Wikipedia, Critical Point of View

internship at INC – researcher on Wikipedia

margreet — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 07:54:11 +0000

RESEARCHER (internship)

The Institute of Network Cultures (INC) is a media research centre that actively contributes to the field of network cultures through research, events, publications and online dialogue. The INC was founded in 2004 by media theorist Geert Lovink, following his appointment as professor within the Institute of Interactive Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam). The institute acts as a frame within several researches and meetings take place as well as publications are being published.

The project – Critical Point of View- (CPOV) is a collaboration of the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India), the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands and various partners in Germany. The first conference took place in Bangalore on the 12th and 13th of January 2010. The second conference took place place in Amsterdam on 26th and 27th of March. A third conference will take in Leipzig, Germany on September 24-26 and will focus on the Germanspeaking part of Wikipedia (the second largest after English). After these event the project will focus on the production of an INC reader on the matter.

The CPOV collaborative research network is an ongoing project for which we are now looking for an intern. Wikipedia has emerged as the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. Different grouped – Wikipedians, users, academics, researchers, gurus of Web 2.0, publishing houses, artists and governments have entered into fierce debates and discussions about what the rise of Wikipedia and Wiki cultures means and how they influence the information societies we live in. The Wikipedia itself has been at the centre of much controversy, pivoted around questions of accuracy, anonymity, vandalism, expertise, and authority.

RESEARCHER (internship)

We are looking for an enthusiastic, energetic, inquisitive and precise master student with knowledge in the field of new media. As the conference has an international atmosphere, a good control of English is required. The Institute of Network Cultures offers you the possibilities for an internship of 3-6 months (starting September/October 2010 or soon after).

Tasks of the researcher:
• write (book) reviews on the subject
• collect interesting articles on the subject
• writing contributions and responses for the webpages/blog
• editorial assistance in the production of the INC Wikipedia reader

The traineeship will approximately be from 8 till a maximum of 40 hours a week.

If you are interested please mail a motivated letter with CV to margreet[at]networkcultures[dot]org. For further information you can contact Margreet Riphagen; margreet[at]networkcultures[dot]org.

Interview with Hendrik-Jan Grievink

julianabrunello — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 08:55:18 +0000

What was the compelling reason for you to get involved in a project concerning Wikipedia?
As a designer, I dedicate myself to inventing new ways of understanding the world through images. I use existing images in almost every project: the Fake for Real memory game I showed during the conference is a good example of this. This is a game that pairs images to make a statement about simulation in ourl world. Another example would be the Next Nature book (to be published early 2011 by Actar, Barcelona). This book talks about what we call ‘culturally emerged nature’, or ‘the nature caused by people’. Through hundreds of images and observations we analyse the influence of technology and design on our daily lives. These projects can be looked up on respectively http://www.fakeforreal.com and http://www.nextnature.net

A lot of images that we use are created by ourselves (co-editor Koert van Mensvoort and me) but even more come from all kinds of sources: some traceable, others not. We strive to credit all authors and would love to pay them a good fee for using their material – if this was possible, which it isn’t. Paying for all visual content would quadruplicate the costs of such a publication, which would make it impossible to get published. As for the credit part: we will always credit artists for creative images, but for small or generic images – even commercial ones, we’re not going to do this, it’s just way too time-consuming. Also, a lot of the times it’s realy hard to trace back the origins of an image in today’s copy/paste culture.

When I heard of the Wiki Loves Art contest I was immediately sympathetic to the initiative, because I think these kinds of best-practise projects are crucial to change the way people (in this case: museums and cultural institutions) think about intellectual property. They have to realise that limiting the availability of resources limits cultural production in a very direct way. Next to that, I am interested in everything that signals new forms of cultural production and the crowdsourced archiving of images certainly does that.

Are you a Wikipedian yourself or a user? Have you contributed to any articles? What about Wikicommons? Any contributions from you that we can find there?
Although I have contributed a few articles I would not consider myself a wikipedian, neither do I have any ambitions of becomimg one. As for Wikimedia Commons, I must confess I am abit of a leech: I use it often, yet only contributed little – I am sorry to say. But I will improve my life in the future! Actually, I am thinking of uploading a batch of my work and visual elements from my work when I have the time. So it can last a while, as I am extremely busy, at least until the end of this year.

