INC Reader #7

Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds)

For millions of internet users around the globe, the search for new knowledge begins with Wikipedia. The encyclopedia’s rapid rise, novel organization, and freely offered content have been marveled at and denounced by a host of commentators. Critical Point of View moves beyond unflagging praise, well-worn facts, and questions about its reliability and accuracy, to unveil the complex, messy, and controversial realities of a distributed knowledge platform.

The essays, interviews and artworks brought together in this reader form part of the overarching Critical Point of View research initiative, which began with a conference in Bangalore (January 2010), followed by events in Amsterdam (March 2010) and Leipzig (September 2010). With an emphasis on theoretical reflection, cultural difference and indeed, critique, contributions to this collection ask: What values are embedded in Wikipedia’s software? On what basis are Wikipedia’s claims to neutrality made? How can Wikipedia give voice to those outside the Western tradition of Enlightenment, or even its own administrative hierarchies? Critical Point of View collects original insights on the next generation of wiki-related research, from radical artistic interventions and the significant role of bots to hidden trajectories of encyclopedic knowledge and the politics of agency and exclusion.

Contributors: Amila Akdag Salah, Nicholas Carr, Shun-ling Chen, Florian Cramer, Morgan Currie, Edgar Enyedy, Andrew Famiglietti, Heather Ford, Mayo Fuster Morell, Cheng Gao, R. Stuart Geiger, Mark Graham, Gautam John, Dror Kamir, Peter B. Kaufman, Scott Kildall, Lawrence Liang, Patrick Lichty, Geert Lovink, Hans Varghese Mathews, Johanna Niesyto, Matheiu O’Neil, Dan O’Sullivan, Joseph Reagle, Andrea Scharnhorst, Alan Shapiro, Christian Stegbauer, Nathaniel Stern, Krzystztof Suchecki, Nathaniel Tkacz, Maja van der Velden.

Colophon: Editors: Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Editorial Assistance: Ivy Roberts and Morgan Currie. Copy-Editing: Cielo Lutino. Design: Katja van Stiphout. Cover Image: Ayumi Higuchi. Priner: Ten Klei, Amsterdam. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. Supported by: The School for Communication and Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam DMCI), the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore and the Kusuma Trust.

You can download the pdf for free here: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publications/inc-readers/critical-point-of-view-a-wikipedia-reader/

To order a hard copy of the reader, send an email to books@networkcultures.org

The CPOV event in Leipzig hold on the 24-26 September got quite some attention.

Under you find an overview of all the news items. For the latest documentation visit also the CPOV.de website.

TV
ARD tagesschau (24.09.2010)
MDR Sachsen Spiegel (24.09.2010)
ARD nachtmagazin (25.09.2010)

Radio
Radio Blau (23.09.2010)
Deutschlandradio Kultur (24.09.2010)
MDR Figaro (24.09.2010)
WDR 5 Scala: Das Wikipedia-Phänomen, kritisch gesehen (24.09.2010)
MDR Info: Wer kontrolliert Wikipedia? (24.09.2010)
DRadio Kultur Breitband: Strukturwandel in der kollektiven Wissensproduktion? (25.09.2010)
detektor.fm: Kritische Wikipedia-Konferenz (25.09.2010)
DRadio Wissen: Wikipedia trifft Wissenschaft (27.09.2010)
WDR 5 Leonardo: Wikipedia auf dem Prüfstand (27.09.2010)
DRadio Wissen Redaktionskonferenz: Wikipedia - Die Konferenz zur Enzyklopädie (27.09.2010)

Print
kreuzer: Ein kritischer point of view Leipziger Volkszeitung: Wikipedia wenig weiblich (25./26.09.2010)

Online
Telepolis: Wikipedia: Ein kritischer Standpunkt (23.09.2010)
ZEIT ONLINE: Wikipedia-Community trifft sich in Leipzig (24.09.2010)
taz.de: Die Macht der Admins (24.09.2010)
tagesschau.de: "Wikipedia hängt alle ab" (24.09.2010)
CAMPUS ONLINE: „Gedruckten Brockhaus wird es in Zukunft wohl nicht mehr geben“ heise online: Kritischer Standpunkt: Wie offen ist Wikipedia? (25.09.2010)
heise online: Kritischer Standpunkt: Wikipedia und das vorläufige Wissen (26.09.2010)
heise online: Kritischer Standpunkt: Wohin mit dem Wissen? (27.09.2010)
FAZ.NET: Einst basisdemokratisch, jetzt ein exklusiver Club (28.09.2010)

(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."

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.

