WIKIPEDIA DEMOCRACY, AND WIKICRACY
The critical context of editing Wikipedia
articles
Kristo Ivanov, Umeå University, (Nov. 2013, revised
251029-1445)
https://www8.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/WikiDemoCracy.html
https://archive.org/details/WikiDemoCracy
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Personalities and
social context of Wikipedia
The
following text which was written originally in 2013 is an inquiry into the “democratic”
control of the Wikipedia, in the context of my gradually increased use of it in
my research. In this sense it can be seen as an inquiry into the “quality” of
its information, a concept of quality whose political dimension culminated in
my papers on the conflict in Ukraine and in Gaza. There I had to increase the
use of Wikipedia’s permanent links in order to freeze the reference to a
point of time. Occasionally I had to complete my referencing with addresses to various
versions of the Wikipedia in different languages. For the rest, as I also mention
below, I have progressively analyzed in my lifework the concept of “quality of
information”, mainly in later updatings of the
presentation of my original doctoral dissertation on quality-control of
information, in the concept of “democracy” in the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, and finally in
the extreme context of the birth and user of the concept of disinformation. All this
required also the editing of a general disclaimer
to the readers. And now over to the original introduction:
There
is a wellknown quotation from Thomas Stearns Eliot's
poem The Rock (1934):
"Where
is the Life we have lost in living?
Where
is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where
is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
One
can check the popularity of the response to this already historical quotation
by means of an Internet search: on one occasion, about 250.000 hits for only
the second row. Interestingly enough, the line immediately preceding this
selection out of the poem is seldom mentioned. But that would lead us too far
in the text that follows.
The
matter happens to be the object of my doctoral dissertation on Quality-control of information that developed the scientific meaning and foreshadowed the
necessity of what later came to be named the Wiki-concept,
and stands at the basis of my choice of Wikipedia as a an often used reference
in my late research reports, with full knowledge of its shortcomings and
limitations. An
alternative formulation of the problem, with less philosophical depth but more
focus on common-sense practice was offered by systems scientist Russell Ackoff in 1967 in an article on "Management
Misinformation Systems". In a play of words that referred to a
concept that was trendy at that time, management
information systems or MIS, he
emphasized that we were entering an era in which the problem would not be the
lack of information but rather the excess of it. It would hamper our ability to
use it because we did not know how to select and create the right kind of
information. In a world of shortage of information we
had to act selectively on the basis of consciously chosen information. Now we
would be lost in the mid of too much available information or data of unknown
quality. And this was what prompted me, under the influence of Ackoff's PhD advisor, and later colleague and friend C.
West Churchman, to dedicate my PhD dissertation to Quality-control of information (1972). Some years later (1976), Ackoff co-authored the presentation of the SCATT report
about the Scientific Communication and Technology Transfer system in a book
with the title Designing a National Scientific and
Technological Communication System. Wikipedia
writes on the origins
of the Internet that the funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science
Foundation in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial
backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking
technologies, and the merger of many networks. So, the SCATT system was
developed with support from the National Science Foundation's Office of Science
Information Service. It is an interesting intellectual exercise to read it
today in order to relate what was said above to what now looks as an early idea
of a partially combined Google, Wikipedia and universal library before the era
of the Internet, and to realize how some insights and knowledge of that time
has got lost in today's information.
The events that reached and surprised the general public
with the worldwide known cases of Wikileaks' Julian Assange and the NSA contractor Edward Snowden indicate that
there is a general nave attitude to these matters and the belief that computer
supported information and communication (ICT) has a democratic potential
transcending the power of daily old-fashioned politics and finance. This
attitude may very well be a late version of the quasi-religious belief in the
saving potential of modern science and technology of which the movement of "Technocracy and the
American Dream" (title of William Akin's
book,
1977) was an eloquent review of. Robert Boguslaw's The New Utopians (1965) conveys a similar message. I have already addressed some of the
political aspects of Wikileaks including their link to the Snowden affair in an
article on Wikileaks, Information, and Systems. The focus here will be on English Wikipedia in general
and a cluster case study in particular. The focus could have been on Google including Google Scholar, and it is is being done by others like Nicholas Carr who already
in 2007 wrote "The rise of
the wikicrats", from which I borrow a part of
the title of this article. What has not been explicitly done is to relate these
problems theoretically to information systems. My thesis will be to suggest how
Wikipedia, a fantastic creation whose rough idea I myself drafted long before
it had become technically feasible as suggested by the history of
wikis,
contributes to an unperceived blurring between information, knowledge and
wisdom. This happens all along with the progressive reduction of wisdom to
information, based on the neglect of politics as related to ethics. And
regarding this relation of politics to ethics, and further to theology is
illustrated by a most important book that I leave aside in this paper but is
worthy of being mentioned and studied: Tage Lindbom’s, The Myth of Democracy (1996). The reader is invited to testify whether the conclusion of the
article will be, as I hope, the proposal of paying more attention to the
ethical aspects of information and the difficulties or impossibility of doing
it in view of the (mis)information explosion when conceived as an inherent,
unavoidable aspect of technoscience. I consider the latter issue in another
essay on Trends in Philosophy of Technology.
The following thoughts focus on a cluster of related
case-fragments and it is intended to be only a modest contribution to other
cases that have been reported, for instance, in the list for "External
criticism" below. My immediate purpose is not to present a typical text
with a clear structure and conclusions but, rather, to share some concerns and
furnish materials, which can be used by others in order to advance the study of
the issues that are raised here. If I am allowed to guess, one conclusion could
be that the present chaos of information explosion or exploded information
indicates that it is not worth the effort of trying to understand it except in
terms of philosophy of technology, and cultural criticism.
