A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as theWikimedia Research Newsletter.
"Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Production"[1] byJeff Loveland (a historian of encyclopedias) andJoseph Reagle situates Wikipedia within the context of encyclopedic production historically, arguing that the features that many claim to be unique about Wikipedia actually have roots in encyclopedias of the past. Loveland and Reagle criticize characterizations of Wikipedia that they believe to be ahistorical and exaggerated, laying special blame with authors who compare Wikipedia’s anonymous production to Encyclopedia Britannica’s production by named experts, and thus ignore the rich tradition of encyclopedic production through the centuries. The authors then set about characterizing the history of encyclopedic production as composed of three overlapping forms: compulsive collection, stigmergic accumulation, and corporate production.
"Compulsive collection" refers to the work of compiling encyclopedias that has traditionally been done by a few dedicated, tireless, detail-oriented individuals. Loveland and Reagle point out that, although Wikipedians share this compulsive behavior with past encyclopedists, the crucial distinction lies in the fact that the vast majority were motivated by money (even if this motive existed alongside more idealistic motivations) whereas Wikipedia editors are unpaid.
Loveland and Reagle use the term "stigmergic accumulation" to refer to the process of production by accretion onto a previous text. Even those responsible for a singly authored encyclopedia were relying on predecessors, the authors argue, "building on their work and using the cumulative character of texts and knowledge as a ladder of sorts". Examples of existing texts included the use of a previous edition of an encyclopedia that ran into multiple editions, and the practice of borrowing between different encyclopedias that was sometimes illegal but more often viewed as "piratical" i.e. morally wrong.
The category of "corporate production" is used by Loveland and Reagle to describe the process of encyclopedic editing by a group – groups that topped a thousand contributors in the 20th century. Editors of early encyclopedias like Diderot and D’Alembert’sEncyclopédie in the 1700s faced the challenge of trying to coordinate the contributions of about 140 contributors in a similar way to Wikipedia having to confront issues of consistency that result in debates about how important a subject must be to merit an article. In contrast to other encyclopedias, write Loveland and Reagle, Wikipedia settles these debates through community decision-making and in the open. The authors also note that previous encyclopedias didn’t always recruit on the basis of expertise and that some recognized that it would be cheaper and sometimes more accurate to have non-experts summarizing the works of experts.
The authors conclude by writing that although Wikipedia is in some respects unique in terms of its size, its reliance on volunteers and nonprofit nature, the continuities between Wikipedia and past encyclopedias are "numerous and significant". Their hope is that this paper "will help scholars avoid ahistorical claims about Wikipedia, identify historical material germane to the social scientist’s concerns (such as the motivations of encyclopedia-producers), and show that contemporary questions about Wikipedia (such as what exactly should be counted as a contribution) have a lifespan exceeding the past decade."
Thecollaboration of the two authors began after Reagle hadlearned (via asummary in this research report) of a review where Loveland had criticized Reagle's 2010 bookGood Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia for having "one major weakness, namely in historical contextualization". The resulting paper has received media attention starting with an article inThe Atlantic, see theFebruary 4 issue ofThe Signpost.
