Reagle's presentation can be accessed on his own website.

I want to make sense some of the criticism Wikipedia receives in a historical frame. I want to do this in a very simple proposition, that; reference works embody larger social anxieties. One of the central things about thinking about encyclopedias is through their motives. Because of the Enlightenment, we tend to think of progressiveness as an inherent property of encyclopedias but that has not been always the case (Reagle’s examples can be found in his presentation on the link above). Encyclopedias can combine progressive or conservative elements and their reception can again be perceived as either, regardless of the inherent qualities of the work in question. The same has been true about Wikipedia as well. While some people criticize it for being anti-academia and hostile to expertise, other people blame it for being a servant of peer-review institutions. While Wikipedia aims to represent all claims to knowledge via verifiable sources in a neutral point of view, this creates an inherent bias towards opinions that are more widely represented within verifiable and notable sources. This natural bias for representation according to proportional evidence aggravates fringe opinion holders (Creationists etc.). Yet, even among scholars the meaning of what an encyclopedia should represent is not certain, not only concerning Wikipedia but concerning historical encyclopedias as well.

Based on all these opinions and issues in discussion, we have understand this debate not strictly about encyclopedias but about larger societal issues. That is my approach; To get a sense of what it is that Wikipedia stirs in society.

At the heart of most discussions concerning reference works in general, and Wikipedia in particular, is a question regarding the degree of normativeness a reference work should embody in contrast to being merely descriptive (Telling how things should be instead/in addition to telling just how they are).

Also, Why should even we care? We certainly don’t care as much about Facebook, to the extend of having conferences solely devoted to it.

Two reasons:

I) This is a market construct. Mid-20th century marketing of Britannica; “Send your children to the Britannica.”

II) Questions of material constraints: What do we put it, what do we take out?

Historically, this is why we have so much critical discourse and debate around Wikipedia. When I look at the discourse around Wikipedia, relative to my research about collaborative culture, I saw four themes that are most prevalent:

I) Collaborative Practice- How do we work together? II) Encyclopedic impulse III) Bibliomania IV) Technological Inspiration - To what extend technology facilitate our struggle to reach our encyclopedic goals?

I will be focusing on the last one.

One of the central arguments of the merits of technology relates to hypertext. It has been hailed as a door for more fluid and accessible learning but it has also been accused of destroying the sanctity of authorship and removing us from real knowledge in favor of mere information. I find most such discussions to be ahistorical, the urge behind connecting information like this is not new. Otlet dreamt of connecting knowledge with index cards and loose-leaf binders.

One other point of heated debate is concerned with the hype surrounding Wikipedia. Critics argue Wikipedia’s shortcomings as a general cultural model. Yet, Wikipedians themselves are seldom the ones that believe in this hype. They usually say “Wikipedia is awesome not because it’s perfect, but it’s surprisingly good. We thought it wouldn’t even work but it’s surprisingly good.” While some critics find even this to be not good enough, I think this might be a question of glass half-empty of half-full. However, comparing something to Wikipedia has become the new cliche. Another indicator that Wikipedia is being used as an example in a larger cultural discussion. Such discussions closely reflect larger, and very common, generational issues, maybe not directly related to age but to certain sensitivities (quotes Douglas Adams on the way people’s perceptions change over time regarding technology). Before Wikipedia, there were many books pointing out shortcomings of other encyclopedias.

In closing;

A lot of the discussion about Wikipedia is representative of some of the prevailing attitudes and beliefs, and some of the contradictions of these attitudes and beliefs, as they shift, as facilitated by technology, and therefore (my argument); Reference works do embody and provoke larger social concerns and with respect to this issue of technology and technological inspiration, I think we can see a concern about the integrity of knowledge, the sanctity of the author and the concern about hype, with the background of this generational difference in perception.