To
begin with, I must state that I myself appreciate the "Faustian
bargain" of the power of technology in general and Wikipedia in
particular. This is testified by my extensive use and reference to Wikipedia as
exemplified in the present text and both in my research and weblog pages. And there is no denying that
Wikipedia considers and embodies complexity, for good and for bad, depending
upon how complexity is and should be defined. That means, in my proposed frame
of reference: systemic complexity,
and as such a legitimate fruitful complexity if it can be conceived as a wise
system according to a kind of systems approach like the one I describe
elsewhere under the label of The Systems Approach to Design and Inquiring
Information Systems. Wikipedia is
not a kind of monolithic personality to be judged monolithically. It is,
rather, an abstraction just as personality
itself, or nation, society, in short: system.
I
will initially consider Wikipedia's explicit
complexity, which is less known by the general "user" and
testifies its level of ambition. Many users have heard about a main feature of
Wikipedia that is widely advertised but few are able to utilize: namely, that
"anybody" can edit its contents with the intent to improve them. The
truth is that disregarding certain controversial articles that are "protected" from
the general public in order to avoid probable damage, edit warring or edits
close to vandalism, editing
itself requires substantial technical knowledge about the particular text
editor. The basics for both editing and browsing can be found in a particular
link of the left column of Wikipedia articles, under "Interaction",
labeled "Help". The
edits, however, can get canceled after only a few minutes by special
"democratically" authorized gatekeepers, or as they
are named according to the particular specialized Wikipedia vocabulary. In
daily practice they often exert what in daily language is known as censorship,
besides making occasional or systematic own positive contributions.
It
is difficult to find a good summary of Wikipedia's organization and workings
beyond the ambitious but at the same time critical account in the study of The Decline of Wikipedia, referenced further below. For the convenience of the readers who
are not already familiar with the organization and workings of Wikipedia I
submit the following selection of reference links that may well be perceived as
overwhelming by the average reader who has not yet realized by means of
concrete examples the import of the so called
information explosion. For purposes of simplicity I take the liberty of not
including the access dates, which are all about September-November 2013. The
text in the links also indicates its subjects, which for some readers may be a
presupposition for understanding the rest of the present article.
Introductory
links:
Wikimedia
Foundation: Guest Projects
Wikipedia:
Wikimedia Syster Projects
Wikipedia
Policies and Guidelines
Three core content policies:
Wikipedia: No
Original Research
Wikipedia:
Neutral Point of View
Instructional
material:
Wikipedia
Projekt: Bibliographies
Wikipedia
User: Gatekeeper/Editors Index
General
policing :
Wikipedia:
External Peer Review
Wikipedia
Project: LGBT Studies Peer Review
Wikipedia:
Patrolled Revisions
Wikipedia:
Administrators' Noticeboard
Wikipedia:
Administrators' Noticeboard/Incidents
Internal
Criticism:
Wikipedia is not a reliable source
Wikipedia:
Conflict of Interest
Wikipedia:
[Internal overview of mainly external] Criticism of Wikipedia
Wikipedia:
Susan Gerbic - Criticism and Controversy
The Signpost: The Decline of Wikipedia,
Wiki-PR, Australian Minister
and especially
Wikipedia:
Criticism - Commandeering or Sanitizing Articles
Wikipedia:
Criticism - Complaints About Administrator Abuse
Wikipedia: Larry Sander - Nupedia and Wikipedia
Wikipedia: Susan Gerbic
and Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia
Knowledge Engine (Wikimedia Foundation)
J.Lanier: Wikipedia and the omniscience of
collective wisdom
External Criticism :
Wikipedia
Criticism and Why It Fails to Matter
Harvard Guide to Using Sources: What's
Wrong with Wikipedia?
Nicholas Carr: Rise of the Wikicrats
Nicholas Carr: Deletionists,
Inclusionists and Delusionists
Nicholas Carr: The Amorality of Web 2.0 + Jimmy Wales response
Wikipedia: The
Daniel Brandt Controversy
The Battle to
Destroy Wikipedia's Biggest Sockpuppet Army
Wikipedia-Watch:
Can you Sue Wikipedia?
Truth and the
World of Wikipedia Gatekeepers
Wikipedia
Woes: Pending Crisis as Editors Leave in Droves
WikiSpooks: Problems
with Wikipedia
University of
Toronto Assignment Annoys Wikipedia Editors
Ludwig von
Mises Institute: About Wikipedia
The Jewish Hand behind Internet (140324) (cf. controversial source)
Wikipedia under Threat - The Rupert
Sheldrake Controversy
WikipediaPlus - Alternative Narratives of Wikipedia
Events
Wikipedia wars: Wikipedia and Guerilla
Skeptics
Mike Adams: 10 shocking facts you never
knew about Wikipedia (cf. controversial source)
Wikipedia: A "Free
Encyclopedia" Controlled by Special Interest Groups
How Covert Agents Infiltrate the
Internet (not direct ref. to Wikipedia)
Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia
Wikipedia Power Structure
The Wikipedia Review. And its entry in Wikipedia
Paul Craig Roberts: The Problem with
Wikipedia and the Digital Revolution
Russia creating rival to Wikipedia
Rupert Sheldrake: Wikipedia under Threat
Wikipedia: Democracy at your fingertips?
