 |
|
|
WikiEverything: Community-Edited
Publications Ponder Paths to More Legitimacy |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
14 August 2006 |
|
|
|
|
The recent Wikimania conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts
fell on the heels of comedian Stephen Colbert's revealing
how easy it is to twist Wikipedia content to one's own
liking. In spite of Wikipedia's editors correcting his
gibberish quickly and effectively, the question of how to
get Wiki content to be both democratic and authoritative is
not being addressed very effectively yet by Wiki
proponents. The enormous potential for collaborative
content will go largely unrealized until more effective
systems are put in place that recognize how hard it is to
defend a democratic publishing institutions from the
tyrannies of both the mobs and the authorities. |
|
The recent
Wikimania conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts attracted
a global spectrum of participants and speakers focusing on
collaboratively edited
Wiki databases in general and the projects sponsored by the
Wikimedia Foundation in particular.
Wikipedia,
the
fast-growing reference site sponsored by the Wikimedia
Foundaton, was certainly an important figure in this
convocation, but hardly the only factor that is pushing
collaboratively edited content into the limelight. Wikipedia
gains the vast share of media attention but there are a raft of
other projects that are beginning to take shape in Wiki format
both online and in major institutions. The importance of Wikis
comes not through any inherent virtue in its software but
because both consumers and professionals are beginning to
accept user-edited databases as useful and entertaining content
sources.
The creation of Wikis is accelerating as free and affordable
software becomes widespread. Wiki hosting services such as
Wikia and
Wetpaint
are making Wiki development more accessible to the users whose
contributions make or break a Wiki, just as weblogs exploded
once services like Blogger
and TypePad made
it easy for pretty much anyone to push out their own content to
the world. And also similar to weblogs Wiki projects
individually may not look to be all that earth-shattering -
MuppetWiki may never
become a hot destination site - but the sum of encouraged
contributors builds content over time that becomes
authoritative and reference-worthy.
How reference-worthy? That's a hot question these days.
Wikipedia was edited recently by television persona
Stephen Colbert on his show to
demonstrate (video) how anyone could come along to change
his Wikipedia bio or most other information on the database and
it would take as accepted fact if other volunteer editors
agreed with him - a concept he dubbed "Wikiality". Colbert's
specious edits were eliminated quickly, along with scores of
others from his viewers, but Wikipedia wound up having to lock
down many entries to prevent mass falsehoods from being posted.
The media fallout was huge, including the Washington Post's
observation that there needed to be a system of
transparency that would allow Wikipedia users to understand how
and who was responsible for a Wiki article's content. Even
teenagers chimed in on how Wikipedia was not reliable
information in the eyes of their teachers.
The issue of making Wikis more authoritative resonated at
Wikimania on several levels. Brewster Kahle was among many at
the conference urging Wikipedia to develop for helping its
writers cite their own sources, even as Wikipedia founder Jimmy
Wales was announcing experiments in its German edition to
"freeze" content that's considered definitive. Michael Eisen,
one of the founders of the
Public Library
of Science, pointed out that the gains posted by the open
access movement argue for Wikis becoming an important tool that
can develop alternatives to traditional peer-reviewed
scientific content.
These are all great sentiments and steps in a constructive
direction, but they all dance around an important question: how
does the Wiki movement resolve the seemingly opposite concepts
of democratic community authoring and authoritative authoring?
Here are a few thoughts as to how Wikis need to evolve to
become tools that are more attuned to both user expertise and
the need for authoritative sourcing:
- If it's all about openness, then make it open all the
way. While Wikis work pretty well when they try to
capture fast-moving topics, there's little accountability for
the end result that would support authoritative referencing.
When I provided our definition for "content" to Wikipedia
last year (sixth
bullet from the top), the definition was accepted easily
enough, and you can use the "History" function of Wikipedia
to
see how it evolved - but there's no record of the process
that lead to its acceptance available to the public and no
easy way to cite authors or reviewers. Democracy in content
is a powerful force with great potential for good, but
democracy with only partial accountability is a formula for
disguising tyranny and deception.
- Allow for the fact that not all opinions need be
equal. There's a lot to be said for content developing
through well-intended peers into authoritative reference
sources, but the gap between consensus-driven acceptance and
authority-driven acceptance remains wide. There needs to be
an openly documented "graduation" process that Wiki content
can undergo to be promoted to be the equivalent of
peer-reviewed content as accepted by scholarly circles. These
authoritative reviewers need not necessarily be chosen from
above - who better to select peer reviewers than one's peers
- but as other social media outlets have already started to
recognize the quality of contributors more effectively so
must Wikis evolve to allow for distinguished and recognized
reviewers to develop for specific topics.
- Allow users to choose for themselves what content
works best for them. Right now in the typical Wiki
environment users have little or no choice in filtering their
versions: it's a full democratic view or nothing. Wikis
should continue to allow open editing wherever feasible, but
at the same time users should be able to choose between
open-edited content and authoritatively edited content as
they prefer - and to let audiences know these preferences in
sum. When open-edited content fails to attract the audience
that authoritatively edited content provides, it would be a
message to users that the mob is probably off base. If
open-edited content prevails, it would be a message to the
authorities that the mob is on to something.
As Wikis start evolving into more trusted and authoritative
sources of democratically edited content they must confront the
reality that democracies are fragile inventions that have
fallen oftentimes to tyrannies out of their unwillingness to
confront the weaknesses of both the mob and the authorities.
George Orwell reminds us in his classic novel
Animal Farm, a satirical analogy of the Russian
Revolution, that "All animals are equal, but some animals are
more equal than others." If Wikimania is to grow beyond a
self-congratulating cult using ad hoc tools to a
phenomenon that can have a lasting effect on both scholarship
and learning it must confront the need to move its idealism
towards more lasting solutions for developing trusted and
trustworthy content.
-
John Blossom
To top of
page
 |
