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.

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