Songs of the Mock Turtle: Ways of knowing in an online world

For many, the democratic and liberatory promise of the internet lies in the potential to allow collaboration, interaction, and exchange of information, ideas, and resources at a scale not otherwise possible (or at least, not highly probable) in a simple offline world. Believers argue for the benefits of intellectual collaboration, a decentralized organizational structure underlying an inclusionary commons, equal access to participation, and distributive social justice to address issues of marginalization, whether gender, social, or economic. Radical collaborative groups like the Old Boy’s Network (www.obn.org), Rhizome (www.rhizome.org), Indymedia (www.indymedia.org) engage issues as diverse as political ideology to integrative art and technology to biotech feminism (see for example, subRosa at www.cyberfeminist.net ). These use the internet for collaborative organizing on different projects at different levels, whether online or offline, enterprise or social. Non believers note a replication of similar issues of governance, inclusion/ exclusion, digital divide, access, empowerment, and connectivity to argue for such online organizing as mirroring traditional social issues to posit that the internet is the same old medium in a different guise. This piece looks at the emergence of Wikipedia as a content development and information resource and examines some factors that might explain its unpredicted success. Further, as a radical collaborative venture in a form of reference work or knowledge collaboration, the Wikipedia project could usefully illuminate specific aspects of organizing, community formation, or norm development online. As a future project, therefore, I would like to tentatively propose a more detailed analysis critiquing Wikipedia through the lens of postmodernist philosophical thought. Briefly, the proposal draws upon an initial premise that different forms of society and technology predicate different forms of knowledge/ information as discourse (Lyotard, 1979). The central thesis of the proposal is to combine Lyotard’s (1979) critique of knowledge in the postmodern age through an examination of the transformative characteristic of cyberspace through Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of smooth and striated spaces, so as to understand and identify the specific norms and practices (or, wikiculture, as Sanger, 2005 has described it) that may lead to specific forms of knowledge.

In order to examine what works for a collaborative online content development project for an information reference resource like Wikipedia, I will begin by drawing on Sanger’s (2005) philosophical comment: “But since we insisted that it was an encyclopedia, even though it was just a blank wiki and a group of people to begin with, it became an encyclopedia. There is something very profound about that. I also like to think that we helped to show the world the potential that wikis have” (http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95 ). Interestingly, while it is important that the group had a clear vision, it was also important for the vision to take on a life of its own beyond the group and be shared by many other Wikipedians who made the vision a reality. Much of the process, as documented by Sanger’s (2005) memoir’s recounting Wikipedia’s history, was rather incrementally mapped out from the start, and an understanding of what worked and why was gained more by hindsight and in the real-time process of going onwards. In some sense, Wikipedia had to learn from Nupedia’s experience both in order to draw on its critical mass of committed volunteers and to derive the necessary momentum needed to evolve into its true form. The memoir’s reveal that while defining itself as an encyclopedia was an important issue; other bigger issues at stake were the norms that were established along the way, and the processes underlying them which involved negotiating the balance between emerging self-regulation and enforcement. At a practical level, norms defined the Wikipedia community as much as the philosophical imperative of willing it into existence did.

