Karatzogianni combines in her talk the theory of cyberconflicts and media. According to her you have to see the Internet as a dialogue. We are looking at a medium and we have to analyse the discourses at that medium. So what control of information do we have? We are using the open source as a choice, we try to keep it very open but it is a mistake to give the people this role. In this environment, Wikipedia and similar endeavors, provides a battleground for dominance in our global political consciousness. This battleground has internal conflicts, competitors within the open software movement and external others in the overall business of knowledge. The tread is not Wikipedia’s content, and even the battle of edit wars is futile. The real threat and promise of Wikipedia and open knowledge production is not an alternative knowledge production, but the alternative to knowledge production. Wikipedia content is producing a single neutral point of view, knowledge is constantly shifting but adhering to the universal neutral fact based encyclopedia. The process is radical the content is not. University scholars learn multiple points of view and Karatzogianni strongly advocated multiple points of view during teaching but Wikipedia only provides a single point of view. More information about her:

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Negotiating the Neutral Point of View: Politics and the Moral Economy of Wikipedia Presentation by Andrew Famiglietti for the Critical Point of View (CPoV) conferece in Amsterdam, 27.03.2010 Andrew Famiglietti's presentation was about the concept of moral economy applied to the Wikipedia. He does so by analyzing the article called 'Gaza War' in the period of 2008/2009. He starts by referring to the work of E.P. Thompson and how crowd intervention influenced the way grain prices were regulated in the 18th century. He applies this idea into how Wikipedia regulates its resources around its community. First, how was the crowd regulating resources in times of scarcity? In case of Wikipedia: how do they manage the scarce resource of volunteer labor within the site? This is a matter that Wikipedians have to work out themselves. He believes that they do that in terms of what Thompson called 'Moral Economy'. In the 18th century there were outrages concerning the procedure of regular market forces that was considered illegitimate by the starving population; in the 21st century's Wikipedia there were outrages by the editors, who considered some of the actions by the site owners were illegitimate based on moral values. He presents then a case study of how values that organize the moral economy have particular political effects in the particular case of the Gaza War article. He shows how the particular design of the page influences how debate emerges. Famiglietti starts by pointing out to the title, which is handled as being an important element on debates. Secondly, he points out to the info-box on the right side of the article, which has a central role in structuring information around the article and therefore was an important part of the debate. He continues by calling our attention to the 66 archive pages of the discussion, which are equivalent to about 600 printed pages. The page provides bookmarks to particular important debates, which is necessary due to its sheer volume. There is also a timeline that can be used to see how the debate evolved. He focuses his studies on the heavy editing period while hostilities during the event are going on and the period immediately after that. The volume of information on the discussion page, along with the difficulties of navigating it, makes it difficult for editors to actually keep up with the conversation and understand what is going on. Bots here have also a role, as they archive pages by moving them form the main page. Some editors become increasingly frustrated and others believe that this is done on purpose in order to sabotage them. As the pages become longer and longer, chunks of information are split out into sub-articles. The discussion than shifted into whether this was a POV (point of view) fork. Forking points of view were suggested by some editors (maybe naively, not knowing about Wikipedia's policies) as a kind of a potentially positive direction to Wikipedia to move. This notion of splitting different POVs has been explored by Wikipedia, however it would set up different articles on the same topic, avoiding neutrality. The idea was largely rejected and Famiglietti believes that it has to do with the management of labor as a resource. Forking duplicates effort and splits the labor force. He believes that the containment of forkings is intended to retain scarce labor resources. (I ask myself though; discussing is so much more work, so splitting would be a better option, if it was the case.) Dangers of nationalism to Wikipedia: Administrators have fundamentally played a role in policing the boundaries of the editors' community. The issue was therefore under a particular administrator's scrutiny. The editors were aware of that scrutiny and the fact that they were under surveillance. Neutrality was constantly renegotiated. In several occasions the title of the article was changed depending on who was available to talk to at the moment. This also points out to the fact that it is not possible to represent all POVs in the title, which is another design problem of the platform. Moreover, the process of neutrality involves the three guiding principles: Neutral Point of View , WP:V and WP:OR. Several times it has been enforced that they were after verifiability and not truth. This moves debate from difficult questions about the truth to a debate about reliable sources. This is useful in keeping the editing process moving. However it may privilege certain historical forms of inequality, as there is a large reliance on western, but not in Arabian sources. Famiglietti finishes by emphasizing this was a presentation with the goal to show how the community works and what seems to be valuable for them. Also, he tried to show the community's attempts to organize their scarce labor force. By understanding that, he hopes one can better intervene in this debate more effectively. I do not particularly agree with him, that NPoV has anything to do with managing the 'scarce' volunteer labor force. His presentation was nevertheless very interesting and brought up many important points about the design that were new to me. For more information about him:

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Teemu Mikkonen challenges the Neutral Point of View policy haunting Wikipedia when it comes to controversial cases such as the Kosovo War article. In these cases, he argues, it is not possible to achieve complete neutrality. As a Masters student at the Univeristy of Tampere, Mikkonen has studied the Talk page of the Wikipedia article on the Kosovo War. Mikkonen fills his thirty minutes of fame by paying attention to the disputed neutrality of the Kosovo War article on Wikipedia. He attempts to trace the conflict and consensus on this Wikipedia Talk-page. By outlining four paradoxes, he lets us in on the juicy bits of his research. By finding out essentially 'how people talk' about the Kosovo War in the context of wikipedia, he unravels the Foucualdian power structures underlying the famous online encyclopedia. Starting with the title, Mikkonen notes the underlying and inavoidable 'biasses' included in the article. For example by naming it the 'Kosovo war', instead as an non-serbian alternative. On the Talk page, there is a lot of discussion going on about what actually happened during the conflict(s). As we see, more often than not are facts, numbers and words disputed on the talk page. Ever since November 2009, the top of the wiki is decorated by a warning message stating that "the neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved." When looking critically at this Talk page, different discourses are noticeable revealing among others Serbian, Albanian, both pro- and anti-NATO points of view. As one may imagine, because of the many parties involved in any conflict, and in this Yugoslavian conflict in particular, it is factually impossible to achieve a genuine neutral point of view when recollecting the facts. Mikkonen reminds us that the less damaged 'winning' side of a conflict would always have a justification-driven view on matters, not to mention a better infrastructure and more survivors left to recollect. Subsequently the most inflicted party can be fueled by trauma and revenge influencing their memory of accounts. When analyzing the Talk page, Mikkonen abstacts the three most common positions. The edits are either to be grouped as 'extremist', where the contributors see only one real and one-sided truth -mostly that of their own. These individuals place unsigned edits more often than not. Moreover, they are characterized by extreme political (hard-right nationalist) viewspoints. An other common position is that of the gatekeepers. The admins and active wikipedians. They believe that there should be a consensus of truth which should be based on equal, neutral knowledge. Mikkonen lets us know this is a highly problematic virtue. As a third group, the situationists are identified. According to Mikkonen they believe that there is no real unbiased truth at all. Even the gatekeepers' democratic consensus is always biased. In fact, wikipedia is unneutral after all. These three positions brings us to four paradoxes that arise from the Talk page. At this point it is more than clear that Mikkonen is of the opinion that absolute neutrality isn't possible. Mikkonen essentially explains how it would be better to get the wikipedia policies working towards a non-neutral point of view. On a closing note I will include some interesting posts from the Talk page on the Kosovo War to illustrate Mikkonen's point. One edit gives a rare supposedly first-hand witness account of a downed helicopter during the conflict.

Before you get at each other's throats... I was a border scout in the Yugoslav Army at that time. I was there when the helicopter was shot down by a 12.7mm anti aircraft cannon. It presented an easy lateral target, as we were camouflaged. The gunner emptied the thirty round magazine at his target and it exploded. We were not in Albanian territory, although the helicopter was. The cannon was outdated and a permanent fixture at the border base and its use was intended for infantry. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Leeppa 21:19, 23 April 2007.

This raises the question concerning one of the beforementioned paradoxes: The paradox of verifiability. What makes a source reliable and true? Mikkonen puts it as follows: "There is a huge problem how to verify the context of these unique experiences." It is all meaningful information, but is is supposed to be true? verifiable? reliable? What makes this paradox (one of four, on which I dare not touch) is that it also makes us think about the reliability of other written, more static sources and enceclopedia's. Now we all agree that there is no such thing as a genuine Neutral point of view on controversial matters, at least the dialogue is made visible on Wikipedia. The fact is that traditional top-down sources be it news institutions and other encyclopedia's don't have a transparent view on the debate surrounding these issues. In that sense, Wikipedia offers something that does come darn close to a 'neutral' point of view' because she shows exactly the ins and outs of the controversy. Though this conference has given a critical point of view on the Wikipedia institution and thereby revealed the faults and shortcomings of Wikipedia. Mikkonens critique has actually shown an invaluable aspect of this product of collective intelligence in it's transparency. As other speakers in Designing Debate Andrew Famiglietti (UK), Andrew Famiglietti (UK), and Lawrence Liang (IN) have also shown; indeed it is problematic to seek a neutral point of view. Knowing many other visitors of this conference will agree with me, I would say that seeking a neutral point of view is downright pointless. There are simply too many truths to fit into one wiki. For more information about him:

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Unlike the other speakers, such as Reichert (Foucault-inspired), Shapiro said that he is less critical: "The critique is all right, however, it should be a component of a larger view, and the larger view should be pragmatic and constructive". According to Shapiro, Hofmann’s ideology critique is insufficient. Blindness and ignorance are a weak thesis within ideology critique. Shapiro is inspired by the work of Gustave Flaubert: "He shows that knowledge is based in society and as such Wikipedia not only represents knowledge, but also stupidity. And what most people believe in society is based on accepted clichés". We must separate the real knowledge from the clichés and the stupidities. Shapiro says that Wikipedia is about the democratization of knowledge and the promise of popular education (a Gramsci-inspired view). We need balance between the consensus culture such as Wikipedia and respect for the work of the scholar who has dedicated a lot of research on particular issues. A model for balancing these two contributory streams needs to be developed. So, is Wikipedia cool? Shapiro thinks that baseball fans think that Wikipedia is cool. A lot of these articles on baseball are really good because they are based on information in a non-controversial area instead of a mixture of clichés and real knowledge in controversial areas, as in many articles. During his talk, Alan showed some examples in the Baudrillard article at Wikipedia. In this example one of the clichés is that Baudrillard would Be a philosopher; but Baudrillard never considered himself to be a philosopher so you can't describe him that way according to Shapiro. Another example is that Baudrillard also has been described as a sociologist, but he disliked sociology, was skeptical towards the concepts of politics, and did not consider himself to be a sociologist. The Wikipedia article mentions Baudrillard's collaboration with CTHEORY (which really happened, and they published translations of many of his essays), but fails to mention his crucial and essential collaborations with the French journals Utopie and Traverses. During his long enumeration, Shapiro received a question from the audience if ever pushed the submit button. He did , and he is now going to undertake the project of trying to submit step-by-step revisions of the Wikipedia articles on Baudrillard, Star Trek, and Flaubert's novel Bouvard and Pecuchet. Alan Shapiro would also want to address the question of how the structure of the database as technological artifact will be upgraded by the New Computer Science; but unfortunately he was running out of time. What he did say was that Wikipedia is a conventional database whereas what we need is a new logic engine, which applies Derrida's deconstruction in computer science, we need to deal with post-structures instead of structures in the database of Wikipedia. For more information about him:

• Interview with Alan N. Shapiro
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By Nadesh van der Post First of all I want to apologize because I’m not sure that I fully understood Hans Varghese Mathews core message during the CPOV conference. So I hope that with a little more research, I will be able to enlighten Varghese Mathews main conception. There are a lot of discussions going on how to obtain crucial information that concerns Wikipedia’s ever growing body of knowledge. One Wikipedia page is even considered to be a textual dynamic research object because of continuous augmentation and revision. As Varghese Mathews puts it: The sheer volume of the website necessitates – and its digital form abets – the automated essay of its contents for evidence upon which to found such inference and interpretation as is proper to the eliciting of such history. And so he has developed an algorithm that will provide a way to collect data that goes beyond human interpretation. Through realizing the page editing history or as he calls it the narrative, Varghese Mathews wants to detect pack editing behavior. He elaborated the tool intentions by introducing us to the algorithm instead of giving a PowerPoint presentation. To do so he used the retrieved data, and explained that the tool clusters the contributors to a Wikipedia page. The Evolution is an example of such a Wikipedia page. The various editors of the frequently edited Evolution Wikipedia page can provide inside when particular interests are clustered. With the help of his tool one could distinguish different editors and cluster them together by some particular interest. The tool functions with minimal human intervention. And despite the fact the some supervening of human judgement is needed, Varghese Mathews - or anyone else of that matter – could use the tool for interesting insides. This tool is aimed at producing information that will allow anyone to analyze editing behavior on Wikipedia. It is too bad that we couldn’t see more of the collected data or results. Okay, I admit he did show some results. But the main issues there is that his story wasn’t structured enough. The only message that I could distill was that he had developed a tool for massive analytical use. Non the less I do find his tool exciting. More information about him:

• Short Bio
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• REPORT OF AN EXPERIMENT IN CLUSTERING by Hans Varghese Mathews, The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
• Analysing Wikipedia : A First Attempt at Clustering by Sriram Rangan
• Analysing Wikipedia: A First Attempt at Clustering. Report of an Experiment in Clustering by Kiran Jonnalagadda

I would like to talk about my research which, I believe, could help us approach some of the questions related to Wikipedia. For this research, I was interested to know, how knowledge is translated/traveled; from people to things. I focused on community healers in rural India and observed the process by which their knowledge recorded, collected and disseminated through larger geographical areas. During its many transformations, the wisdom of the local healer goes through numerous phases and inevitably loses some of its essential characteristics. This observation has lead me to the question;

Can we define databases that makes these different ways of knowing things visible?

I believe this question relates to the equal treatment of different knowledges in technology design, ultimately aiming for a technology that contributes to knowledge diversity. So, with this talk, I am hoping to bring the issue of database design to the forefront concerning Wikipedia.
To illustrate her point on different database desing approaches to varying knowledges, Maja van der Velden then presents the following examples;

• Mukurtu archive (features collective tagging but also implementation of exclusionary login procedures)


• Tami (ontologically flat database - Minimizes Western assumptions on data collection by only categorizing by media type. No tagging, only a list of items listed by picture/sound/video etc. Each object can be connected to each other)


• Storyweaver (focus, again, is creating connectivities. Storytelling is a form of performative mapping. 3 protocols underlying; -Autonomous local knowledge mapping -Local ontology mapping -Merging mapping through making connections; Connections are made through context to context, not object to object in another context)

These databases have the underlying idea that Knowledge can be understood as performance. Implying that the design of a database is not preconfigured, but they emerge through usage over time.

Seen under this light of these examples, Jimmy Wales’s quote regarding the ultimate goal of Wikipedia (Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.) emerge as a warning. Given this understanding, Wikipedia’s understanding of knowledge becomes hegemonic. Such a definition of knowledge is very singular, other ‘knowledges’ are ignored. Aboriginal knowledge links back to traditional knowledge in English language Wikipedia, which is not recognized as proper knowledge. In this sense, Wikipedia becomes a master narrative about knowledge.

I would propose the creation of a third space, a contact zone where different knowledges not clash, but interact and co-exist. As Donna Haraway calls them; “world-making entanglements”, which is the meaning I want to carry over to Wikipedia. If Wikipedia aims to provide sum of all knowledge to everyone, how can it provide dissenting knowledge claims?

I argue that Wikipedia’s decentralized production system can be taken further as a model for its ontological stance as well, rendering a database that is more respectful to differing knowledge claims.

More information about her:

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Developing open source software Ortega xeroxed the ten top language Wikpedia sites to present us with an impressive quanititave corpus of data. In his presentation he cast a critical eye in the developement and publication of quantitative data in on-line research worldwide, calling for more open practices. He pointed to the lack of comparative studies,  the need for open data to assist global comparisons. Indeed, Ortega experienced the lack of a worldwide perspectives in quantitative studies at first hand when he started his research,  as most data was not avaliable in the public domain or didn't use open software, or even worse used categories that made comparisons impossible. His work is to a large extent a reaction to this lack. Ortega created wikixray- the ultimate open wiki machine, instead of using of the shelf software. Wikixray is  now made avaliable to reseachers worldwide, together with the pull of data findings of his research. Ortega was eager to note that the software is easy to use on any wiki website. In his research design,  Ortega, decided to include some open questions such as "is Wikipedia a sustainable project" or "what type of parameter affect Wikipedia" to analyse somewhat 7 terra bytes of content, that is the 10 most popular language wikipedia sites! Ortega found there are 4,805,713 registered editors in the top ten languages Wikipedias. These users use Wikipedia at least 346.9 days in time, something like 141,6 in average. His analysis shows that in all language versions growth follows an exponential growth patern, i.e.  it starts slowly and then accelarates. This is particularly surprising in the light of the difference in the number of contributors. The same pattern repeats in creation of pages in all ten languages. For Ortega these patterns point to a key question: Does Wikipedia reach a maturity stage were activity stops progressing, and if this is so why cant it grow? Ortega mentioned that in answering this question the media have interpreted his data in opossite ways! Ortega also compared tiny vs standards articles. For example in the english version 80% of pages are talk pages, in the polish Wikpedia there are no talk pages. With regard to the sustainability issue Ortega was keen to show that the number of edits by people has remained stable since 2007. He also briefly pointed to the Wikipedia general survey of 130,576 poeple, which showed that 65% of users are readers, 10% are regular contributors ( 50% of answers came from russia), and only 13% are women. He was carefull, however, to point to the fact that the survey does not sample users and therefore is limited in terms of how one can interpret the results. Ortega also noted the inequality of contributions amongst editors. For example 5% of authors accounts for more than 90% of total number of revisions. Finaly Ortega showed that 4 years ago the inequality in distribution reached a plato and has been equal each month wordwide since then. In Ortegas view in order for Wikipedia to remain sustainable better ways to use Wikipedia in education need to be carved.  Furthermore ways to improve the interphase and the reviewing proccesss are needed. Together these can be used for improving their user experience overal. Ortega argued that Wikipedia needs better community building and maintance tools. Furthermore that Wikipedia needs to exploit the power of academia. March 26-27, 2010. 2nd CPOV: Wikipedia Conference. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. [slides] More information about him:

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Mayo Fuster Morell's website

I will present results of my research concerning governance on digital commons, which was a research based on a comparative analysis of case studies, one of which was Wikipedia. It is noteworthy that most research focused on governance on online communities focus on the interaction between participants of the community, which is an important issue. But my focus on this research is on the providers of the infrastructures of these communities and the relationship between the community and these providers. In the case of Wikipedia, the provider is the Wikimedia foundation.

The goal of this research is to gain insight on whether different kind of providers effect the community that emerge. I analyzed the relationship between the type of provider and merging communities -In types of scale - Types of collaboration and -Level of self-governance within the community.

First, I would like to demonstrate my analysis of infrastructure providers and then provide the example of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation.

I identified four elements that define the characteristics of an infrastructure provider;

I) Openness vs. Closeness with respect to community participation
II) Sustainability; Whether the provider is for-profit or non-profit
III) Level of freedom and autonomy the community is given. ‘netenabler’ vs. ‘blackbox’ infrastructures; Whther the platform is based on open-source software of proprietary protocols and data management. This determines the fork-ability and data mobility.
IV) Formal vs. Informal of the organization.
I analyzed 50 cases according to these parameters and identified 4 main categories (Illustrated by slide below)

Case Study of Wikipedia - Role of Wikimedia foutdation
CPOV blog has previously published Maya Fuster Morell’s analysis of the evolution of the Wikimedia foundation, which can be accessed here.

The involvement of the foundation seem to have evolved on a case-by-case basis and the power relation between the community and the foundation seems to be in flux and is actively discussed in the community. The opinion of the community regarding the involvement of the foundation into the activities of Wikipedia can be placed on a scale [See slide 2]

Based on this analysis, the Wikimedia foundation represents a very formal structure with a high degree of professionalization.These characteristics are against many features of the Wikipedia community. Why? Also, how do these radically different modes of organizations co-exist?

It is noteworthy that both the foundation and the community have adopted different governance styles and power structures depending the need and task at hand and have moved from one to another fluidly, even applied two concurrently to different parts. While consensus is central, sometimes the founder exercises his monarchical power for example.

It appears that the foundation has adopted this formal and professional outlook in order to provide technical infrastructure to the community but also to handle legal support and public relations on a professional level. The community, on the other hand, creates the content and the rules and regulations that relate to the creation of content. Ownership is also representative, the Wikipedia logo and other PR material are owned by the foundation while the community can claim ownership of the content they create.

This creates a mutual dependency between the foundation and the community. This does not necessarily mean the power and rights of ownership of the foundation and the community are symmetrical, but it means their contrasting systems co-exist and work for the benefit of the project together. This also creates a very interesting dialogue between the foundation and the community where there is a continuous negotiation of power between them, rendering the power distribution fluid. In understanding this relationship, the concepts of lateral source of authorship and parallel governing.

The hybrid model of Wikipedia can be a model for other institutions of rethinking global institutions of the public and political in the 21st cent. We have to remember that the issue is not how to criticize Wikipedia. They constitute a new form of providing public goods, we have to think about our responsibility to Wikipedia, to improve and learn from it, since it is so important in our lives.