In 2006 however, I did the graphic design for the My Creativity convention, organised by the Institute Of network Cultures. One of the main images I designed for this event was a copyright symbol that I manipulated into a snake that bites its own tail. A very strong image i must say in all modesty, even today. I uploaded this image to Wikicommons, but so far it has not been used by people, only on some incidental powerpoint shows here and there. It hooked me up to Paul Keller from Creative Commons Netherlands, who proposed to turn it into a font so that it could be used on people’s PC. Now Paul and I collaborate on the WLA book. But we still should do the font. Maybe there are readers of the INC website who would be interested in doing this?

At the conference you gave us some insight on the ‘Wiki Loves Art’ book. How is the production going? What can we expect to see in the book? Have you planned already a possible launching date?
At the moment we’re editing material from Flickr (both texts and images) and correspondence between the organisers and the contributers. This are mainly small observations which will be presented in an A-Z index that runs through the whole book. You can think of comments by other Flickr users, statements from the participating museums and short analyses of the visual material, like a comparison of different images from the same object, or a special page dedicated to the person who obsessively photographed all the information labels in the Boijmans museum in Rotterdam. This is the most light-hearted part of the book. More a documentation or celebration of the project. Next to that, we have longer written essays by contributors who reflect on topic relating to the project, like copyright, amateur culture, curatorial issues, crowdsourcing etc.

My little baby in the project however, is the visual contribution part. We invited artists and designers – young and upcoming as well as more established ones – to make a derivative work, a remix you could say, of the images from the WLA project. For example, one artist makes a series of merchandising products by combining images from the WLA database with online printing-on-demand tools. This results in products like an Isaac Israels Thong, Mondrian Sneakers etc. and conceptualizes a kind of virtual Wiki Loves Art Museum – a museum that exists only through it’s DIY merchandising.

We do this because we are convinced that good practices of remixing otherwise copyrighted material can help change the way cultural institutions think about intellectual propery in a positive way, in the hope that in the near future they will loosen up their IP regimes. For me, this part of the project is very exciting because it relates the most directly to my practice as a designer and personal interest in this project: the (re)use of cultural resources for new forms of cultural production. In the end, it is all about the question: how can we have as much high quality visual material accessible for everyone as possible?

The launching date has to be confirmed, but the plan is to release the book during the Economy of the Commons event, organised by INC in November this year.

By reading the blog entrance on your presentation, I came across the following sentence: "A real challenge would be to think of Wikimedia Commons as a goal in itself." Would you care to comment on that?
Well, as I stated in the answer to your previous question, my personal agenda is as much banal as it is idealistic: I just want as many visual resources online so that I can use them for the projects I do. The idealistic part is that I want this for cultural actors all over the globe because I believe this contributes to a better world. At least one where cultural production is more free and less restricted by intellectual property laws.

Since its start, Wikimedia Commons is mainly set up as a picture archive for Wikipedia. There is nothing wrong with that because Wikipedia is still very text-based and could use some imagery here and there. My problem with it is that Wikipedia is very much linked to literate culture – a perception of the world through the written word. But the cycles of meaning production in the world are more and more dominated by images (whether you think that is a good or a bad thing). If you want this process to be more democratic instead of dominated by corporations, than the tools behind visual production should be more democratic and collaborative than tey are now.

For example, the visuals from the keynote presentation that Al Gore used to adress his global warming statement have made a huge impact on (at least a part of) the world’s ideas on this topic. Regardless what your position is in this debate, one has to acknowledge the highly manipulative character of these images (as is the very nature of images, but that’s another story). So when there’s manipulation through images, whether it is for ‘the good cause’ or not, we deal with power relations and power always corrupts and thus needs contra-power. In this case, we talk about Visual Power: the power of images to change the way people think. To go short, I think Gore’s presentation should be available online in an open format, including all the media files that come with it, so that it can be re-used, mis-used and re-interpreted by anyone. In a flash of self-chosen naïvity (call it idealism), I would say the same should go for voting forms, press photography, corporate imagery and so on.