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

These are the links to the videos of all the talks for the CPoV Conference in Amsterdam - Enjoy! SESSION 1
Ramón Reichert (AT) Rethinking Wikipedia: Power, Knowledge and the Technologies of the Self
Jeanette Hofmann (DE) Wikipedia between Emancipation and Self-Regulation
Mathieu O’Neil (AU) The Critique of Law in Free Online Projects
Gérard Wormser (FR) The Knowledge Bar
SESSION 2
Joseph Reagle (USA) Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Anxiety
Charles van den Heuvel (NL) Authoritative Annotations, Encyclopedia Universalis Mundaneum, Wikipedia and the Stanford Encycloped
Dan O’Sullivan (UK) An Encyclopedia for the Times: Thoughts on Wikipedia from a His- torical Perspective
Alan Shapiro (USA/DE) Gustave Flaubert Laughs at Wikipedia
Discussion session 2 Encyclopedia Histories: 13.30 – 15.30. Friday, March 26
Moderaror: Nathaniel Tkacz
Speakers: Joseph Reagle, Charles van den Heuvel, Dan O'Sullivan, Alan Shapiro
SESSION 3
Hendrik-Jan Grievink (NL) Wiki Loves Art
Scott Kildall (USA) Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act
Patrick Lichty (USA) Social Media, Cultural Scaffolds, and Molecular Hegemonies. Musings on Anarchic Media, WIKIs, and De-territorialized Art
Discussion session 3 Wiki Art: 15.45 – 17.30. Friday, March 26
Moderator: Rachel Somers Miles
Speakers: Hendrik-Jan Grievink, Scott Kildall, Patrick Lichty
SESSION 4
Felipe Ortega (ES) New Trends in the Evolution of Wikipedia
Stuart Geiger (USA) Bot Politics: The Domination, Subversion, and Negotiation of Code in Wikipedia
Hans Varghese Mathews (IN) Clustering the Contributors to a Wikipedia Page
Esther Weltevrede (NL) and Erik Borra (BE/NL) Controversy Analysis with Wikipedia
Discussion session 4 Wiki Analytics: 10.00 – 12.30. Saturday, March 27
Moderator: NIshant Shah
Speakers: Felipe Ortega, Stuart Geiger, Hans Varghese Mathews, Esther Weltevrede & Erik Borra
SESSION 5
Lawrence Liang (IN) Wikipedia and the authority of knowledge
Teemu Mikkonen (FI) Kosovo War on Wikipedia, Tracing the Conflict and Concensus on the Wikipedia Talk pages
Andrew Famiglietti (USA) Negotiating the Neutral Point of View: Politics and the Moral Economy of Wikipedia
Florian Cramer (DE/NL) The German WikiWars and the limits of objectivism
Discussion session 5 Designing Debate: 13.30 – 15.30. Saturday, March 27
Moderator: Caroline Nevejan
Speakers: Lawrence Liang, Teemu Mikkonen, Andrew Famiglietti, Florian Cramer
SESSION 6
Mayo Fuster Morell (IT) Wikimedia Governance: The Role of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Form and Geopolitics of its Internationalization
Athina Karatzogianni (UK) Wikipedia’s Impact on the Global Power-Knowledge Hierarchies
Maja van der Velden (NL/NO) When Knowledges Meet: Database Design and the Performance of Knowledge
Amit Basole (IN) Knowledge Satyagraha: Towards a People’s Knowledge Movement
Discussion session 6 Global Issues and Outlooks: 15.45 – 17.30. Saturday, March 27
Moderator: Johanna Niesyto
Speakers: Mayo Fuster Morell, Athina Karatzogianni, Maja van der Velden, Amit Basole

If you were at the conference in Amsterdam, you have probably noticed that there was a parallel tweet conversation going on. For the ones who would like to read them again, and for the ones who would like to read them for the first time, just click on the following link:
http://www.twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/cpov

Lawrence Liang is an Indian legal researcher and lawyer residing in Bagalore. With his speech he tries to place current debates into a historical context. There are a variety of controversies which he tries to place in perspective. Throughout the latest years there have been different responses considering the rise of Wikipedia:

• Refutation: It is not as reliable as Britannica.
• Intentionality: What's the motor behind all this?
• Pragmatic steps: How to improve upon?

Overall a rather somber tone dominated, Liang argues. What remained stable and unchallenged was the authority of knowledge. Therefore Liang tries to point us to a manner which is a little more realistic. He continues with an early history of the book itself, the book as an object of knowledge. His goal is bringing the notion of the authority of knowledge back, in a sense, to the contemporary realm. It's an important debate, not confined to Wikipedia, he says. The book has not always been seen as reliable; there were various inherent problems of copy. During the print revolution, the volume of the total amount of books increased tremendously. The reliability of book were constantly challenged. He shows some quotes of people contesting the supposed inherent truth of books. It not only happened in the realm of religion. Also science struggled how to classify things constantly, of which Borges has given a famous example. The physical copy introduced simultaneously the right to grant permission to copy it. It was not just accessing. The popular account of pre-print cultures is that of slavish copying, but - as many might not realize - also that of annotators, compilers and correctors. Medieval book owners and scribes actively shaped the text they read. Authority was never given. Readers didn't have the tools to check this either. It was a question of trust. Tracking the original source was very difficult. The emergence of authority was born later on. We now take for granted things like the publisher's name, the cover design etc. They are all meant to make the total package appear to be reliable. His end argument, then, is to try to de-classify and un-authorize encyclopedias and Wikipedia in particular. Encyclopedias are an attempt to authoritatively classify the world, an act to create certainty that doesn't exist. We should move to a certain idea of the uncertainty of knowledge. Not as reform or to make Wikipedia better, but as a precondition to just think of the production of knowledge. For more information about him:

• Short Bio
• Abstract
• Wikipedia

The mission statement of the Wikimedia foundation says: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment." If we want to achieve this, Hendrik-Jan Grievink states, we have to take it literally: imagine a world in images. He holds a Master in Design from the Sandberg Institute, the postgraduate course of the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. What follows is a brief overview of his previous work. For instance the posters he made for the MyCreativity and New Network Theory conferences. His approach is remixing the world around him. "Not very unique", he confesses, but "remix is something of our time." Illustrating this, is his successful project Fake For Real, a memory game which draws attention to fake/real counterparts. "As a designer, I try to make sense of the world through images", he continues. His recent, work in progress, project is called Wiki Loves Art. One part of it consists of a competition for the best illustrated Wikipedia articles. People are competing to take the best pictures of existing art. The photos, with aspects like depth of field and alternate point of views shed new light on pieces of art. Something that opens up museums to new audiences. By uploading these pictures to Flickr under the Creative Commons license, a database is slowly constructed. The result is a lot of free content, available for other artist, which enables remix. For instance, Bruegel's painting of The Tower of Babel was documented many times, presenting the artwork in various ways, which was then picked up by some to be digitally edited. Something that wouldn't happen with professional artists. The other part is very much under construction. Actually, Grievink gave us some insight into this book that wasn't even shown to those involved in the project. The book is going to be a sort of documentation of and reflection on the Wiki Loves Art project. It will be structured completely like an index from A to Z. It has to be kaleidoscopic, almost like browsing through Wikipedia: "a source, but also an experience to be there". That's something he wanted to remake in book form.

The book does three things:
1. A visual documentation of the WLA project.
2. A reflection of related topics.
3. Produce new works, hoping to create a never ending loop.

This is a relatively small project, "but we must not forget: images sometimes do change the world", like the first photograph of planet earth. Thirty years after it was made, this photo was re-used by Al Gore in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The movie is overwhelming, partially due to the fact of the powerful imagery. In an open society, docs like this presentation by Al Gore should be available to anyone, Grievink argues. Not only the presentation, but also every image and everything in it: "A real challenge would be to think of Wikimedia Commons as a goal in itself." It is like the logo of Wikipedia: with puzzle pieces still missing. A tower of babel that will never be finished, but nevertheless is worth pursuing. "Well, Wiki might love art, but there is a long road before art loves Wiki." For more information check:

• Short Bio
• Abstract

The German WikiWars and the Limits of Objectivism Presentation by Florian Cramer for the Critical Point of View (CPoV) conferece in Amsterdam, 27.03.2010 Cramer started his presentation by pointing out to some fictions about collaborative media. He believes it is mostly a utopia, what leads to a big history of disappointments. On the positive side, Wikipedia, with all its problems, is nevertheless the only large-scale working community of collaborative authorship. The implications of that are not all positive though: If one considers the hypertext/hyperfiction utopia by Nelson, Bolter and Landow in the 1990s, their ideas, especially when applied to literature, have gone almost nowhere. The notion of collective intelligence by Pierre Levy has also failed in most cases, if one considers the huge amount of single authors and single articles. Wikipedia, in this case, is what comes closer to his ideal of collaborative writing. The p2p, another utopia, ended up being used for consumption instead of being a media for cultural production. Finally, the creative commons idea, whose works are rarely re-used. He thinks that these hopes for collaborative media are 'a bit old European', and the one that persists the most is the hope for a CPoV instead of a NPoV. This means, that Wikipedia is founded precisely on the opposite of CPoV. This is a question of what inspired the creation of Wikipedia. He continues his critique by showing the Wikipedia page on Jimmy Wales ('largely edited by himself') and emphasizing his influences, which involve Ayn Rand's Objectivism - which is 'hard core neo-liberalism' and 'capitalist philosophy'. This philosophical stream believes that there is an objective reality and that therefore it is possible to have a NPoV of things. He believes that Wikipedia is the only successful appropriation of the notion of Open Source for works other than software. Free marked and the free flow of ideas were also incorporated (see 1998s the Cathedral and the Bazar). In other words, the NPoV is the translation of Ayn Rand's school of thought and other libertarian influences into the project. Wikipedia, as well as other FLOSS movements, are built on consensus. The main problem is that this consensus is built on fictions. In Wikipedia there are implicit social contracts based on objectiveness, what holds the community of editors in Wikipedia together. However, this fiction/myth of having an objective reality does not scale. Once the project grows and controversies arise, it leads to subsequent disappointments. A further design problem in Wikipedia is that it tries to create its neutrality/consensus/objectivity by the way the article page is designed. It looks like one unitary source of information that does not reflect the actual editing history. Cramer finalizes his presentation by introducing Annemieke van der Hoek, who developed a tool called Epicpedia. EpicPedia (based on the epic theater by Bertold Brecht) is a tool that translates Wikipedia pages into a theatrical kind of way. For more information check:

• Short Bio
• Abstract
• Piet Zwart Institute