Wikipedia, Critical Point of View » interview

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.

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.

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.

Interview mit Geert Lovink @ Zeit Online

julianabrunello — Wed, 12 May 2010 07:55:46 +0000

Geert spricht mit ZEIT ONLINE-Redakteur Kai Biermann über Regionalität im Netz, Google, Extremismus und last but not least: Wikipedia! Schauen Sie mal das Interview und die Videos unter www.zeit.de

Interview with Jeanette Hofmann

julianabrunello — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:37:47 +0000

by Bas Bergervoet and Marijke Tiemensma for the NMDC = New Media & Digital Culture, a Master program at Utrecht University. Originally published online at mtschaefer.net

Click here to view the embedded video.

Interview with Maja van der Velden

julianabrunello — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:41:07 +0000

by Juliana Brunello

Are you a Wikipedian yourself? If yes: Have you contributed to any Wikipedia articles? Which one(s)?
No, I have never contributed to any of the Wikipedia articles. For a while I was working on a text for an article on cognitive justice, but I haven't finished it yet.

You have written about cognitive justice, meaning that all kinds of knowledge should be equally valid. In this sense, do you believe that Wikipedia is biased?
Wikipedia is as biased as the people and technology who make it. Wikipedia is a materialisation of knowledge, as any other database or archive - I hope to say more about that in my presentation. The question of bias is really a question about any claim - including Wikipedia's - to a neutral perspective. Do I think that there is such a thing as a 'Neutral Point of View' or that we can speak of neutral technology? No. In that sense all technology designs are biased. Recognizing that there is bias, and working with it, is the first step towards cognitive justice.
We can work on designs that allow us to keep differences visible. Wikipedia does that in a way, but often one needs to go into the history of a page to see if there were other understandings. In that sense we can describe Wikipedia as a palimpsest (put simply, a place or artifact with a variety of layers). In an Wikipedia article we only see the top layer, a kind of consensus layer, in which all the underlying layers are implied. The challenge is to make the underlying layers more visible.
In the case of Wikipedia and our diversity of knowledges, I am more inspired by the concept of contact zone. I have described contact zones as third spaces in which we translate, meet, clash, connect, co-constitute, and intra-act, establishing relationships based on responsibility and (agonistic) respect. In this way a contact zone is a space in which we question any order coming from above. What I hope CPOV will do, is to question the ordering and othering by Wikipedia.
Cognitive justice is for me about different ways of knowing the world and treating these knowledges equally. Establishing the validity of knowledge, in particular what methods, rules, processes or apparatuses we use to say something about what is valid or not, is an ethical and political project. We should not leave that to a Science that pretends to stand outside the world we seek to understand. Cognitive justice is about located, accountable positions from which we know. Cognitive justice is thus not about being tolerant towards other ways of knowing the world, but about engaging with the ontologies underlying these different ways of knowing the world. The lack of cognitive justice results in violence: violence in the form of being indifferent to difference and in the denial of the ethical.

Can Wikipedia be improved in terms of equality? If yes: How?
Yes. Let's start by understanding Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia of a particular form of (local) knowledge which has gained global dominance. The design of Wikipedia itself is producing a new iteration of this local knowledge for global use in the manner in which it organises knowledge. We can look at projects related to Wikipedia. We need to look in particular to Wikipedia practices and the wider Wikipedia ecologies. I think we should understand the CPOV as a kind of mapping of these practices and ecologies, in which alternatives become visible and interventions possible. Can we re-design Wikipedia to become a contact zone? In my presentation I will present an example of what I call a contact zone design. In such a design the knowers decide how their knowledge will be organised and presented. I don't know if Wikipedia is open for the radical change such a design implies.

Interview with Patrick Lichty, Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall

julianabrunello — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:58:11 +0000

by Juliana Brunello

I have been running some interviews with the speakers from the conference and posting it on our blog. I was going to make only individual interviews, but by researching about the works from Patrick Lichty, Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kidall, I saw a connection and thought it would be interesting to make a common interview with the three of them.