I see a huge potential for Wikimedia Commons there. It is shocking how little cultural actors (like my designer friends) are aware of the existence of Wikimedia Commons, let alone that they use it or even contribute to it. This is not just because of their lack of interest, they just don’t know about it because they have other tools. They google everything because Google image search seems to have a monopoly as image archive. But we all know what comes with finding images on Google: they’re often poor quality, badly tagged and from unclear sources and often not copyright-free. Flickr is a bit more reliable in that respect, although it is hard to cut through all these Eiffel tower pictures there. But for some reason the architecture and design of these two websites is just so much more convenient for cultural actors to get their images from. There is a lot to be learned from these commercial giants. I see a huge potential if Wikimedia Commons would be able to abondon their librarian’s mentality and rethink itself as the world’s largest collaborative media database. But before that happens, we need to realise that understanding the world through text is on its demise and rethink the world’s cycles of meaning production from a visual culture perspective.

Do you have any recommondations for Wikimedia Commons?

Acknowledge that we live in a visually oriented culture and act to that
Learn from succesful tools on the web such as Google’s image search and Flickr.com
Try to engage image makers and other people who professionally use images on a daily basis

Interview with Felipe Ortega

julianabrunello — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:46:17 +0000

As a computer scientist and engineer you could have chosen among many different objects of study, why Wikipedia?
For 3 reasons:

Firstly, at that time (2005) it was very clear for me that Wikipedia was a new Internet phenomenon, a flagship initiative, one that would play a key role in the Open Movements arena, just like Linux did back in the 90s.

Secondly, Wikipedia was creating a vast compilation of activity records from millions of editors. It had the potential to become one of the largest online commuities in the world, thus making it unique and offering a great challenge to analyze it, at the same time.

Finally, because of its goal. We all know that compiling all human knowledge is a very ambitious goal. But even in its current state (still a long way to go for completing its mission) Wikipedia has proven to be valuable for hundreds of millions of persons. Its content is adhered to the definition of free cultural works [ http://freedomdefined.org/Definition ]. It's a perfect example of the advantages of this totally open model for knowledge production. So, I thought it deserved my attention to explain why this approach works in practice, defying our classical preconceived models for collaborative production.

What gave you the idea to develop the WikiXRay tool?
From Eric S. Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar": "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch".

I don't think that my tool (still in "beta" state after 3 years) can be really considered a "good work of software", yet. But it did start from a personal itch: the lack of a reliable tool to parse available data dumps published by WMF. I think I tried 3 or 4 tools, and mwdumper was the best one, but I constantly got errors parsing the huge Engilish Wikipedia dump.

Thus, I thought carefully about my options and it was pretty clear that, at least, I should attempt to build my own tool if I ever wanted to do serious work with those data.

In addition to this, reproducibility was (and still is) and obsession for me. Too frequently, we find yet another quantitative analysis on a certain set of FLOSS projects, online communities, etc. And you cannot reproduce it, validate it and learn from their approach for the simple reason that the source code is not available anywhere! So, the best option for me was to code libre software, under GPL, and let others to freely inspect, adapt, use and distribute it.

What was the most difficult thing in developing this tool?
There were many difficult problems to solve, but I think the most complicated one was to build a parser with decent performance. Parsing huge XML files was a little bit tricky, since you cannot store the whole thing in memory (+2TB is out of question).

Interestingly, last month I found a new parser (also libre software) that apparently outperforms mine. But that's also the good side of libre software. Now I can try to adapt it in my own code . In any case, I'm very happy that WikiXRay is still one of the best options out there to analyze Wikipedia dumps.

How do you see WikiXRay being used in future research? Can it be used on other platforms as well?
Well, right now it's a cross-platform tool, and I've heard of people using it on Windows, Linux and Mac OS without problems. All dependencies (MySQL, GNU-R and Python) are available for these platforms. This is great when you're trying to build something useful for a broad audience. It's a good starting point.

However, right now it only works for MediaWiki dumps. In the future, I'd love to have alternative parsers for other wikis (Tiki Wiki, DokuWiki, MoinMoin... well I can not mention them all!).The advantage is that the analysis modules are independent from the type of platform analyzed, as long as you store the info using the same data model.

Other ideas could be:

Feeding a web interface to visualize the current state of your wiki (community, activity, trends). This could be great as a service for large wiki communities, like Wikia, or even for enterprise wikis.

Adding support for seasonality analysis, trends and forecasting (something I'd love to work on as soon as we find time and funding ).

Integrating additional perspectives like: Social Network Analysis, effort analysis and patterns, co-authorship, forecasting/identifying prospective top-quality articles...