The word is “propaganda”: playground for
rich and powerful manipulators
Adhocratic governance in the Internet
age: A case of Wikipedia (pdf)
Evaluating Wikipedia’s entries on seven
great minds (pdf)
Wikipedia art: Citation and performative
act (pdf)
The myth of Wikipedia democracy
Wikipedia: Elite disinformation tool?
CIA moderating Wikipedia (from
west-censored Russia-Today rt.com)
General: see in
browser e.g.: <wikipedia+democracy> and
Wikipedia:
Democratization of Knowledge
The World's most Prolific Writer (original article, and other)
Aaron Swartz: Wikipedia's occasional
contributors or "outsiders" vs. regular editors
Susan Gerbic -
Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia - YouTube Workshop
Wikipedia's 20 years, January 10th, 2021
(in Swedish, SvD,
by S.Sundberg)
As most researchers I rely professionally upon the
institution of the university and a network of colleagues who share some of my
concerns and are available to both criticize me and to contribute as I myself
do to our common research area of information science. In this context there
have been a few people who were sufficiently knowledgeable to act as
users-editors of Wikipedia and towards the end of year 2009 created in it a
sort of biographical
page
in my name. I have been occasionally been briefed about it, as I have been
asked questions, and have occasionally followed its development, appreciating
the amount of effort that went into various modifications and additions up to
April 2013. They were well portrayed by a fair amount of readers' evaluations
as summarized in the evaluation table that used to figure at the end of
Wikipedia standard pages' layout until about April 2013. Well conscious of
Wikipedia guidelines for this type of pages, Biographies of Living Persons, I have obviously refrained from making
own edits and have not had any serious factual objections to the text and the
edits or the curtailings. Examples are the ones done
by the user-administrator Mdd in March
2009. I got intrigued, however, for not understanding the rationale and context
for one particular later deletion, which is the object of this case study for
research purposes. This means that I am striving for a more general research
issue about and beyond Wikipedia, rather than for a simple trivial revision or
correction of the particular page, which would have started at the particular
user-editor's Talk Page or at Wikipedia's
Administrators' Noticeboard.
My
attention was called upon the fact that on April 3rd, somebody who in the
"Revision history" is identified as Dougweller (with a
complex identity also in a "Japanese"
version) had deleted a
large amount of text from my Wikipedia page. Dougweller's
action consisted of several fragmented deletions on the one same day of April
3rd, plus the addition of a template on the top of the page, with the label
"Too Few Opinions". The fragmented deletions were
motivated "telegraphically" with a few key words in the edit summary (see below.) The deletions included
details that had been quite painstakingly gathered and contributed by a few
different people, user-editors, during the past years. One of the supposedly
self-explanatory edit summaries motivating
the deletions claimed e.g. that a reference to my published PhD dissertation
counters the Wikipedia policy of OR/NOR of not containing original research:
"is OR – original
version clearly written as an essay". Doughweller
seems to ignore that Swedish dissertations were made available in a minimum of
hundreds of copies, being examined and graded by several experts more deeply
than in most peer-reviews, and defended by the author in public defense. They
are available in libraries including the National Library and are
submitted to further detailed evaluations by panels of international experts on
occasion of contests for selection among candidates to university professorial
chairs. So goes with the rest: two of the edit (deletion) summaries state
tersely "more, and a fact tag", and the fourth states "stick
with stuff by subject or that mentions subject". This seems to be
motivated by the fact that Dougweller could not find
the right terms in the references, e.g. about statistics, security-secrecy, and
hypersystems.
The
edit summaries may have some valid
point in them concerning clarity but do not account for synonyms and immediate
inferences from texts that require careful reading. The objections, besides of
missing references to statistics, do not account either for the change of technological
context and terminology in the 40 years that passed between the PhD
dissertation in 1971 and the Wikipedia page created in 2009. It is not only the
case of "management information systems" overlapping with later
"knowledge management" (as in Wikipedia itself), or the concomitant
misunderstanding of what statistics is about, but also the more subtle relation
between security and secrecy that became ultimately evident after the cases of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden.
On
the whole, however, the edit-summaries of the deletions from my page may also
appear as bureaucratic nit-picking. In practice also can be perceived as
hyperactive harassment as stated in many Wikipedia-critical articles (ref.
above). Dougweller seemed to read and destroy in 8
minutes what had required, say, 100 times this time to build up, and would
require almost as much to explain and discuss. This is an often
recurrent issue in the external criticism of Wikipedia, as if it were a
sort of internal auto-vandalism. There are hundreds of Wikipedia biographies of
living persons, and dead ones for that matter, who have similar shortcomings.
One example among many I happened to notice is the Wikipedia page for professor
Adam Grant, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania: the
introduction to "Academic
career"
presented (as per November 2013) huge claims and praise that were completely
unreferenced. Just another example is the page for the feminist theorist,
professor of political science at the University of California, Berkely, Wendy Brown, (also
mentioned as partner of the queer theorist Judith Butler). I do not
believe that it is different kinds of requirements in feminist and gender
theory that explain why numerous achievements accounted by Wikipedia regarding
Wendy Browns "career" are
accepted without any references. Obviously many if not most cases of such
Wikipedia pages do not attract the attention and motivation of some stranger to
the article to implement in 8 minutes a 5-fold deletion of a sizeable part of a
very informative text. It is a referenced and non-controversial text without
huge claims and praise that is not likely to lead to any serious
misunderstandings. It explains the connotations of the older wordings of the
surveyed work, and must have taken hours to be written by editors in periods
since year 2009, having been read by an average of 10-20 daily readers who had
not expressed objections. As already mentioned it had
also been explicitly evaluated by a total of about 15 committed readers in the
final evaluation table at the end of the article that was standard and
available for many Wikipedia pages until somewhen around April 2013. The
deletion left the earlier
version of the page bereft of important information on my core
work about Quality-control of Information
that would have been useful for future readers to understand also the text that
was left.
