Globe article on wikipedia

I was interviewed for a Globe & Mail article last week, and the results came out on Saturday, May 6. It was - as usual - the provocation of being interviewed that seemed to get me thinking about wikipedia in a new way and as a different form of knowledge than what people are used to. The position I tried to formulate with the reporter was that wikipedia represents "knowledge in process" rather than "knowledge as product." I will try to elaborate on that claim here.

J S Mill

Wikipedia is huge. The number of articles, the number of languages, the rate of growth... all of these are more enormous each day and show no signs of tapering off. I often make the comparison, when speaking to students about the way in which new communication and media technologies come to general usage, to that point at which we stop asking "do you have..." (telephone number, fax number, email address, web site) and start asking "what is your ...." (telephone number, fax number, email address, web site). Wikipedia is entering that era of ubiquity, whether professors or publishers of competing services like it or not. As it moves into that territory, however, misunderstandings and improper assumptions about what it is seem to be causing trouble here and there. In particular, people are worried about the "reliability" of the information found on wikipedia.

This was the case in the situation that prompted the Globe & Mail reporter to contact me. She had found a profile of another journalist that she thought contained factual errors and misrepresentations. She wondered if this represented a flaw in the system... no one was checking to see if someone was really who or what they said they were.

My first response was to suggest that since she had noticed the errors/misrepresentations and could do something about it by editing the page, this was, in fact, the wikipedia system working as it was supposed to. If you check the history of the page she was referring to, there has been a pretty steady refinement of the content reflecting editing by several people. Her article has resulted in even more scrutiny, and the page is currently marked for deletion.

Leaving aside that particular page for a moment, let's return to the concern that she raised: people might arrive at a wikipedia page and accept it at face value. Or, to raise that a level to the concern of many academics, that students might cite it as a source for a paper. This, I believe, is a problem - not because the value of the information in wikipedia is less than printed sources, but because student citations and popular unthinking use of the wikipedia service is based on a misunderstanding of what it actually represents. I think many people - not surprisingly, really - think of wikipedia as being somehow akin to a regular encyclopedia. This isn't surprising in part because of the "pedia" in the name and in part because of the amount and tone (the famous "neutral" tone sought by wikipedia editors) of the information.

It is a mistake to leap to this assumption, however, because at a very fundamental level wikipedia is a process and not a product. In other words, when we go to wikipedia we get a view on the social production of knowledge as a process, we are not the recipient of knowledge products.

There are two ways to take that "process versus product" claim. One the one hand, it could be argued that all knowledge is socially produced and even the printed encyclopedia is merely a snapshot of what was believed at the time by a small group of people. In that sense wikipedia is just a more timely and volatile version of the same thing. This sort of argument is really not very productive in the end and I think it misses the point of wikipedia and why it is so important. The alternative perspective is to grant the social production of knowledge claim but rather than seeing it as a weakness, or evidence that relativism is invading another realm of discussion, we should instead celebrate the way in which wikipedia presents knowledge as being socially produced and invites every person to participate in that production process.

With wikipedia, ultimately, the real power is the production and not the consumption of knowledge. I am sure I am not the only person to see this, but I think it is very difficult, especially for people who are used to a world in which a small number of people take information, turn it into knowledge products (be they newspapers or textbooks), and sell it to a large number of people who consume it. Instead, we are seeing hints in wikipedia of a world in which a large number of people both produce and consume knowledge and that this is the normal state of affairs and that given enough time and interest anyone can move from the consumption side of the divide to the production side.

This is in and of itself a good thing. Knowledge production is good for you, and wikipedia makes it possible. Because it has reached critical mass - to return to the opening part of this article - participation in wikipedia has value in a way that blog posting or web page creation does not. Those are individual or interested project but wikipedia is explicitly and - so far - entirely a collective project.

In many ways wikipedia production is good for you in the same way that participating in politics is a good thing. As JS Mill argued, it is uplifting to take part and moves the human being closer to what he or she might become rather than what they are.

...r

Updates

I have been maintaining this page because I have an ongoing interest in this concept of information technology enabling the social production of knowledge. Here are further articles and links, in chronological order (newest at the bottom):

• a nice (and lengthy) discussion from Alex Bosworth on why wikipedia is so much fun . Alex makes the (should have been obvious) point that wikipedia is not a democracy, and in so doing brought my attention to the What wikipedia is not page, which should be required reading for everyone who uses it.
• There is an interesting take on this in the ClickNoise.
• Jaron Lanier has taken Wikipedia to task for supposed Digital Maoism, but read the responses before you believe too much of Lanier's complaint.
• Jon Udell has a lovely screencast of what actually happens when a wikipedia article is collectively edited (in this case the one on the heavy metal umlaut).
• Peter Nicholson, president of the Canadian Council of Academics, has been getting a LOT of attention for his presentation to the Association of Research Librarians on The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority. He uses Wikipedia as an example of "massively distributed collaborations," a term coined by Mitch Kapor in a talk, in November, 2005.
• And the NY Times has weighed in, reporting on the changes to the anyone can edit policy. (If that link expires, since NY Times blockades it's work eventually, I'll try to preserve a version here.)
• Recently, as part of their 10 years (on the web) anniversary, CBC asked a number of online journalists to write guest columns. Cory Doctorow contributed this piece on wikipedia and "truth."
• An interview with some of the main site maintainers for the English, German, and Japanese versions of Wikipedia.
• Howard Rheingold pointed me to to this article by Trebor Scholz. Trebor sees contributions to "peer-based production" as an example of collective action that is NOT some sort of digital maoism but instead a good example of individual motivation and social benefit coinciding. I know that is certainly my experience with del.icio.us - I tag for myself. If others benefit, great, but I don't see that as the prime motivation.
• The Washington Post wrote an article claiming that the controvery swirling in Kenneth Lay's entry on Wikipedia is a good example of why Wikipedia is "broken" or "it is good until it breaks" or some such thing. I don't suppose that the Washington Post managed to summon up enough irony (or reflexivity) to see that the very fact that the Washington Post was writing about the entry in Wikipedia was a perfect example of how wikipedia is NOT broken (which was my point with the Globe and Mail reporter, above). Anyway, the ensuing discussion in Slashdot is quite good, just make sure you have your "doofus score" (ahem, "threshold") set high enough to skim out the blather.
• New Yorker has a good piece on Wikipedia, which I found courtesy of Alex Halavais' blog