You have stated on your WikiSym 2010 summary that “the need to find solutions for social scientists and engineers to work together in interdisciplinary groups, is probably one of the top-priority issues in [your] research agenda.”How do you envision it? Any concrete plans already?
This is absolutely right, and it's a must for reasearch on virtual communities today. If we just focus on numbers, trends, activity patterns etc. and we obviate the social side of the story, we're missing in practice half of the whole picture. We will never understand virtual communities completely.

I'd like to explore why there seem to be so many difficulties to create interdisciplinary working teams (tech sciences + social sciences). Admittedly, we may "speak" and "interpret" things in a bit different way. But we must overcome these differences, since they are not the problem but the *asset* when we build this kind of teams.

We don't have concrete plans for WikiSym 2011, yet. But I'd love to have a panel where researchers from both "worlds" can sit around a table with the audience and debate on best practices for interdisciplinary teams to become a reality.

What are your predictions concerning the future of Wikipedia and its influence?
[Smiling] You know, last time I answered this question, there was a strong polemic, so I tend to be cautious (even though subsequent research and reports have surfaced some of the key problems we had already identified).

My impression is that Wikipedia influence will keep on growing, specially in development countries, as Wikipedias with fewer articles attract more contributions and expand their coverage. At the same time, we need to find new ways for weaving edits from academics and scholars with the contributions from the large existing community, to address the problem of creating content in very specific niches of knowledge. This also involves spreading the word on how to use Wikipedia effectively among students and scholars alike, and eliminating widespread FUD among many faculties who still think that Wikipedia is just "a perfect source for students to avoid doing the hard work".

Finally, I think we still have to find "new ways of using Wikipedia". Many people use it as an encyclopedia, right. But we can also see a source for information contextualization and categorization, for creating thesaurus, for translation... The longer the list, the best we will exploit the many possibilities of this "everyday partner".

Anything else you would like to add? Comments, ideas, thoughts?
If I can make a call, I would really like to spot the attention of funding entities (private and public foundations, EU government, etc.) on the urgent need to invest in research on virtual communities. In our own research group, we have spent several years in this research line with very little support, but with great results and outreach, so far. NSF is funding 7 or 8 projects on virtual communities and open collaboration in the USA, while EU is somewhat lagging behind, in my opinion.

Not only Wikipedia, but virtual communities in general are a core piece of the Information Society, and the so-called "Future Internet". If we just focus on technology but forget about "people using technology" we may lose and important perspective: that this Information Society should be user-centered, and not technology-centered. There must be a serious effort to fund research lines to understand this reality, creating interdisciplinary teams to face up the challenge.

Dare to Quote! On Zizek and Wikipedia

geert — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:57:40 +0000

Reading Slavoj Zizek's 2010 Living in the End Times book, I noticed the author quoting Wikipedia a number of times. No big deal, you would say but it is significant in the light of the ongoing controversy around Wikipedia as a reliable (academic) source. Zizek is considered a leading intellectual, and arguably Europe's most famous baby boom philosopher (b. 1949). This postwar generation entered their professional lives in the age of the (electronic) type writer, well before the introduction of the personal computer. As authors they are the ones that profit from the copyright regimes and are known to have a firm grip on the print media. Even though computer literate (read: they can type) their cultural attitude towards the WWW is ambivalent--if not absent. If a critic like Zizek includes Wikipedia in his verbal stream of consciousness it is a sign of the times that Wikipedia has become an integral part of our media environment.

So far, in the case of Zizek, referenced media have been books, followed by feature films. Forget newspapers, television and radio, or hearsay conversations and correspondences. If Zizek starts telling stories it is based on contemporary myths and current affairs that are supposed to be known to all of us, written down without detailed references. If Zizek starts to theorize he talks aloud, like in a bar, and it is this oral, narrative element that constitutes his philosophy. To include Wikipedia in these rants is part of a significant cultural shift and it is odd that Zizek himself is unaware of this Event.

As far as I know Zizek has not yet written at length about the internet, mobile phones, e-readers or computer games. What in Living in the End Times resurfaces is his fascination for post-humanism and techno-gnosis. The example analyzed in this book it is MIT's Sixth Sense research program ("wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information"). Much like Zizek's analysis of early 90s Virtual Reality it is in particular the embodiment of information that interests the psycho analyst. Zizek cannot distinguish between networked communication and the 'virtual architecture' (if possible in 3D) of Second Life or World of Warcraft. The invisible, non-representational nature of new media falls outside of Zizek's theory scope. Zizek is not the only theorist we can blame for the confusion between cyberspace and virtual reality. But twenty years onwards you would think that someone could have given Zizek a basic update what has happened in the world of new media.