As
mentioned above, in 2010 I had found that some earlier deletions could be
considered reasonable or a matter of judgment, having been made by a
user-administrator who was especially concerned with a main area of my research
– on systems. In my efforts to understand the possible intervention of Dougweller in an area in which, contrasted to Mdd, this user-administrator had shown neither interest nor
familiarity with, I went on to check the traffic statistics for my page and his
documented activity around the very same date of 3 April 2013.
To
begin with, I noted that the date of April 3rd showed a remarkable upsurge of traffic statistics for my
Wikipedia page. From an average variation between 10 and 20 accesses per day in
the previous and following weeks there had been a top of 60 accesses exactly on
April 3rd, suggesting a sudden increased interest for my page, possibly related
to Dougweller's deletion since the page itself had
not undergone any remarkable edits, and there were no events in my name that I
know of. A new minor upsurge or 50 accesses to the page took place on April
14th, and I identify it as related to the objection raised by another
user-reader coded "EnolaGaia" who on the Talk-page of the
article had objected to Dougweller's deletion. His
objection to the deletion (accessed 28 November 2013) has been until this time
(November 2013) neither acknowledged nor responded by Dougweller
who had not cared to bring his objection to the talk-page, and had ignored
Wikipedia's own policy guidelines for his summarizing template "Too Few
Opinions".
The deletions were in practice a "Revert" that recalls the
recommendations concerning bold editing, including
"Wikipedia:Revert
only when necessary" meaning that it is not the
intention of the Wikipedia guidelines on
being Bold, Revert and Discuss (WP:BRD)
to encourage reverting, and:
"When reverting, be clear of your reasons in the edit." Dougweller lacks clarity and consideration for Wikipedia
readers.
The
Wikipedia instructions for the use of this template ("Too Few
Opinions") state: "This article message box
tags articles which may suffer from systemic bias
by failing to include significant viewpoints. It will categorise
tagged articles into Category:Articles
needing more viewpoints. This tag should only be applied to
articles for which significant, non-FRINGE
different perspectives are reasonably believed to exist, e.g., for many
articles about political economy,
but not for many articles about chemistry.
Please explain your concerns promptly on the article's talk page. If you do not
identify the opinions that are missing, then any editor may remove this
tag."
These official instructions put into evidence that Dougweller neither justified his edit nor followed up
objections to his action, and indeed does not follow official instructions that
should be well known by users-administrators. The fact that no other editor
removed the template/tag may in goodwill, besides other obvious alternatives,
be seen as demonstration of civility and courtesy combined with avoidance of
time-consuming belligerent attitude. In the attempt to explain Dougweller's negative contribution to my page I checked his
own self-presentation on his user page and on the net where he
appears to be the object of some texts including an article titled Scandal at Wikipedia. I also checked his parallel
simultaneous activity or his "user
contributions" around 3 April 2013 that could explain the sudden
interest in my page in an area for which no interest had ever been shown. His
activity log showed that immediately
before Dougweller's multiple operation on my page
he (I assume is a he)
had been involved in one on the page for Political
Correctness. Did it mean something?
The way towards an explanation was unexpectedly confirmed,
however, when I received a communication by a foreign informant who had got
interest in my work. His user-contribution
to the Wikipedia page on Political Correctness as identified by
his IP-identifier 177.32.16.45
had also been rejected around 3-5 April by this very same user-administrator Dougweller in concert with a likewise extremely active North8000.
They had been both involved in quite heavy polemics with others that happen to
be well exemplified
in Wikipedia. Both appeared prone to start edit wars against occasional common
readers-editors. That is, wars which are paradoxically symptomatic for the
concept of political correctness itself,
since, as one
user put it , the term itself is emotionally charged and allows no neutral point of view. Another
user expresses it as "Whoa, this article is the product of
a lot of emotional baggage". And the research issue is that it may be
necessarily so, the more so when there is an ethical content where neutrality
of point of view would imply the existence of a standard ethical personality
(of editors) or a universally accepted worldwide religion.
That foreign informant, being interested in my work, had
also made an edit of my page on April 3rd and had noticed that the very same Dougweller had intervened there that very same day. The
informant's hypothesis for the otherwise nearly unexplainable event was that Dougweller had got annoyed and emotional by the fuss around
the contribution of user 177.32.16.45
as further supported by the combative attitude of another user 90.229.133.145
on the talk page of Political
Correctness. This would have led Dougweller to
check their user pages, and especially the user
page for 177.32.16.45 which was the only one with further
information which could be useful for retaliation. There it could be seen that
this same user also had worked on my page. This may have made it possible for Doughweller to quash parts of my page in which 177.32.16.45
also had shown involvement by contributing to. As a matter of fact if one looks
into the previously mentioned user-contribution pages of Dougweller
his daily edits, as those by North8000 and for other ambitious administrators
like e.g. Rlevse, are so numerous that it is easily
understood why most of them are quite superficially made, as in our "8
minutes". The number of edits is meritorious and deletions are easy, and
speedy. Such edits will be barely followed up except when fueled by strong
emotions that also can be misunderstood as intellectual commitment.
