WIKIPEDIA DEMOCRACY,
AND WIKICRACY
The critical context of
editing Wikipedia articles
Kristo Ivanov, Umeå University, (Nov. 2013, revised. 230821-1110)
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
Personalities
and social context of Wikipedia
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.