Libertarians are indeed featured (Ayn Rand) but the Silicon Valley techno-libertarian religion is not an object of study for Zizek. It is in particular the dark, apocalyptic side of Ray Kurzweil that interests Zizek, not Google. An interesting example of his blind spot for the networked nature of capitalism is on display in Zizek's visit to Google's Mountain View headquarters where he spoke during the Authors@Google lunch series in October 2008. Zizek is the perfect example if you want to show how little cultural studies and film theories have to say about the internet. As Zizek recently admitted to The Guardian: "I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality." The problem in this case is that Zizek not even as a basic set of critical notions, let alone a theory. This could be reason why he remains silence about it in his books.

All the more interesting that In Living in the End Times we can find at least five references to Wikipedia (always without URL). The books also refers to used internet sources in thirteen footnotes in which he does point to actual web locations but forgets to mention dates or author names. The editors at Verso Books did not include Wikipedia in the index. They did include 'internet' with three page references, but none of them are significant, idea-wise. "He is very much a thinker for our turbulent, high speed, information-led lives," Sophie Fiennes remarks in the same Guardian piece. Sure, but it is a pity that when Zizek will eventually slow down to write his real Magnum Opus its topic will be Hegel and not the internet.

Wikitrust reduces ‘oracle’ ilusion

julianabrunello — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:22:38 +0000

Wikitrust is an open source software that can be added to your firefox extensions. It shows you "the origin and author of every word of a wiki, as well as a measure of text trust that indicates the extent with which text has been revised".

Jaron Lanier points out in his essay Digital Maoismus that "In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle." His critique here is clear if you take the platform design of Wikipedia into account. Due to the lack of vision on who, rather than what, has authored an article in Wikipedia, the information presented on the articles' main pages wins an 'oracle' quality. I mean, it just makes it look a lot more authoritative than it would look like, if you could see the work of the many individuals who were actually behind the authoring of an article.

Using Wikitrust allows the Wikipedia user to have a better understanding of how Wikipedia articles come to existance, making the 'oracle' ilusion generated by its design to be, at least, reduced. The information does not come out of 'the web' or 'Wikipedia' anymore, it can be traced back to individuals.

For the add-on download go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11087/ .

Manuel Schmalstieg and the Wiki-Sprint

julianabrunello — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 09:48:31 +0000

by Juliana Brunello

Manuel Schmalstieg has recently directed an event called Wiki-Sprint. The sprint concept derived from the code-sprints of the FLOSS communities, in which a team of developers came together in order to engage in some serious code-writing. Only this time, there would be no code-writing, but article writing for Wikipedia.

For this, a team of contributors was gathered to take part in the event's workshop, which consisted of rewriting and improving the Wikipedia article of VJing. I ask Schmalstieg about this experience:

Most Wikipedia articles are written in collaboration by people who have not met. Why did you choose to make it a face-to-face event? What are the benefits in writing an article this way?
I should make clear that my main target was actually not the improvement of this article… That was the alibi, but the actual objective was to explore the performative act of collective writing, in the tradition of Surrealism… and also informed by the "reading performances" of artists such as Arnold Dreyblatt or Rainer Ganahl, as well as the recent practice of collaborative technical "writing-sprints" that has emerged from the free software scene, exemplified by the Flossmanuals project. The public reading of the article, and its inclusion in Wikipedia (as an audio article), was the crowning of this performative aspect. To answer your question, the benefits of this method of writing are: a) a much faster writing process, b) strict time management, and c), the unique experience of human interaction that derives from such an intensive work situation.

Were the people involved in the sprint already involved with Wikipedia?
Most of them were not. When searching for volunteers for this project, I targetted different groups: specialists in the field (audiovisual performance and VJing), who had already written on that topic; heavy contributors of the existing Wikipedia articles (in English and French version). From the 11 people who participated, 3 had some previous editing experience on Wikipedia (one of them, Sleepytom, was a major contributor of the VJ article in 2006).

How was it to work with the previous editors of this Wikipedia article, who did not belong to the sprint-group?
As far as I am aware, the article has practically no regular editors. It is the result of initial work by a handful of wikipedians in 2006-2007, who aren't active anymore. The rest is the result of "drive-by editing". So we didn't have any response from the original editors of the article (with the exception of Sleepytom).
One exception: during the writing-sprint, I had the chance to meet Anthere (Florence Devouard), who had contributed photos from Pixelache festival to the French version of the article. But she isn't a specialist of visual art, so she didn't contribute to the text of the article.