I believe most people think of art as something 'mona-lisish'. So, can you explain to me as an artist-layman, why the project 'Wikipedia Art' is called art?
Patrick: Here's a good metaphor. Wikipedia Art ist to art as was Duchamp's LHOOQ to the Mona Lisa. The meterialist, antiquatioan view of art is certainly valid, but what is it to take conceptual art into a user-driven milieu like Wikipedia, and then what is it to take it tactical by leveraging the reaction in order to bring attention to its cutlural practices? This is especially important as Wikipedia is positioning itself to supercede institutions like the OED and Encyclopedia Brittanica, when it is closed to Encyclopedia Dramatica...
Nathaniel: I prefer to think of Art as "Research and Development for Humanity" (I'm stealing this line from contemporary digital artist, Zach Lieberman). Artists no longer simply make images, they make discourse - they ask us not only to "look," but to "look again," to re-examine. For me, Art and Philosophy bookend all of culture. This "work" that is a "work of art" asks us to look again at epistemology, power, and information, and how they relate to each other. It does so on both a micro level - evidenced by the behavior of Wikipedia editors all the way through to the figure head and his lawyer - and on a macro level - speaking back to how people relate to information online.
Scott: Contemporary art projects in the last several decades have increasingly looked at systems and structures of power, such that the definition of "art" has expanded to mean things that are not only art objects, but ephemera, documentation, text itself, concepts and much more both in and outside of the gallery. Wikipedia Art could be said to derive from the post-minimalism period expanding upon art ideas of Kosuth, Barry, Smithson and many more. In the same way that "Land Art" was an escape from the gallery and manipulating space itself, Wikipedia Art works with an information landscape, manipulating elements that comprise much of our daily existence.

What were the underlying motives for launching the Wikipedia Art project?
Nathaniel: I'd like to point you to a few links to answer this question, and you can feel free to cite/quote as you see fit.

Scott: Same links as Nathaniel. It's all in the original Fireside chat interview.
Patrick: I'll let Nathaniel and Scott fuield this one, but my understanding it was that of a bit of an "exquisite Corpse" project on Wikipedia, but by the time I came on as a cohort, I felt that it had become something that could make visible the internal structures of Wikipedia and show it's cultural specifficiies.

What can be 'read between the lines' in this particular piece of art?
Nathaniel: Actually, we were quite forward about our intentions - what the project is and does - and it was more successful than we ever imagined it would be. Our paper goes into more detail than we ever have before, but there isn't a need to read "between the lines" - it's all there, and cited!
Scott: We were very careful to be transparent about our motives behind the piece. Between-the-lines, were the various responses: in blogs, comments, print publications, all resulting in what the piece "is". We wanted to emphasize the collaborative process involved in Wikipedia Art and that this artwork is comprised of all of the discourse surrounding it.
Patrick: That Sometimes a work of art changes from its initial intention; that properly contextualized, a work of art can have a great deal of impact.

Can one learn something from it?
Patrick: Yes. This is self-evident.
Nathaniel: The most important thing this work did, in my opinion, was bring to the fore how information and power influence one another, how people-powered democracy still breeds hierarchical structure, and the kinds of cultures that make important decisions about our perceptions of reality, often without our awareness. The work does this both explicitly - by bringing debates, arcane rules and how they are (or are not) followed on Wikipedia, to the surface - and implicitly - as the debates trickled up to falsehoods and name-calling by some of the power brokers at Wikimedia. We said nothing; they made our point for us.
Scott: Hopefully, there is much to be learned from Wikipedia Art. It depends on what you choose to read about it and believe. There have been many contradictory opinions about the work, and in these varied opinions lies a "non-consensus," that the artwork resides in a zone of the indeterminacy. It succeeds because the work was designed to produce dialogue.