A study titled "Exploring the Cautionary Attitude Toward Wikipedia in Higher Education: Implications for Higher Education Institutions"[2] analyzes the attitudes of five British university lecturers towards Wikipedia, throughqualitative analysis. The methodology consisted of 90-minute interviews with the lecturers who declared their familiarity withWeb 2.0 educational tools, and analysis of university documentation, primarily in the form of “unofficial policy” regarding the use and evaluation of Wikipedia by students, as no official policy on Wikipedia existed. The author finds that Wikipedia is still treated with suspicion by the educators interviewed, due to 1) a lack of understanding of Wikipedia, 2) a negative attitude toward collaborative knowledge produced outside academia, and 3) the perceived detrimental effects of the use of Web 2.0 applications not included in the university suite. Some factors of particular concern included 1) "the difficulty of knowing if an article is correct," 2) doubts regarding the quality of information produced by anonymous contributors, 3) doubts about whether the Wikipediacrowdsourcing model of knowledge production can really outperform the experts (reviewer note:butofcourse...), 4) concerns that Wikipedia makes research "too easy" for students and 5) misunderstanding of Wikipedia's non-profit nature, with two interviewees suspicious of Wikipedia, expressing concerns such as "this is a commercial business; it wants to make money" and "they are obviously doing it from a business perspective", and another concerned about "politics and motivation behind [Wikipedia's dominant position on the Internet]". All the interviewed teachers hoped that the library staff would be able to provide guidance to students regarding evaluating when to use Wikipedia; however correspondence with the library staff showed that their guidelines are mostly inapplicable to Wikipedia, and they do not address Wikipedia during their literacy teaching sessions. The research also found that all five lecturers use Wikipedia in personal life, and four, in professional research, with two of them commenting that they feel a bit hypocritical using the same tool they warn the students about. None of the interviewed lecturers contributed to Wikipedia, and only one was aware of any outreach from Wikipedia to academics. As the author notes, Wikipedia is still alien to the academic culture, and while the attitudes are shifting, there is still much misunderstanding about Wikipedia's reliability, quality and non-profit mission. The author concludes that Wikipedia should address those concerns through the following recommendations: 1) "Increase understanding of Wikipedia, its policies and processes." 2) "Increase understanding of the nature of open and free collaboratively produced knowledge." and 3) "Make available Wikipedia guidance and evaluation criteria to students and teaching staff."
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A research team fromBarcelona Media Lab has put a preprint in arXiv recently,[3] in which thesistership relation between cities is analyzed. Although the paper has little to say about Wikipedia in itself, the corresponding dataset is extracted from the English Wikipedia, which, according to the paper, hosts "the most extensive but certainly not complete collection of this kind of relationships". Although this statement could be argued, and no evidence is presented in the article to support that claim, it is striking thatmass collaboration of Wikipedians can provide such an interesting package of information on a global scale.
After a description of the data extraction process, the paper presents a set of standardComplex Network analysis, e.g.,degree distribution,clustering, averageseparation of nodes on the network, etc. While there is no surprise among the results of the network analysis, the interesting conclusion is about the effects of the geographical distance of sister cities: "the geographical distance has only a negligible influence when a city selects a sister city."
In a paper titled "Towards Content Neutrality in Wiki Systems"[4] (an extended version of aconference keynote), a German computer scientist criticizes Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" policy as based on "an objectivist point of view" that is prominent in parts of the natural sciences, but is challenged in the fields of quantum physics, psychology and the social sciences, according to the author. He offers differences between language versions of the Wikipedia articles on Osama Bin Laden and the Mossad as further arguments against the NPOV concept. He admits that "two examples, based on machine translation and subjective classification by an author who wants to prove his point do not show anything", but claims that even more systematic studies "would suffer the same objection", proving "that the object under consideration, i.e., a neutral point of view, logically may be considered an ill-defined concept". However, it is still used on Wikipedia, and even ingrained in its architecture where the "linear version history evokes the illusion that there is one 'currently best' version of an article". To explain why so many Wikipedians do not accept his own logical conclusion, the author offers the psychological diagnosis ofcognitive dissonance: "Accepting the illusion of NPOV, one does not have to live with never ending edit-wars on the ultimately right article and one does not have to suffer dissonant feelings in every article".