The collaborative nature of the Wikipedia shares a few similarities in its guiding principles to other knowledge sharing and information networks, from those geared at co-authoring platforms on corporate intranets to activist, social networks or the niche anarchist or hactivist community networks. In this case, the powerful legitimating influence of the collaborative decentralized commons culture defines the functional knowledge-form. Starting from a blank wiki on Jan. 15, 2001, the creation of almost 3,700,000 articles (see Wikipedia homepage at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ) today point to more emergent order than chaos. Postmodernist perspectives might emphasize that the rhizome-like, striated evolving form of Wikipedia mirrors the unique form of collaborative organizing evidenced both online and offline today, for example, one where WTO flash mobs coalesce and disperse at a given geographical location at a moment’s notice only to re-emerge at another (Rhiengold, 1987). Hence, while the encyclopedia Brittanica might emblematize the era of a classical solidity, of institutionalization and stable editorial policy, of rigorously authenticated knowledge (with a capital K), and an inalienable objectifiable truth, the Wikipedia is in some ways its exact opposite: publishing articles on obscure celebrities (Sanger, 2006, p. 4), for example, or niche teenage trends with an almost serendipitous spontaneity, of reifying norms, or jettisoning others, of stating, restating, and stating facts again in edited forms. Certainly Google’s spidering Wikipedia helped in increasing visibility and accessibility; as also the dedicated Nupedia pool of believers it was able to draw on– yet these do not together form a satisfying explanation of Wikipedia’s success and strengths. After all, given its anti-elitist principles, and that it springs from a blank slate, it does only average four errors per article as compared to Britannica’s three! One is tempted to facetiously characterize its success to the serendipitous chance of an idea whose time had come at the right place– a model aka an Ebay or an Amazon. Or again, it could be due to the statistical relationship between exponentially rising linkages and connectivity.

What makes the Wikipedia project model work? Sanger (2006, p. 2) notes that quality and accessibility of information were important factors. Extending those, if we could for a moment imagine a construct for “amount of information,” then Wikipedia served the need for breadth of information matched with the right depth. Secondly, as an open dialogic process, it integrates the discursive potential of knowledge as information sharing while combining access with collaborative authorship, following the principles of open content and collaboration. Furthermore, it combines open-ended process without centralized enforcement; a sort of democracy-meets-consensus instantaneously, yet, in the co-edited co-evolving nature of collaborative content collaboration, maybe never. While it acknowledges that knowledge is not a positivist notion; it would be interesting to study the extent to which Wikipedia is a reflection of knowledge as discursively negotiated and unbiased, changing dialogically in a process of co-creation with its participants. Finally, Wikipedia also enshrines a radical way of knowing, naming, and believing than did our parents when we were growing up. Back then, a set of hardbound stately alphabetically arranged Britannica’s in the living room were the very statement of Truth and Knowledge, carefully consulted, and even more carefully preserved. Back then, in times of plain positivist modernity, we all believed in immutability of knowledge, as much as we trusted in the whole process through which it was delivered to us. With democratic control of knowledge creation, then, the commons at any point decides the content and the form in which the story will be told, or, as Sanger (2001) noted, the million faces needed to make a neutral point of view.

A project like Wikipedia might be understood not as much as society’s grand narrative on information sharing as through the lens of localized folklore: the knowledge-face of a culture told through the shared (and edited) narratives of its members. The tale is never quite the same in each telling, but retains in spirit the essence of the culture, maybe even embodying the culture. Without the many different ways of telling the folktale, there may be no culture. The Wikipedia project then may be critiqued as knowledge as folklore, enthusiastically embraced by all the members of the tribe, simultaneously constructing and documenting knowledge in each telling of the tale. I remember hot summer nights on my grandmother’s roof when I was a kid, asking her to re-narrate some favorite fairy tale to me for the millionth time– the story was just as magical and true each night she re-narrated the tale. Wikipedia brings out a little of that child in each of us, seeking to re-create in reality a vision of what we would understand as knowledge, in all the different forms of “neutral points of view” it may take.

References

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Lyotard, J.F. (1979). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Twelfth reprint, 1999. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Rheingold, H. (2002). Smart mobs: The next social revolution. Perseus Publishing.

Sanger, L. M. (2006). The future of free information. The Digital Universe Foundation (Draft). Online at http://www.unwiki.com/files/freeinfo.doc on March 29, 2006.

Sanger, L. M. (2005). The early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A memoir. Online at http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95 . Accessed on March 29, 2006.
Sanger, L. M. (2001). “Neutral Point of View—Draft.” meta.wikipedia.org. Online at http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Neutral_point_of_view–draft&oldid=756 . Accessed on March 29, 2006.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia . Accessed on March 29, 2006.