for worse. For example, the values and social system as they relate to community organization and land use for Native Americans were not conceptualized and constituted in the same way that they were for the settlers. However, we now know whose conceptualization of communal/social organization and land/property prevailed. While this seems like an antiquated example (and I am sure there are more contemporary examples to engage), it most starkly highlights the point that the concept of private property and individuality became coded into our legal, political and social institutions over time. This code privileges one group over another, one ideology over another, and essentially one way of being over the other. Principals held by Native Americans were displaced by Settler principals and became the foundation of our legal and our social and economic institutions.
Therefore, it is quite understandable to perceive something like Wikipedia as too democratic and too open. It operationalizes concepts that are ubiquitous in rhetoric but missing from the actual practices of the nation, both on legal-institutional levels as well as the cultural forms that develop around them. I argue then that Wikipedia resists and challenges our basic ideologies about how society and citizenship works, and tests how democratic principles and openness (open and free to utilize and or participate) would look like. As some of the examples from the readings demonstrate (Hurricane Sandy, Gamegate etc), these ideals are not entirely ideal, even or clean cut. Democracy in action turns out to be a contested space that is messy and ridden with power and hierarchy, but also a space that is open to and inviting of a (re)negotiation of those things.
It is only fitting then that negotiation happens around information. The Wikipedia project can then be conceptualized as an epistemic struggle; a political and ontological activity in shaping what we know, and how we know it. The issue of validity and value are especially pertinent in this case. Academia has largely functioned as an institution that acts as the arbiter/gate-keeper and producer of knowledge (within a particular sphere that is distinct from the media or think tanks, both that may have a more direct relationship to public policy but for the sake of the argument we shall leave this aside for now). Academic institutions self-validate through constructing an economy of value and validity about truth claims that are engaged in questions and concerns around methodology, source and disciplinary codes of conduct. Epistomology becomes the domain of a few specialized spaces where the construction and circulation of knowledge is managed, policed and guarded. These spaces are also largely homogenous. Academic institutions encode within their practices a self-referential mechanism where only the knowledge produced within their own domain is valuable and valid. While Wikepedia does not move too far from this model (that is its concern with methodology, source and codes of conduct) it is though more open (accessible to greater amounts of people as participants and as users). Again, this statement is an over-generalization that too conveniently places these spaces in a binary. But there is some truth to it. The fact is that authentic participation and co-construction of knowledge challenges an institution like academia in similar ways that I’ve asserted that it challenges principals of private property and individuality.
Against this brief and brutish backdrop, I return to the conversation on why edit on Wikipedia?
