Call for papers (open until May 15., 2010): A session in The 2nd International Power & Knowledge Conference, Tampere, September 6-8, 2010
http://tinyurl.com/yfvgyh6 The collective knowledge creation on various wiki-sites, including the massively popular Wikipedia, is having a profound effect on the social and epistemological conditions of public information. Distributed collaboration, possible anonymity, radical equality and global reach of wikified information lead to a situation that at the same time democratizes knowledge production by levelling hierarchies of expertise and increases the postmodern condition of reflective uncertainty. Everybody knows that the Wikipedia can not be trusted in the same way as, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica, yet over 100 million people utilize the Wikipedia daily. The ‘edit’ and ‘history’ buttons ever present on wiki pages are already starting to exert pressure on information presented elsewhere. For instance, the negotiations on what information to include and how the information should be presented in various Wikipedia entries constitute a huge experiment in the use of public reason à la Kant. Consequently, the dynamics of collective collaboration also bring out questions on the nature of rationality and plurality of knowledge. Wikis provide ready made windows into the dialectical interplay between knowledge creation and issues of identity, social inclusion, authority, and the interface between information and politics.
The session invites contributions discussing these themes through theoretical reflection and/or empirical case studies. Abstracts should be between 150-200 words of length.
Abstract submission: http://tinyurl.com/yk98dgk Organizers & more information:
Organizers: Tere Vadén, tere.vaden ä uta.fi , Teemu Mikkonen, teemu.mikkonen ä uta.fi, Juha Suoranta juha.suoranta ä uta.fi

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.

Wikipedia is fundamental in current shifts on how knowledge is produced and organised. This is the thesis outlined in R. Reichert's presentation.  According to Reichert  Wikipedia should be understood as representing a new mode of power. Attempting to offer (a short) archeology of Wikipedia, to a room of mostly non-Foucauldians,  Reichert argued that power, as a regime of mechanisms on Wikipedia, is controled and exercised through the network of users and editors. Wikipedia thus produces normative orders of knowledge via the micro-management of political engagement with so-called knowledge. So, for example, wikipedians can't change what they can do on Wikipedia, there are rigid roles and fuctions engineering the discipline of the self. Wikipedia represents a specific discourse of participation and produces particular technologies of the self. On Wikipedia subjectivity means engeenering  the impersonal view of the self. Reirchert also streesed that wikipedia represents a certain way of organising knowledge towards effectiveness, and control. Its objective is to disaminate a normative based archive of knowledge, and a new social clasification system of flexibility.Wikipedia  is also a space in which discursive practices of excluding and discipling reign. For example edit wars are about exclusion and also about  accepting, together with other practices they form disciplines. Reichert key argument also focused on outlining how Wikipedia constitutes a new paradigm for organising culture that is increasingly adopted by many business. Joining many outside the and inside the Foucauldian tradition Reichert sceptically explained how the wiki way of orgnaising and doing knowledge is alarmingly being exported outside the realms of profit making. Acocrding to this line of thinking Wikipedia technologies of the self produce flexible and efficient human labour in an organisation that can be assigned to any task. Finally Reichert talked about how Wikipedia visualises the discoursive process it generates. This means users can actually see these practices deisgned in the wikipedia interphase. Audience responce was typical of the cynicism often voiced in responce to Fouldian analysis: what does this all mean? does it mean subjects are actually subjugated and that we cant really escape the wikipedia mechanism?...As the morning progressed Reichert's pessimistic scepticism appeared less cynical, it grew on the audience ...and echoed more like  a refreshing european negative thought in comparison to the more alien american positive voices that had surfaced by late afternoon....

Following our internal editorial discussions as well as the welcoming notes on the closed cc: mailing list, I thought it is time to open our debate! I personally think it is important to emphasise – and here I refer to Geert Lovink – that this debate likes to be understood as a critical debate which locates itself outside of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation; this debate wants to be a forum which is not ‘anti’ but reflective. CPoV means Critical Point of Views in plural and that is why not only scholars, researchers but also practitioners, artists and users are invited to present and discuss their views. I am looking very much forward!!

Nishant Shah talks about dis/location as key notion of resistance in the context of Wikipedia. Also, Nate Tkacz introduces openness/closure as key dichotomy to think about. And there are lots more to imagine: in/exclusion, ir/rationality, global/local, de/centralization, integration/fragmentation… I am interested if and how to move beyond these notions. For me, the CPoV debate is about learning more about latency – latency which operates at core of the in/visible. In November 2009, Carsten Zorn has published a critical, German-only book article in which he places the recent debates about swarms in the historical context of both, media latency and political latency. He develops this position-fixing as a story of dis/continuities. On the one hand he identifies these debate as a modified continuation of the “invisible hand” (Foucault), “revolutionary subject” (Marx) and the mass. This continuation evolves around the following question: How emerges the hidden into the light, so to say, and manifests itself as power? On the other hand, he sees differences to the swarm-discourse’s precursors in terms of a non-relation to traditional collectivization references such as nation, class, and mass. With the notion of swarms, the discourse opens itself to think somehow outside of traditional forms of belonging. I am particularly interested into ideas about how to think Wikipedia as a translingual space. In general and looking at Wikipedia, I wonder what we can learn about latency in order to inform our imaginary of (new) media and the political…