I will present a history of encyclopedias with respect to Wikipedia. I will specifically focus on the question, whether they were conservative or radical enterprises for their time. It should be noted that encyclopedia is a very mobile genre. It has meant different things to different people throughout time. It can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome but the word itself is from the 16th Century England. However,

Encyclopedic can be taken as meaning an inclusive discussion of where you get your knowledge from and where you apply it. In this sense Leibniz and Bacon can be considered encyclopedic authors. Even fiction from 20th century can be classified as such, Joyce, Eco etc.

While these examples have been radical and challenging, historically most of encyclopedias have been conservative. The tendency to be conservative can be traced back to the fundamental purpose of an encyclopedia, after all, what is an encyclopedia but a collection of existing texts. This has been true for other cultures as well like the Chinese. The Chinese emperors supported huge encyclopedic efforts throghout history to support their regimes and bolster national pride. In the West, medieval scholars mostly did conservative work; digesting the ancient Greeks with Christian theology. They used different analogies to illustrate their attempts; one of them was a mirror (Famously used by Vincent of Beauvais with his Speculum Maius in 13th Century). A mirror implied that they could capture a snapshot of a world, that the human-worldly affairs were essentially static.

Given these conservative encyclopedias, the question is, can you even have a radical encyclopedia. The answer is, it is possible when the time is right. A very critical example is Francis Bacon. Although he did not produced an encyclopedia, he talked about possibilities of amassing and organizing knowledge. He also produced his own trope to illustrate knowledge; a tree, which is slightly more radical than a mirror. A tree can still grow where a mirror is static. Bacon challenged the Aristotelian categorization of knowledge that was in use for centuries where he divived knowledge in three categories;

1. imagination
2. reason (Natural Philosophy, etc.)
3. Memory (Natural History, etc.)

At this time (17-18th Century), compilers were still trying to produce encyclopedias which presented knowledge as part of an organized whole which could be understood by an individual reader. The idea was, one can read it from cover to cover and achieve enlightenment. In that sense, encyclopedias has a mission of being a personal university. This was challenged by the massively expanding knowledge at the end of 18th century, it was around this time that compilers started writing scientific dictionaries. These were an attempt to include scientific knowledge but they also retained the old idea of a personal university, signifying a transition in the mentality. An example is Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) which described knowledge as a course of learning. Scientific Dictionaries represented a micture of radical and conservative in this regard. Chambers is followed by the Diderot and d’Alembert and their Encyclopedie which was again a transitional work it still tries to provide diagrams that explains how it all works while having an alphabetical organization which implied you look it up, not read it from beginning to end. Diderot was a radical in many other ways; they used many collaborators and they used cross-references, also they used the encyclopedia to push social change.

During the 20th and 19th centuries, multi-volume encyclopedia came to the forefront. Most famous of which is the Britannica, which featured specialized treatises and combined them with shorter, general articles. These works were essentially conservative. They didn’t include any self-criticism. They made many assumptions about the nature of things. They had a Victorian confidence concerning achieving knowledge and preserving it.

Wikipedia; It it radical?

• It may be obvious that it is. Given its digital nature;Hyperlinks (Anyone can forge their own path while browsing, create their own book). George Landau, 1992 on Hyperlinks, influenced by Deleuze and Guattarai’s Plateau and their trope of Rhizome, argued hyperlinks represent a cultural revolution.
• Wide community of authors vs. small group of expert contributions
• It produces a new view of knowledge as a pluralistic and ever-changing

What isn’t?

While Wikipedia is certainly not conservative on talk pages, many people don’t read them. From the public point of view, the article pages mostly reflect a 19th century multi-volume encyclopedia. This is a very conservative thing to do.

What’s wrong with Wikipedia?

The NPOV is at the root of the problem, combined with majority decision making. These lead to a consensus which is very limiting. It doesn’t allow you to see different voices and result in an article that sounds very sterile and boring. It would be much more interesting when dealing with a controversial topic if they could take different points of view and give them one ofter one another instead of aiming to achieve an uninteresting consensus. That would be a very radical project. We can argue, based on this that, Wikipedia is very radical except for all the articles.