Wikipedia and Cultural Disruption

The user-created on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia closed the year with controversy as a couple high profile incidents sparked debate over the credibility of its content. The particulars, though, may be symptoms of a larger cultural disruption.

For the uninitiated, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia where anyone can enter content. It is built through a web based tool called a Wiki, which is derived from a Hawaiian word meaning quick. As of this writing there are 887,630 English language articles (thousands more in other languages), far exceeding any print encyclopedia. Any reader can add and edit content. Its advocates argue that a reference built by many will be more comprehensive because it is open and transparent. It is manifestation of the Wisdom of Crowds. Acts of vandalism are quickly removed as contributors monitor their subject areas and a hierarchy of moderators create areas for debating controversial issues.

But two recent events called into question Wikpedia's ability to self correct. First, there was the "prank" contribution in which a former Kennedy administration assistant was identified as being involved with a conspiracy to assassinate his former boss. The culprit later confessed, spurred in part by the investigatory efforts of Wikipedia Watch proprietor and critic Daniel Brandt. Later, some accused Adam Curry, one of the originators of podcasting, of elevating his contributions to the technology by deleting references to others.

Both incidents raise serious issues. Clearly, the Kennedy entry fell through the cracks. A resource with this much influence has to have better safeguards. (Here are some steps that are being taken.) The Curry affair is more problematic. Should someone be permitted to edit material about their own work? Curry claims he was eliminating inaccurate information and should not be disqualified. Theses cases raises questions about how Wikipedia can maintain its integrity dispite the incursions of ego, idiocy and vandalism. At its root is a question about authority.

And when it comes to authority, traditional academic references cannot unequivocally claim a higher degree. Who can honestly say that academia is free of ego, politics, orthodoxies and pranks? Recall the "Sokal affair" and a recent prank pulled by MIT students who created a program to produce gibberish papers and had one accepted by an academic conference. Also note the academic journal Nature compared Wikipedia and Britannica and found them to be relatively equal:

In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team. Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively."

It is the issue of authority that makes Wikipedia a symptom of disruption. Mark Federman of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto picks up where Neil Postman left off and runs the opposite direction from Postman, arguing that the digitally connected world irrevocably changes what we know and how we know it. In his essay "Why Johnny and Janey Can't Read, and Why Mr. and Ms. Smith Can't Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in tumultuous times" Federman walks through the social disruptions brought about the transitions from orality, to literacy, to the hyper connectivity that began with Morse code in 1844. To jump to the point, Federman says,

Roughly speaking, it takes about three hundred years for the foundational knowledge ground of a culture to change, that is for the society to change its conception of what is valued as knowledge, who decides what is valued as knowledge, who controls access to the knowledge itself, and who controls access to those controls.

The greatest disruption occurs in the middle of the epochal transition, exactly where we sit 161 years after Morse. We are in the midst of moving away from the literate model of authority by attribution, to authority by aggregation.

Consider the reversal that has occurred here. In the traditional literate structure of the academy, indexers who controlled the portals to knowledge were very few, very knowledgeable, and possessed a high level of public trust. In the traditional literate system, assertion of both meaning and value of a collection of knowledge by that trusted individual, whose power and authority were vested through an institutional proxy, was paramount for establishing the readability of that collection. But it seems that we are in the process of changing from the traditional, closed system of knowledge to a more open system of knowledge. A single person or authority asserting meaning and value is automatically suspect, like in the example of Sears.ca; it is the collective wisdom of all the Maries and Steves and Alices that creates trust.

The UCaPP world – ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate – is a world of relationships and connections. It is a world of entangled, complex processes, not content. It is a world in which the greatest skill is that of making sense and discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux. It is a world in which truth, and therefore authority, is never static, never absolute, and not always true.

Wikipedia, Google, the blogosphere, del.icio.us are all emergent tools for negotiating truth in the hyperconnected world. It is a new Commons. And if the Wikipedia incidents tell us anything, it tells us the commons deserves a caretaker.

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