Heading back towards his own area of academic expertise, the author then outlines "a variant-augmented Wiki system" to modifying the linear versioning of usual wikis. He bases it on a proposed concept of "content neutrality" requiring "knowledge management platforms" "to store and provide content without any evaluation of its merit", modeled afternetwork neutrality. He argues that "a collection of every-point-of-view, contradictory, possibly emotionally charged articles may provide a better approximation to reality than a synthetic and illusionary neutral point-of-view" and hopes that such a "content-neutral, EPOV knowledge base [has] a real chance of becoming a truly helpful instrument for science." Various possible problems with such an architecture are outlined, together with some suggested solutions, but the discussion remains brief and without detail ("The formal design and security analysis of low-level protocols are left to a later paper"). To protect against malicious site operators, the concept is extended to "distributed Wiki hubs". The paper mentions the existence of "a preliminary implementation as a MediaWiki plug-in prototype" and ongoing work on a use case "which can be described as a Wiki / Blog merge".
A section on related work cites a few earlier papers discussing distributed wikis or Wikipedia forks (out of many more, see e.g. this reviewer's "Timeline of distributed Wikipedia proposals").
Thank you for letting others know that the continuities between Wikipedia and past encyclopedias are numerous and significant. Regarding Wikipedia's uniqueness, can you open up any other encyclopedia or most other published works and personally verify each of its sentences? Regarding the statement "Even those responsible for a singly authored encyclopedia were relying on predecessors," Wikipedia does not just rely on predecessors. Among several unique aspects, Wikipedia articles are limited to what predecessors have written, e.g.,no original research, and Wikipedia's line up to add it for free. In the history of encyclopedic production, has anyone else put as their number one rule that each contributor is to have little or no concern for oneself, especially with regard to fame, position, money, or view? As for which predecessors, there is the effort that coverage is to beindependent of the subject. Has any other encyclopedic adopted as a premise that a worst source of information is the subject itself? Hey, let's build an encyclopedia where the publishing decisions of everyone but the subject itself can be used in the writing. Who in their right mind could conceive of something like that? Yet, here we are, imposing selflessness on ourselves and on the subject of an article to coalesce bits of information from around the world that have published since the beginning of the first printed word into articles that best capture what others are saying about a subject in averifiable,unbiased way. --Uzma Gamal (talk)10:24, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It is good to see more research going on in this area, even if the article in question is behind a [[pay wall]. Looking at the list in the wikipedia entry forGood Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia I see no reference to the proposal for a Workers Encyclopedia which the RussianMachists (Maxim Gorky,Alexander Bogdanov andAnatoly Lunacharsky came up with in 1908, and which Bogdanov tried to implement in 1919. Unfortunately, this project never really got of the ground, thanks to opposition from the Leninists, and unavailability of documentation, we cannot assess to what extent their proposal would have answeredUser:Uzma Gamal's question above. Likewise,Aksel Berg made a proposal for an on-line encyclopedia in his 1962 paperCybernetics and Education. But this along with the associated educational reforms got lost whenBrezhnev came to power in theUSSR in 1964. I also feel that a discussion of these issues could usefully take place in the contect ofMarshal McLuhan'sUnderstanding Media. Another matter in which I am interested is this: what do Wikipedia editors understand by encyclopedia and to what extent do previous models inform their practice?
We have EPOV, it's called "the top ten hits on Google". EPOV with relevancy weighting is ideal NPOV.
Multiple POVs is a perennial proposal. But the reader demand does not appear to be there -David Gerard (talk)08:06, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm trying to figure out how to say thatstigmergy is essentially the same term ascrowdsourcing in the context of these stories in a mildly negative way. Hmpf!?Josh Joaquin (talk)08:53, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sister cities are usually unsourced and incomplete. Despite this, they are surprisingly accurate.
By the way,Saint Peterburg's list of sister cities has evolved from an unsourced mess to an organized and fully sourced list. Kudos to the maintainers of the list. --Enric Naval (talk)23:07, 1 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The CMU paper on mildly negative feedback is interesting -- in layman's terms, it seems to hearken back to the long-standing wiki principle of "always leave something to do" as a way to encourage others to contribute. Seems like something to keep in mind when reviewing articles and leaving newbie feedback.
Thanks for this month's research newsletter, all really interesting. --phoebe /(talk to me)16:53, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