How is it different from other art intervention projects?
Patrick: It is on Wikipedia.
Nathaniel: I'm not sure I want to get into the specifics of what makes this project "different" - it misattributes value to "the new." More important than it being different, it is successful.
Scott: This is the first significant art intervention into Wikipedia -- an encyclopedia.This makes it unique in venue. There are many small details that differ, but in terms of intervention works, it is similar in that it uses an existing structure and the loopholes within the structure (in this case the citation mechanism) to assert its existence.

I see Wikipedia Art continues to exist in a remixed way. But can it still be called Wikipedia Art, if it is not taking place in Wikipedia anymore?
Patrick: Does a work about Wikipedia have to be ON Wikipedia? That would limit discursive portential immensely.
Nathaniel: We tend to refer to these works as Wikipedia Art Remixed. The intervention is over, but the piece lives on in its discussion, and in projects like this.
Scott: Same as Nathaniel; these works are Wikipedia Art Remixed.

I understood Wikipedia Art as being a form of re-constructing the social reality of Wikipedia, so that, in this way, the social reality constructed by the community is made more visible, facilitating its understanding. Am I right on that?
Nathaniel: You've got the spirit of it, yes. Less re-construction, though, and more of that accent / making visible. We all know the mythical wonders of Wikipedia, but the flaws go well beyond the standard debate around fact and fiction - POWER is of huge importance.
Scott: I think the reconstruction or as Nathaniel aptly puts it, making visible occurred mostly outside of Wikipedia. I'm not sure exactly how much the Wikipedia community was affected, but I do know that many non-editors began to reconsider the mythology behind Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation itself.
Patrick: More than the social reality of the community, it also shows how that social reality and hits history is trying to reshape the global conception of the construction of knowledge.

Apart from the Wikipedia Art page, have you contributed to any articles, bots or software improvement in Wikipedia? Which one(s)?
Nathaniel: We both often add to Wikipedia pages on art, digital artists, and our regions. Most recently, for example, Scott fixed a mistake on the page about the Digital Dark Age, and I added a page on the Museum of Wisconsin Art.
Scott: The Wikipedia Art project stemmed from our direct experience on adding and editing articles on Wikipedia. Here is where we found a surprising lack of arts coverage and began to wonder about the invisible layer of editors that were behind the consensus-driven site, and thus began the idea for an intervention.
Patrick: I have, but cannot remember.

What other projects are you currently working on?
Patrick: I am curating two shows, one on mixed realities between the physical and Second Life, and the other being a remix of the popular viral site "YTMND.com"
Nathaniel: I've had two solo shows of work in the last month. Both are much more invested in discourses surrounding the history of images than Wikipedia Art was, but I see them all as part of the same practice.
For Distill Life, I permanently mount translucent prints and drawings directly on top of video screens, creating moving images on paper. http://nathanielstern.com/2010/passing-between/
And Given Time activates and performs two permanently logged-in Second Life avatars, each forever and only seen by and through the other. This one is a dedication to my wife. http://nathanielstern.com/2010/given-time/
Scott: I am working on a variety of new projects. The one most related to Wikipedia Art is an individual artwork that I developed as a resident artist at the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center called "After Thought." Using brainwave testing with flashcards, I produce a custom video for each subject that reflects their emotional mind-state.
Link is: http://www.kildall.com/artwork/2010/after_thought/index.html
This artwork is a sort of "subjective science" -- where interpretation and meaning become murky the more you look at it. The notion of a video that truly reflects your consciousness has been echoed in popular culture in ways that are both appealing and disturbing.

Anything else you would like to add? Comments, ideas, thoughts?
Nathaniel: This isn't a simple debate, a gag, or trolling. We see Wikipedia as an important project with enormous potential - some of which it already meets. That in mind, it needs to be critically examined. Like CPOV, Wikipedia Art began such a discussion, and we're very proud of that fact.
Scott: We're both quite pleased with the success of the work. More than anything, it's been amazing to hear polarized opinions about it -- the controversy of Wikipedia Art itself has revealed that Wikipedia hit a critical point, which requires an examination of structural bias around obscure rules when an open system essentially closes itself off. This contradiction in the ideology behind a structure that is supposed to be open is of utmost concern: how our culture transmits knowledge itself.
Patrick: I think it's interesting that something like WPA continues to resonate so much with people.