The idea of Dougweller's
"retaliation" is consistent with comments to the article mentioned
above about Scandal at Wikipedia.
As the result of polemics or edits that per
se are sometimes necessary and legitimate in Wikipedia, he is reported to
have responded to mail by threatening to "permanently block from
Wikipedia" his adversary. As mentioned, his name is found in similar
controversial contexts on the net. One mail I received from readers of my page
even advances the possibility of a worst case
scenario: if this present essay of mine could be related to a user name or IP
address it could retaliated by being blocked. Or worse: in the maze of
Wikipedia policies and rules the bureaucratic-administrative means might be
found for deleting the whole Wikipedia entry in my name. I cannot refrain from
associating such extreme, exaggerate fears to psychological paranoia but they
are meaningful in for the understanding of some Wikipedia problems that recur
in criticism that has been directed against it.
The last remark introduces us to a reflection about the type
of personality of more prominent, active user-administrators and their social
context, which are supposed to guarantee the open, democratic, participative
workings of Wikipedia.
What are we to do with the above? I
know that the attitudes exemplified by the two mentioned user-administrators
have been perceived as polemical, which may be sometimes justified with
reference to the circumstances. They have also been perceived as outright
arrogant, as suggested by the deletions from my page not having been brought to
its talk-page, or as evidenced in the earlier mentioned dialog that involved
the pair North8000 & Doughweller. Especially
North8000 exemplifies an administrator-attitude, which is easily perceived as
overbearing. One example is in Talk dialogue about political
correctness mentioned above,
where instead of responding to arguments, it is stated "Your post also
indicates some misunderstandings in other areas. If you are new to Wikipedia,
it is very easy for that to happen" or "You have misread the
situation, and how Wikipedia works [ɝ you reading way too much negativity into
a routine process. Such is easy to do for new folks because Wikipedia editing
is a really different place that takes some getting used to." The user with IP 90.229.133.145 mentioned above even
symptomatically adduces a reference to the Wikipedia advising page WP:HUMAN labeled "IPs are human too", and quotes on the
Talk Page of Political Correctness surveyed above (in vain): "Because of
these misconceptions, edits by unregistered users are mistakenly reverted and
their contributions to talk pages discounted. This practice is against the
philosophy of Wikipedia and founding principles of all Wikimedia projects."
And the overbearing words above were
written without knowing anything about the person in question except for the
identification of the user-page in terns of an
occasional IP-number. This is, however, part of a much greater and deeper
systemic issue that lately has surfaced in reports and articles, one of best
being The
Decline of Wikipedia.
In the context of the Wikipedia-scandal
Wiki-PR, one of the
commentators ("John" 2013/10/23) observes that many are discouraged
from making corrections by "gatekeepers" while these gatekeepers may
very well be being paid to enforce the status quo of "knowledge" –
there is no way to tell. But the worst of it was reported in the context of
another scandal that became well acknowledged after being publicly discovered. Wikipedia
itself reports that in 2008 the pro-Israel activist group CAMERA launched a
campaign to alter Wikipedia articles to support the Israeli side of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (cf. my later
reference
to it in a theological context).The campaign suggested that pro-Israeli editors
should pretend to be interested in other topics until elected as
administrators. Once administrators they were to misuse their administrative
powers to suppress pro-Palestinian editors and support pro-Israel editors.
And in
2010 two pro-settler Israeli
groups, Yesha Council and Israel
Sheli, launched courses to instruct pro-Israel editors on how to use Wikipedia
to promote Israel's point of view. A prize was to be given to the editor who
inserted the most pro-Israel changes. All this can be seen as parallel to the
type of conspiracies suggested by Grant F. Smith as published by "The National Summit to Reassess the
U.S. - Israel Special Relationship", speaker transcript audio and video at the National Press
Club, Washington D.C., March 7, 2014.
The Israeli question seems to be an interesting focusing point in order to
illustrate the problems we are considering, as also illustrated by the
historical case of the appearance and disappearance of an apparently
controversial Wikipedia article on Ashkenazi
Jewish Intelligence.
These
examples are extreme, as it would be extreme to suspect, for instance, that Dougweller and North8000 are in practice
"friends" acting as in an internal "meat puppetry" in
supporting each other as if they were experts, all through several different
pages of Wikipedia about the most varied subjects. As stated in Wikipedia itself about meat puppetry: "Do
not recruit your friends, family members, or communities of people who agree
with you for the purpose of coming to Wikipedia and supporting your side of a
debate."
Such
extremes, which are not applicable to our modest and trivial case may, however,
be the top of an iceberg. For the purposes of the present essay, please compare
with the section of Criticism of
Wikipedia titled "Commandeering or sanitizing articles."
Besides these extreme example there are other smaller events like one that was
reported to me by a research colleague who in the course of his studies
happened to note controversies in the editing of the Wikipedia page on American Jews: the case was the
introduction of a reference to Bernard Madoff
in that page's section on Finance, edited on 30 June 2009, as well as other
edits of the same page 4 July 2009, which were promptly reverted by
gatekeepers, followed by arguments on the "Talk page", under the
labels on No censorship of "Bernard Madoff" and From Madoff to Political Controversy. The stuff
was wether Bernard Madoff was to be considered to be
a notable American Jew only before he was incriminated and sentenced to jail. I
will not take issue about who was "right". As it has been noted that
user-administrators in Wikipedia will be neither requested nor verified to be
experts, recalling what has been debated in terms of The Cult of the Amateur – the title of a book by Andrew Keen. I
wish to expose by means of these references the painstaking process that went
on between 30 June 2009 and 7 February 2010, and elsewhere might have been
called "historical revisionism", as in former Soviet. As Wikipedia itself writes about Historical revisionism (negationism): "The history of the
Communist Party was revised to delete references to leaders purged from the
party, especially during the rule of Joseph Stalin
(1922–53)."