Have you been following the changes on the VJing article in Wikipedia? Were there any? How do you feel about them?
Yes, I have been watching the changes - a bit like a gardener who planted vegetable seeds, and observes the slow growing process. There were some small corrections, minor additions, a bit of cleaning up. I think it's a good sign - it would prove that a "solid" article with consistent references can act as a barrier against spammy self-referential edits (which were very frequent on the previous version).

How difficult was it to organize such an event? Do you recommend it and could you give us any tips?
The project was organized in a very short timespan, which was a problem for getting any institutional funding partners (also the fact that it doesn't fit into any category does not help). In the end, everything was done on a shoestring budget, all the logistics being handled by the Mapping Festival team who loved the project. On the other hand, it was great to see how easily people from the "general public" understood the idea and how positively they responded to it. We had a lot of enthousiastic feedback.
However, I wouldn't repeat the project in this format, as it really was a context-specific experiment.

Anything else you would like to add? Comments, ideas, thoughts?
The most recent news: we are currently preparing a print publication of the article, with some statements and reflections from our participants. This very weird relationship between Wikipedia content and print distribution is something I'm looking forward to work on in the future (the next planned step is a printed edition of my favorite Wikipedia article: The KLF).
For more background information on the wiki-sprint, here is a FAQ page that I wrote during the preparation phase: wiki.greyscalepress.com/FAQ
Finally, if after this interview you want to actively engage with Wikipedia, I suggest creating some of the missing articles on pioneering media artists, such as Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, for instance.

Data en research juni 2010 – Kritiek rondom Wikipedia

margreet — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:20:58 +0000

Een artikel in Data en Research van juni 2010 over de Kritiek rondom Wikipedia.

Download het artikel hier.

Amit Basole: Wikipedia is irrelevant, and it’s not

julianabrunello — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 08:30:44 +0000

(Wikipedia Critical Point of View Conference March 26-27 2010)
by Karlijn Marchildon

"The interesting thing about Wikipedia is that it's irrelevant, and at the same time it's not." With this statement Amit Basole opens his talk on the global issues and outlooks of Wikipedia and the broader context in which it exists. Basole explains that although the majority of the world's population hasn't ever heard of Wikipedia (making it quite irrelevant), the collaborative knowledge platform at the same time does represent a new social order, and a new economy that very much impacts the lives of exactly those people who haven't ever heard of it. In that sense, Wikipedia could be understood as relevant indeed.

Amit Basole has come to Amsterdam to give a talk about the implications of this new social order. As many before him have claimed, there has been a shift from an industrial, to a knowledge based society. This shift has many far reaching implications for the world's population, it's cultures and knowledge hierarchies. In fact, Basole ultimately claims that in this new social order, new (knowledge) hierarchies have been born. Basole, together with the India-based Vidya Ashram collective on whose behalf he speaks, has taken it upon himself to "investigate these dynamics of knowledge in society, production and transmission, values, its relationship to the state, the market and so on".

Vidya Ashram is a collective that believes that a radical intervention in the world of knowledge is necessary for a radical transformation of society. As society is changing, so is knowledge. With the driving philosophy that a people's knowledge movement (as in Lokavidya) is part of mass movements of people on the less fortunate side of the digital divide, can lead to a new philosophy of knowledge required for a radical pro-people transformation of society. With this socialist background, Vidya Ashram aims at bringing people from all over together to share, debate and explore the new knowledge hierarchies.

In a way, Wikipedia as an embodiment of this virtual knowledge, reflects and flattens hierarchies of knowledge as it presents different approaches of content, as it is collaborative.

More concretely, Vidya Ashram makes an effort to open debate and interaction on knowledge hierarchies and flows, in order to give shape to this new pro-people society where all types and flows of knowledge are respected from Lokavidya knowledge (evolving tacit people's practical knowledge) to traditional (scientific) knowledge. As the Vidya Ashram web site states; it calls on all college and university educated people to deliberate on the following actions:

Opposition to the building of elite institutions of higher education.
Recognition of knowledge in society, knowledge with peasants and artisans, and reflection of this in our writings and public stands.
Support for proper economic returns on Lokavidya; at a minimum buying Lokavidya products, and campaigning for it.
Opposition of policies that restrict peasants and artisans from using their knowledge for economic activity. Opposition to the expropriation of lokavidya by the corporations.
Campaign for public spending on research in the fields and work-sites by peasants and artisans.
Work for the dignity of Lokavidya by building overlaps between formal education at all levels and Lokavidya.