Interview with Amit Basole

julianabrunello — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:11:40 +0000

by Juliana Brunello

Are you a Wikipedian yourself?
No. I am mostly a "Wikipedia consumer," and not a "Wikipedia producer." But an organization that I am a member of, an alternative online media outlet from India (www.sanhati.org) was once involved in what I believe is called a "wiki war" over an entry on a government sponsored, anti-people miltia in India (called the "Salwa Judum"). At that time I got to see how wikipedia handles controversial topics.

Have you contributed to any Wikipedia articles? Which one(s)?
No, I have not.

Do you believe popular knowledge should be put together with scientific knowledge or should it be kept apart? Why?
Not only should scientific and popular knowledge *not* be kept apart, in fact they cannot be. Science arises from knowledge in society ("popular knowledge" if you will). If Science attempts to separate itself from its source, as it has tried to do, it turns against the people. Historically we see that scientific knowledge has accorded to itself the status of the best or true knowledge (or "knowledge" without any qualifications). Other types of knowledge then became qualified in some way, such as "popular knowledge, " "folk knowledge," "traditional knowledge," and so on. On the other hand we speak of "knowledge" (without qualifications) located in different places in society. We also speak of the necessity of a dialog among people from these different locations. We are currently working on the concept of "Gyan Panchayat" which roughly translated means "Public Hearing on Knowledge." I will elaborate on this concept during my presentation.

Nowadays there is a hierarchy upon knowledge; some knowledge is considered more valuable than others. The same thing happens with knowledge coming from certain persons in the society. You, on the other hand, speak of the ideal of equality. Do you see this ideal in Wikipedia?
Continuing from the answer to the previous question, our political goal is precisely to challenge the hierarchies that you speak of. From our perspective the hierarchies can be challenged effectively if a knowledge movement takes shape in society at large (i.e. outside the universities and other recognized institutions of knowledge). The wiki movement, the FLOSS movement, the movement against patents, copyrights, the movements against the corporatization of the University in Europe, all appear to us to be working towards this goal in their own ways.

Is this ideal a utopia? Can it be put into practice in the 'real world'?
This is not a utopian vision. We consider it a necessary condition for the emancipation of vast sections of oppressed humanity. However to make any progress on it requires robust political movements.

Interview with Teemu Mikkonen

julianabrunello — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:02:02 +0000

By Juliana Brunello

I was trying to find some information about you and your thesis online, but I was not very successful. Could you tell me more about it?
It is not online, because it's not published yet. It should be soon...

Have you completed your Masters, or are you still working on it?
I'm still working on it...I've been quite busy with my other research projects in my university and that's why I haven't finished it completely yet.

What is your thesis about? How does it involve Wikipedia?
I've been studying the talk pages of the Wikipedia article about the Kosovo War.

Why are you interested in Wikipedia as a topic? Are you a Wikipedian yourself?
The whole concept of Wikipedia is interesting. There are many sociological, epistemological etc. issues, which could be revealed by observing the interaction and content in Wikipedia. I'm an active user and not-so-active producer in Wikipedia. I've also studied the social dynamics of the open/free source movement, which is the background, still influencing in Wikipedia.

For your research, do you follow a specific sociological model or methodology, or do you use a mix of models, methods and theories? Which one(s)?
I've used the method which contains the principles from ethnomethodology, ethnography, new rhetoric, discourse analysis and conversation analysis. My methodological orientation is concentrated more to the philosophical backgrounds of the wiki-knowledge than the empirical research. The most inspiring theorists are Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas and Harold Garfinkel.

Anything else you would like to add? Comments, ideas, thoughts?
I think it'll be very interesting seminar and I'm sure we have great debates there.