The Harvard Guide to
Using Sources in a special section on "What's
Wrong with Wikipedia?" spells that "Some
information on Wikipedia may well be accurate, but because experts do not
review the site's entries, there is a considerable risk in relying on this
source for your essays. That is, experts do not review the site's entries and
this means that Wikipedia has had to grow into a bureaucratic pyramid which is
often believed by the general public to be vaguely "democratic" but
may be more social-anarchic,
which in certain systemic frames is supposed to be a self-referencing,
self-policing,
homeostatic,
autopoietic,
or emergent
network. It has stimulated speculations, philosophical as in the problematic
tradition of Friedrich Nietzsche's "self-reference", and such as in
"Gödel-Escher-Bach"
train of thought, or half-serious playful fantasies. These fantasies display,
however, serious ambitions when one reads about them "how self-reference
and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of
'meaningless elements'. Or, "recursion and self-reference, where objects
and ideas speak about or refer back to themselves." Or, about emergence as
"the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of
relatively simple interactions." In fact such fantasies have been permeating
the conception of not mainly Wikipedia but the whole Internet and
pseudo-scientific ecological thinking, as critically illustrated e.g. in the
second documentary titled "Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts" of
the TV series All Watched Over by Machines of
Loving Grace.
Not here, but in old good established control
engineering there is a consciousness about the danger that systems,
which apparently are self-referencing, homeostatic, etc. can run into
unexpected destructive processes of positive feedback
and resonance. Fortunately, at least on the Wikipedia
page on self-policing there are revealing references in the section "See also" to Conflict of Interest, and Ethical
Code. The Wikipedia
organization itself including its core personnel also has its own interests,
and more so: its own passions.
If it were not for the lack of knowledge of historical facts
the matter should have incurred into the centenary discussion about bureaucracy
or general administration, as well into the great issue of trust in general and in the search for truth in particular, not the
least in science as considered, for instance, by Steven Shapin in A Social History of Truth.
After an extremely well studied history of science
Shapin reaches at the end of his book an anti-climax when he believes that
personal relations of early science in the seventeenth-eighteenth century can
be substituted by reciprocal social control or self-policing in the smaller
communities of fragmented, specialized science.
We
touch here one of the main points of this essay, the theoretical link to
philosophy of science. In Wikipedia the main link relating to philosophy of
science and scientific method is the policy page on Verifiability, where the
history of its Talk Page,
especially as highlighted by the research colleague involved in the
Madoff question exposes in a symptomatic way the problematic scientific particulariy of Wikipedia in using the term in its own way.
Under the undiscussed label of vague democratic organizational structure of
supposed self-control there are unchallenged assumptions about truth, but also
about democracy, which ignore political science, sociology, and systems theory,
not to mention ethics.
Wikimedia
defines the term Wikicracy in the following way, which in an
eloquent way differs from Nicholas Carr's use of the term: Wikicracy, or Wikidemocracy is a model of government based on the open
source and "wiki" concepts that have already been brought to the
private sector, i.e. Wikipedia. Some people think it is the future of
democracy. The idea, at its most basic level, is bringing common citizens to
the law, and allowing for a transparent law process and maximum public input
using the latest technology. The pinnacle of this theory is allowing community
members in any given jurisdiction direct access to its laws. Using wiki style
editing, people can actually edit their demands into laws. The whole idea is
closely related to the so far poorly documented initiatives for metagovernment, about which the general public may have
a general enthusiastic feeling but knows nothing except for the ambition that
"Metagovernment's solutions are collaborative, consensus-based, and synthesis-oriented. In this way, we avoid the
traditional limitations of direct democracy and allow everyone to be involved
without degrading into mob rule, tyranny of the majority, or demagoguery."
This recalls the possibility to adapt to Wikipedia what Claes G. Ryn writes (pp. 221ff.) in his book
on Democracy and Ethical Life: "Yet,
the institutions of constitutional democracy are endangered or destroyed in
proportion as they are placed in the service of plebiscitary democracy".
Who
cares about whether "plebiscitarianism" has
something to do with the basic tenets of Wikipedia? We are very far from the
kind of analysis of democracy, its requirements, limitations and dangers as
found in political science or sociology or, for that matter as early as in the
work of Alexis de
Tocqueville
– his fears for centralization of power in American democracy. If anything,
Wikipedia's situation reveals a remarkable lack of historical and theoretical
knowledge, and consequently a naivety regarding the essence and difficulty of
the Wikipedia project. It is as if the renaming of democratic participative
ideals into "wiki" will offset such shortcomings. And this happens in
the same old spirit that was alive in the earlier mentioned technocratic
movement, since it is the computer and ICT that are supposed to allow new
possibilities and to avoid previously experienced but ignored historic
difficulties.
This naivety,
however, is concomitant to the fact that the scientific particularities of
modern technologies in general and ICT in particular allow for the rise or,
rather, the selection of particular personality profiles. Many user-pages of
Wikipedia most active and therefore most experienced editors-administrators
display such a frantic activity, easily about 60 edits per day of Wikipedia
pages on the most different issues. They can be handled only be polymath
experts who appear as geniuses, or by bureaucrats on the basis of networks of
rules in the form of policies and guidelines. At its best this indicates a
passion for truth, for competitive domination or whatever. At its worst recalls
what psychologists name as compulsive behavior, most akin to
bullying and gambling but also to checking,
counting, repeating, and washing. The extreme is, of course the "Internet
Addiction Disorder" of "wikipediholics"
that, however, does not address retaliative bullying behavior. Ultimately it
may be a question of personality
disorders.