This call is a clear action towards the exploration of the ruling knowledge paradigm. In that sense, Basole's talk on the concept of knowledge and society is radical and relevant in the same sense as he claims Wikipedia is. In his words: "Although the content is conservative, the form is radical."

Interview with Florian Cramer

julianabrunello — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:55:06 +0000

by Juliana Brunello

Have you/would you contribute in editing Wikipedia? Do you use it?
Yes, I have contributed to Wikipedia and am the principal author of a few articles in the German and English Wikipedia.

You mentioned in your presentation that Wikipedia is precisely the opposite of a CPoV, because it is based on objectivism. Do you believe it is possible to successfully create a project like Wikipedia based on CPoV instead of NPoV?
Not as a unified resource where diverging views have to be merged into a single text since the balancing of those views would itself imply a NPoV. The most realistic model would be to replace the current database underlying the Wikipedia Wiki with a distributed version control system that allows to run several branches of a project in sync to each other.("Project Levitation", an initiative by the German Chaos Computer Club, tried to do just that, but doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.)

How would it look like?
Probably like a number of parallel versions of the current Wikipedia where the articles have a stronger critical voice, and do not pretend to purvey objective knowledge.

Why has no one created it yet?
Because there are issues of scale. Such a system is considerably more complex and requires more work, but Wikipedia has a limited number of contributors and administrators. As we have learned at the CPOV conference, limitations of administrative capacity - time for and necessary amounts of editorial work - are the bottleneck of Wikipedia, and the genuine root of exclusionism and mainstreaming of voices.

Would that still be an encyclopedia?
The definition of "encyclopedia" is not set in stone. The success of Wikipedia was founded on leveraging new technological possibilities of collaborative authorship in the Internet, much in contrast to the standard approach of considering the Internet just another channel or outlet for existing media and editorial work flows. It seems as if Wikipedia has reached a critical impasse now and needs to make the next step embracing networked media and ridding entirely itself from the textbook paradigm.

Would it be better than Wikipedia's NPoV?
It would depend on the particular domain of knowledge. The current Wikipedia policy is good for articles on engineering, science and other areas of formal knowledge, but doesn't scale well to social, cultural and political topics. We are encountering, in other words, yet another failure of the cybernetic paradigm of computable knowledge.

Peter Naegele posted on our blog that "objectivism holds that reality exists independent of observation. Therefore, defining reality based on consensus is non-objectist". Would you comment on that?
The problem - known since Chuang-Tzu, Plato, Descartes and Kant - is that we have no grasp of reality independent of observation so one needed to be god in order to be a qualified objectivist, and have a "neutral point of view". (And a gnostic would even dispute that.)

Where do you see the Wikipedia project in the future? Will it evolve into something new or stagnate?
It will likely continue to stagnate because it has reached the limitations of what is possible with its technological and editorial structure.

Wikipedia GLAM

julianabrunello — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:14:39 +0000

Wikipedia GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) is a project initiative that tries to encourage culture-sector professionals to improve Wikipedia in their area of expertise. The project page provides the future contributor with some basic guidance and tips in order to edit Wikipedia articles.

Some examples of Wikipedia/culture-sector interaction can be found on the same page. Most of them are positive ones, such as a number of donations made by the German Federal Archives or the Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam) to the Wikimedia Commons or the projects Wikipedia Loves Art coordinated by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the sister project Wiki Loves Art from the Netherlands.

Other related WikiProjects in the cultural area are:

WikiProject Arts, which includes several subprojects involving more specific themes like asthetics, films, visual arts, dance, theater, etc;
WikiProject Libraries, which involves coordinating and mainteining library-related content as well as assisting Wikipedia with categorizations;
WikiProject Museums , which has among other goals the improvement on Wikipedia's coverage of museums.

A conference on the GLAM theme has been held in Australia in August 2009. Furthermore, a list of reccomendations addressed to the GLAM sector concerning law, technology, education and business has been developed and can be accessed under GLAM-WIKI Recommendations. A similar event is being planned for October 2010 in London by the Wikimedia UK .