More information about her:

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Triple the number of African elephants, so when they do get extinct we still have ourselves a wikiality. A jolly suggestion coming from Stephen Colbert which got embraced by Wikipedia critics. It was basically what happened on the encyclopedia: vandalization to make a point. But what really happened was the elephant page being protected. It was solely editable by administrators for about two weeks before being given to the public again. Who is in control of Wikipedia? Jimmy wales? Wikilawyers? It's a question based on fear. The idea of a leviathan (he shows this image), a totalitarian ruler, applying body politics. One of severe oppression. But this is not the most interesting, Stuart Geiger argues. He is a researcher at Georgetown University in the Communication, Culture, and Technology program. People are important, he says, but not soly. Because, in addition, technology is important. The technocal structure makes the social possible. With this in mind, the question becomes: what is in control of Wikipedia? Order in Wikipedia is increasingly produced through technical means. There are bots, deployed to ban users, enforce policy and to inform admins on debates. Tools, such as specialised scrits that automate various social actions, like nominating an article for deletion. Code, in the form of wiki-software, with for instance 'flagged revisions'. And analytics, which are being used as arguments in themselves, making judgements of the future. Geiger gives a quick definition of bots: actors who perform repetitive and mundane tasks. But, they are most definitely important. Bots are becoming more and more sophisticated. Checking language use and censorship, moving into the sphere of admins. It has become a quite complex phenomenon, plus, the amount of bots is still growing. Therefore, more research is needed (considering the different languages). His main example, or case study if you will, is HagermanBot. A bot which added the {{unsigned}} template to edits which where not signed. It was ment to let people know that they forgot to sign their comment, which wasn't a contorversial guideline. However, what the bot did was fixing the comments in real time, leading to the point that signatures became one of the most enforced policies. The thing to remember is that bots are not allowed to act by default; they have to be approved. The case of the HagermanBot is interesting, because it seems to be a non-controversial bot, but it nevertheless can show us some of the mechanics of power and policy. Because there is a bot policy, a bot approval group. In order to install a bot, people need to submit a proposal, whereafter it gets approved or declined. HagermanBot got accepted fast. Because new software reveals incosisitencies, a big discussion on Wikipedia commenced. People didn't want to sign their comments. A loose social norm was turned into a very strong law, they said. Geiger shows some of this debate on slides. In the end, the introduction of the HagermanBot triggered a debate of the role of bots in general. The solution to solve these complaints came in the form of an opt-out list. But these solutions to controversies are 'black boxed', Geiger argues. The opt-out mechanism became a standard reply to every objection. It showed the technical structure. So, does society dominate technology? Or does technology dominate society? Determinist narratives are easy, he says. But dialectis of socio-technical systems are hard. Kinds of things people talk about change as technology changes. Beyong "code is law", Geiger notes that social structures and techological system are co-productive. Compromises are forced to happen. The opt-out list as a compromise, for example, turns out to be a standard. What we need to be thinking about then, is how technology and society affect each other. During the Q&A and via Twitter Stuart Geiger notes that he wanted to incorporate Kelty's theory in his speech, proposing it as a more contemporal frame.

With a love for technoculture, a research past in Californian cyberculture, and a present in French critical intelectual new media thought, O' Neil presented a compelling talk on wikipedia user culture or rather "tribal culture".  O' Neil presented his stream of conciousness in tags (projected on a large screen) as he developed his arppoch to on-line triibes. Interested in the hacker habitus and how its production,  his talk opened with a brief discussion of the shortcomings of critical sociology. Despite O' Neil's  pessimism with regard to the conspiratorial and dis-empowering aspects of critical sociology, he went on to focus on the work of Boltanski and the field of justification, which Boltanski understands as "open". Before linking Boltanski with Wikipedia O' Neil was careful to frame his understanding of Wikipedia within the context of new media political economy mentioning that 13% of Wikipedia editors are female, and that this means that certain types of behaviors are more tolerable, that for example aggressive commentary and flaming are accepted as standard practice. Machismo, in other words, frames the wiki habitus. O' Neil proceeded to literally map the different orders of online justification, and how these can possibly come into existence in different tribal formulations in different network cultures. Central to understanding the map was the term "on-line tribal burocracy of social organisations" coined in his book Cyberchiefs Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes. O' Neil understands charisma, hacking, sovergnity, and the archaic, as central to conceptualizing how on-line user tribes work. Situating Wikipedia in a map showing a sovergnity and charisma in each end of the vertical and horizontal axis,  O' Neil concluded that charisma and soveirgnity are in particular very important in understanding how Wikipedia as tribe works, and that charisma is actually more important. O Neil also discuss ethical issues arising when conducting research with wikipedia editors.