Right
or wrong most people bear in themselves an image of the typical
"scientist" or "university professor", e.g. as
absent-minded or introvert. What kind of people are attracted to the "Wikiversity" bureaucracy to the point of risking
turning into arrogant "wikipediholics"?
ICT-operation requires logical and technical skills, which in turn often
presuppose certain psychological aptitudes related to simpler formal skills in
logic and mathematics, or "gymnastic" symbol manipulation, valuable
for those whom Shapin calls "technicians" in the history of science
(see below). It happens that the general public considers ICT people, not the
least those who are conversant with Wikipedia's workings, as a sort of
renaissance geniuses, as when top administrators run dozens of edits per day of
pages on the most different cultural and scientific subjects. IIt is often the case, however, that certain brilliant
aptitudes appear at the cost of serious detriment of other undeveloped
aptitudes. This is sometimes evident in reports about people with high score on
IQ-tests, exemplified by accounts of the deeds by Ronald Hoeflin with his
claims in an article with the sensational ambitious title of Theories of Truth: A Comprehensive
Synthesis, and Evangelos Katsioulis with his active membership in more than 70
"High IQ
Societies"
or accounts of phenomenal productive Wikipedia authors like Sverker
Johansson
as The World's most Prolific
Writer. Different psychological theories have different perspective
on this very same issue. For instance, according to the psychological
types
of Carl Jung the ICT-aptitudes require most probably the extraversion of the
functions of thinking, and sensation, to the disadvantage of feeling and intuition, despite of intuition also being important in daily
creative professional work. Some functions related to strong emotions can fall
into the unconscious, running amok. My own experience indicates that there are
close, if complex relations to the so-called Savant
Syndrome, which is
skillfully summarized by Darold Treffert in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (2009) as a
contribution to a Discussion Meeting Issue "Autism and talent."
Details, which require focused study also to ascertain whether it is a matter
of degree (of "savantism") can be found in
the same author's book Extraordinary People (1989.) It is common knowledge that many
exceptional ICT-brilliant people have very peculiar personality traits that, if
not savant-autistic, recall autism. Less favorable hypotheses are that
"brilliancy" on the verge of genius can be found among borderline personality
types,
who show excessive preoccupation with and motivation for power, prestige, and vanity, with important organizational
implications.The serious
version of exceptional people who are not trivial "savants" is found
in other works about serious scientists-mathematicians, as in Donald Albers and
G.L. Alexanderson (eds.) Mathematical
People, (1985). See
especially about the relation between mathematics and computer science in the
chapter on Donal Knuth (pp. 183-203), and compare with West Churchman treatment
of "Leibnizian
Inquiring Systems" in the context of his book The Design of Inquiring Systems.
These
references are mentioned here, as others all over the present article, because
in the spirit of my writing I do not aim at pronouncing categorical statements
except inadvertently because of writing style, but mainly to offer hypotheses
and hints for the study of these neglected matters. Savant or autism or
personality syndromes mean that the concerned people have important
shortcomings and difficulties, which cause important problems in organizations
and society and require
"the right man at the right place."
In this
context related to talent and autism, mentioned above, it is interesting to
note Steven Shapin's observation in his mentioned book (pp. 410ff.) that modern
science has been characterized by depersonalization
of research and loss of personal knowledge in the sense of knowledge of persons
which is supposed to be replaced by trust in the organization. This is so
despite of Shapin falling into the earlier mentioned trap (p. 414) of believing
that this is today obviated by the homeostatic self-control arising within
"small specialized communities of knowledge-makers", whatever
"knowledge" and "small" means in the case of Wikipedia.
All this is a
matter glossed over in the facile rejection of (even in Wikipedia itself)
misunderstood ad hominem
arguments.
If we understand the problems of democracy we also
learn to understand the importance of ethics. It is basically personal, and
therefore it reflect itself in the importance of trust, a matter that is central in the
mentioned work by Shapin. If, as in Wikipedia, most editors are supposed to
work ideally, without payment, then it is probable that if they do not work for
money they will work for advancing their
"ideals" or, more prosaically, their own interests as related to
their talents. If such interests are not pure logical-mathematical plays as in
the mind of typical ICT-people and programmers (cf. Wikipedia technical
infrastructure) or "networks of rules" loved by abiding
top-editors-bureaucrats (cf. Wikipedia policies and guidelines), what is left
is the play of emotional stuff that under the label of "truth"
emerges in controversial matters exemplified by political correctness and American
Jews. My own case, as I said, is comparatively very modest with the
advantage that the emotional side of top editors is in a way still more visible
when divested of strong political passions in matters of life and death. It
appears in "childish" forms of systems of symbolic self-promotion and
peer-recognition, which try to replace economic remuneration of
"ideal" edit work and the inapplicable millennarian
academic traditions, titles, and rituals of universities and international
scientific societies. There is an overwhelming statistical display of
activities (number or edits, etc.) and of various templates on their user
pages, not the least Wikipedia's reciprocal peer-recognition, also in the
visible forms of the magnificent list of Wikipedia
Service Awards.
