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Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality

2022; The MIT Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/leon_r_02205

1530-9282

Jan Baetens,

Wikis in Education and Collaboration

The starting point of this timely and excellent book is simple but very sound. While teaching their students how to use Wikipedia, not just as passive consumers but as active users, since after all Wikipedia boasts of being the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, the authors systematically noted that “everyone was using Wikipedia despite being told not to, and no one knew how it worked” (Preface, p. xi). The first of these two issues proves easy to solve: blind peer-reviewed analyses amply demonstrate that Wikipedia is no less reliable than other scholarly sources and similar publications. Moreover, there are no indications that its standards are weakening; on the contrary. In addition, there are good reasons to believe that Wikipedia is still “the last safe place” on the Internet, as shown by its successful battle against fake news and, more generally, its radically nonprofit character (on all these points, the comparison with Facebook and other commercial players speaks volumes). The second issue is a more complex one: despite its typically 1990s techno-utopian ethics of openness and democracy, Wikipedia still seems to be a black box that is less welcoming than most people think it is (or that it wants to be itself). Even experienced users experience serious difficulties when trying to edit the encyclopedia’s content, that is, to participate in the collective creation of a website that claims to give access to all the knowledge of the world, whereas for beginning users the technical and above all human thresholds often seem insurmountable.The goal of this book is to describe how Wikipedia works by explaining its general principles, rules and guidelines, as well as elucidating the concrete practices that these principles involve. More specifically, the book envisages this clarification as a form of constructive criticism. The authors’ idea is less to highlight the flaws and imperfections of Wikipedia than to analyze the hidden causes of these deficiencies and by doing so to make suggestions to remediate the current working of the encyclopedia and thus to make room for a new and more open version of it. As McDowell and Vetter rightly remind, Wikipedia has indeed many problems and biases (and most of its problems are related to exactly that: inbuilt but implicit biases). However, it remains a unique achievement that its own principles may help change and evolve outside of the still too-small community that is currently limiting its own ambitions. We should not forget that Wikipedia is independent as well as human. It is not a logarithm-driven structure that uses consumer-generated content but a space where users themselves decide on what is being published and how it is presented and shared. This fundamental characteristic, which generates part of the problems of the site, is also what can allow its community to make it better. The greatest quality of this book is that it reveals the link between these two things: On the one hand, the general principles of Wikipedia (the so-called pillars that define, first, what knowledge is, what counts as knowledge and how it has to be presented, and how the encyclopedia can make sure that it contains just that: knowledge that counts as knowledge, nothing more and nothing less); on the other hand its practical limitations, which do not result from a partial or flawed implementation of these general rules but appear instead as the direct consequence of too strict and direct an application of Wikipedia’s own standards and guidelines. McDowell and Vetter offer an illuminating close reading of the principles having to do with the definition of reliable and neutral knowledge, on the one hand, and the rules that govern the collective verification of this knowledge, on the other hand, and their analysis points to a certain number of structural difficulties. Chief in this regard are two elements. First, the text-based condition of “facts” and knowledge, which are never defined in themselves but always in relationship with reliable “sources”—more precisely published sources in reliable venues by reliable people—in theory an excellent tool to exclude fake news and all forms of “original” research; in practice, an unfortunate obstacle to facts and knowledge that are less text-centered or less mainstream. Second, the fact that assessing the reliability of facts and knowledge is supposed to reflect what the Wikipedia community considers as such. Once again, a wonderful principle that helps resist the imposition of monolithic interpretations of knowledge (facts are not just “facts” but what people have said on facts, that is, written and published on them), yet here as well it often proves a way of excluding minority and marginal voices, given the fact (sic) that the current composition of the active Wikipedia community does not reflect at all the totality of its more passive or possible users. The most active users, that is, those who as editors and administrators can control what actually gets to Wikipedia’s free published content (for instance, by refusing to publish new information or withdrawing previously published material), are mainly male, white, Western and highly educated, which in practice generates all kinds of biases and censorship, as shown by the examples of female and black scientists, crudely underrepresented if not shockingly ignored. McDowell and Vetter do not suggest that these deficiencies are produced by individual or subjective attitudes. They do not put the blame on this or that specific gatekeeping community but adopt instead a much broader, Foucault-inspired archaeological analysis, trying to understand the general procedures that control, select and organize knowledge and, more generally, the relationships between power and knowledge. For example, the first rule that users have to follow is for instance “Be bold,” which once again may seem theoretically encouraging (one is supposed to read it as: Yes, we need you, and your contribution is valuable, even if you think that you are not an authority in the field) but in practice easily degenerates (some gatekeepers interpret the “boldness” imperative in a way that discourages starting editors and thus weakens the community and, more broadly, the very content and quality of what Wikipedia may offer). The “be bold” Wikipedia pillar relies upon a type of agency that is far from universal.Reviews Panel: Kathryn Adams, Cristina Albu, Jan Baetens, John Barber, Catalin Brylla, Rita Cachao, Iain Campbell, Judith A. Cetti, Chris Cobb, Giovanna L. Costantini, Edith Doove, Hannah Drayson, Phil Dyke, Ernest Edmonds, Phil Ellis, Anthony Enns, Jennifer Ferng, Bronac Ferran, Enzo Ferrara, Charles Forceville, Gabriela Galati, George Gessert, Allan Graubard, Dene Grigar, Daisy Gudmunsen, Craig Harris, Jane Hutchinson, Amy Ione, Boris Jardine, Assimina Kaniari, Jacqui Knight, Mike Leggett, Ellen K. Levy, Will Luers, Robert Maddox-Harle, Roger Malina, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Stephanie Moran, Mike Mosher, Sana Murrani, Frieder Nake, Maureen Nappi, Ryan Nolan, Jack Ox, Jussi Parikka, Stephen Partridge, Ellen Pearlman, Robert Pepperell, Ana Peraica, Beate Peter, Stephen Petersen, Andrew Prior, Michael Punt, Aparna Sharma, George Shortess, Brian Reffin Smith, Laurence Smith, Eugenia Stamboliev, James Sweeting, Gregory Tague, Flutur Troshani, Ian Verstegen, Anna Walker, Cecilia Wong, Ahyoung Yoo, Jonathan ZilbergAlthough very critical of some of the encyclopedia’s flaws, this book is adamant in its support of Wikipedia and ends with sketching a certain number of practical proposals to make it better, not just by simply adapting or changing its principles but by making a more radical use of them. By enlarging the Wikipedia community and fostering engagement by users who currently shy away from it, the encyclopedia can show, the authors argue, that it is possible to come closer to the great ideal of offering all the knowledge of the world. In other words: Wikipedia is not just shaping the world (that would be the narrow constructivist point of view), it is also shaped by it, that is, by its users, that is, by us, even if for the time being not all of us are as committed and involved as we can or should be. The encyclopedia’s representation problem has therefore less to do with the robustness of its rules and guidelines than with the insufficient inclusion of hitherto underrepresented groups and voices.