We can realize
that the lack of a critical view of Wikipedia's theoretical difficulties is due
to "that technicians' observational and representational labor was
transparently subsumed into the workings of the instrument without attribution
of assisting human agency." This is well illustrated by Shapin (pp. 362,
386) if we conceptualize bureaucrats (top editors who like mainly to control
others' editings) and programmers under his
historical label of laborants-laborators or technicians.
A reader of
this present article may at the end ask what is the import of all the above
theoretical ramblings, especially considering that the author himself confessed
and showed that he uses many Wikipedia references. One answer to this is that
such references are given when their content is not controversial for the issue
at hand. An example is the link to ad
hominem, above. Whenever an issue is controversial, or often socially
important, then all the questions raised here become also important. That means
that in the case of the ad hominem, for
the further development of the argument I would have needed to resort to other
references, which are much more difficult to identify, or then to develop the
matter by myself.
I
mentioned at the beginning of this article that I come from a tradition of
systems thinking influenced by West Churchman. It is well different from what
goes under the label of knowledge management, which could also be thought of as
an approach to the issue treated in this article. If the analysis of Wikipedia,
to begin with, had followed Churchman's steps as outlined in his The Systems Approach (1968, 1984) it would have emphasized,
among other dimensions, the question of measure of performance, clients, and
decision makers. I assume, despite of not having seen it discussed publicly,
that Wikipedia "internally", whatever that should mean, discusses the
measure of performance. One should that it is not be only one or the mix of
several among items such as the number of "Google hits", daily
accesses, number of articles, number of edits, number of voluntary non-paid
editors in proportion to the number of pages, accuracy (whatever that is in
view of the above reference to "verifiability") etc. And this is much
more than the Composition, Accuracy, and Coverage
of the "Flagged Revisions Review" that years ago was
considered in "wikibooks.blogspot.se".
In order to identify legitimate measure(s) of performance
it is necessary for "someone" (but who?) to identify legitimate
clients or stakeholders of the system, and they must be guaranteed to be
properly represented by the actual decision-makers. In the case of Wikipedia it is not clear whether the privileged editors
acting as decision makers and not being "elected" by readers really
represent them with the consequence that they also act as clients. The decision
makers must in turn be guaranteed the resources necessary to run the system and
co-defining its environment. This includes the influence of external financers,
and the editor-manpower issue that, for instance, the present Wikimedia
Foundation's executive director Sue Gardner should consider to be one main
problem. Or, as "John" states in the comments to her statement
in blog.wikimedia.org on October 21, 2013: Many are discouraged from
making such corrections by said gatekeepers. If Wikipedia wishes to live up to
its ideals, it needs to allow much greater liberty in the information
presented. It would definitely benefit from allowing and presenting public
debate of those issues. While the truth may not always be immediately evident,
given time and effort it will come out, if allowed.
The
caveat is that this is not recognized to stand at the interface between ethic
and politics in a field that ignores basic issues of scientific method. Probably it also ignores relations to basic tenets of library
science before its ICT-reinterpretation, as historically perceived by studying
classics like, say, Gabriel Naudé's
Avis pour
dresser une bibliothèque [Guidelines for
Developing a Library.]
Naudé makes a "pre-Hegelian" case, for instance, about the importance
for libraries to acquire books that are seldom borrowed or are weird, a thought
that also permeates my "quality-control of information". The
ignorance, if not disregard, of scientific method is also patent when
considering those Wikipedia gatekeepers who allow themselves to practice an
"editing" that consists mostly of deletions.
They represent a denial of one basic tenet of what Wikipedia should
be about: the communication between
writers and readers of its articles. As V.H. Howard and J.H. Barton from the
Philosophy of Education Research Center of Harvard University formulate it the
book Thinking on Paper (1986,
p. 24) "Editing presupposes a text to edit." Such gatekeepers may
foster the accumulation of their own internal Wikipedia service awards in terms
of amount of edited (=deleted) text but in this way they do not contribute to
the creation or improvement of existing text, ignoring even Wikipedia's own
guidelines such as about how to Improve Articles. Still worse, they frustrate and
discourage the long-term recruitment of good-willed new users-editors, while at
the same time destroying the collective good reputation of conscientious
gatekeepers-editors. Most of these problems could have been identified with a
front line application of the systems approach in general, and measures of
performance in particular where gatekeepers would not allowed to be confused
with legitimate beneficiaries or clients of Wikipedia, the less so when
occasional contributors or "outsiders" to Wikipedia contribute more
to its contents than regular editors and gatekeepers appear to do (ref. Aaron Swartz's investigation).
At
the time of my own PhD dissertation on quality-control
of information I did not dare to go into the issue, but it stands as a
rationale for my late
blog-skepticism about "debates", and about all the rest leading to my
own brand of skepticism under the banners of "evangelization or
apocalypticism". If anything my idea of not only allowing but even
fostering public debate and its documentation not only in "Talk Pages"
but also in the main body of the articles of Wikipedia pages indicates that
approximation to truth within the idealized frame of a "hypersystem" should
be a main dimension of the system's measure of performance. But this discussion
implies the mind-blowing hubris of conceiving a paradoxical "system of
chaos" of the information explosion, and indicates the limits of our
legitimate investments and commitments to Wikipedia. We would meet what West
Churchman called the enemies of
the systems approach, especially politics, morality, and
religion, and that would take us too far, as it should. It confirms at the end
of this our article its initial poetic quotation about the wisdom we have lost
in knowledge, and knowledge we have lost in information. Wikipedia is a dream,
the latest expression of the old dream of the "enlightened" encyclopedists.