A few months ago, my friend was cited on the German Wikipedia entry for The Social Network. This was exciting, because I had just seen Das Social Network at a German cinema in Germany, where I live. This was also worrying, because although my friend is certainly a skilled journalist, it made me question Wikipedia's sourcing protocols, since it selected a fresh-out-of-college kid as a fountain of truth.
Of course, enlightened creatures tend not to consider Wikipedia the best researched and reliable of references. That's its whole shtick. A Wikipedia entry need only be cited from "credible" media sources, like interviews, blogs, or Wikipedia. It lacks any formal vetting process and is by definition unstable. But however unsound these foundations, Wikipedia is now the most cited document of our times, coming up first on almost any Google search, luring you into its hyperlinked labyrinth, and transporting me, at least, time and time again to the land of religious cults, megafauna and racist Disney cartoons.
Although Wikipedia is still, for the most part, scoffed by the Academy, more and more journals are referencing it. Several scholars have even cited the website, who themselves are subjects of Wikipedia articles, including Gayatri Spivak, Lawrence Buell and Donna Haraway.
A couple years ago, two artist activists, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, decided to prod at these quirks through a piece of collaborative art, in the form of a Wikipedia page.
In order for Wikipedia Art to qualify as a Wikipedia entry to begin with, it had to be discussed on some of the sources Wikipedia considers citation worthy. So Wikipedia Art was blogged about. The artists were interviewed. And then, on Valentine's Day 2009, Kildall and Stern launched the Wikipedia Art page, citing the blogs that had mused on it and the interviews they gave, and inviting edits. In doing so, Kidall and Stern made Wikipedia Art exist.
Wikipedia Art is what J.L. Austin called a "performative utterance" -- an expression that is also an action, like saying "I do" at your wedding or a declaration of war. The words transform reality, bringing a thing into existence by saying it.
Kildall and Stern's "collaborative performance" and "public intervention" was a feedback loop, existing only through its documentation, and so called to attention the cracks and short-circuits in Wikipedia's totalizing claims to knowledge.
Within 16 hours the page was deleted. A month later the Wikipedia Foundation sued the artists, who had established wikipediaart.org to archive their project, for trademark infringement.
With their project, Kildall and Stern proved the vulnerability of Wikipedia to the comic or malicious machinations of vandals or fools. But more dangerously, the artists showed how Wikipedia is in the business of truth-making, influencing the reality it tries to record.
This happened when artist David Horvitz edited the Wikipedia entry on Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, claiming that the singer glanced at one of Horvitz's photographs in the moments before his suicide. Before this nugget was finally found and deleted, it landed on several Curtis fan sites, and became an enduring part of Curtis lore.
Wikipedia is a generator of conventional wisdom, in the original pejorative sense of the phrase:
Untruths that stick because they're widely believed and oft repeated -- like the earth being flat and the universe geocentric or, these days, that swallowed gum takes seven years to digest.
But Wikipedia feels trustworthier than old truth-making systems. It is, after all, not-for-profit and democratic, stitched together and amended by the masses. It escapes the static, top-down authority of print encyclopedias; the institutionalized biases of old knowledge factories; and the dusty elitism of academic peer-review. It seems like Wikipedia, with a postmodern pirouette, had soared above the Marxist, feminist, minority and post-colonial critiques that have been stabbing at old narratives for decades.
But when this populist patina was peeled back last week, it revealed a scarily hierarchical and gender-skewed structure. Only 13% of Wikipedia's contributors are women, 2% of users perform 75% of edits, and the average age is in the mid-20s. The architects of today's conventional wisdom are by and large young and male.
Having broken away from the institutions of old, Wiki's peer-to-peer playground has actually re-constituted itself in their image, reflecting once again the inequalities of the society it seeks to document. Most obviously, the four billion people without access to the Internet cannot edit the Wikipedia entries on their own cultures. And among the wired, it is the male techy community that has established a monopoly on truth.
Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikipedia Foundation, wants to increase female contribution to 25% by 2015. It's a noble goal on paper, but such an intervention goes against the techno-libertarianism of the hacker ethos, and fails to address the underlying cause of Wikipedia's gaping gender cleft.
Science and tech are still considered un-feminine pursuits, and the very fact of male dominance perpetuates itself; without role models in the field, girls are less likely to imagine themselves as welcome in it. The women who end up entering the computer club can feel like ambassadors for their gender, laboring under a scalding spotlight, afraid to speak out or mess up.
The digital artist Stefanie Wuschitz, speaking at Berlin's Transmediale festival, defended the hacker community as inclusive, in principle. "But they develop these very masculine codes," she said, referring to hackerspaces, and clicking to a slide with doodles of pornography, junk food, and testicles. "I wish they didn't make me feel so exotic and just gave me the space to work."
No doubt more women will geek out in the future, and spend their leisure time editing Wiki. But the wild skew in the website's demographics is a reminder that epistemology can be as illusive as art. Today's most prolific truth-makers might be vandals and fools, and are definitely, for the most part, young, male and probably bored.
Footnote: This post links to Wikipedia nine times.
Follow Claire Gordon on Twitter: www.twitter.com/clairedon
1. Wikipedia Women Facebook Group — http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=33052
2. WMF GenderGap Discussion Forum — http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=33040
3. Concern About Porn On Wikipedia — http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=33021
4. Media Coverage Around The World — http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=32780
As an educator, I do not accept Wikipedia as a primary source. I think its an all right place to go for a quick look, but far too many articles are profoundly biased, even without the "neutral pov" tag, and have gross inaccuracies in them, never mind nuanced problems. I encourage people to think about it as a tool, but one limited in depth.
I could say HP and Yale are gender-biased too, since you've got visibility here and there and I, a male, did not. But of course you're way more skilled than I am in most if not all possible aspects. It's not because you're a girl.
I don't see how "Wikipedia Culture" could possibly be imposing obstacles to women to participate. Or anyone for that matter. You know the site, you should be aware of that. Specially in Wikipedia English, you've got every single person, with honest encyclopaedia-building intentions or not, having their say at least on every Discussion and History pages for the entries out there. Wikipedia not only is serving the purpose of acting as an unbiased source of human information, it's also writing history itself, literally on its History pages, where you can see how irreconcilable arguments were settled based on a not-so-simple set of rules that everyone has access to.
If you think any given entry is being particularly biased towards we the horrible males, go ahead and edit it. It might get reverted, but there's a whole process to validate the "best possible truth".
Isn't that an equally valid point of view?
Women are hip to this kind of con game, and don't want to soil their name by contributing to a pool of information that is full of holes. Did you hear about that art project that got in? Phew! Women are smart to keep their distance.
Give me a break. What do these people want? their money back?
The internet is full of people giving information on how to fix cars, appliances, iPhones, etc.
The idea of offering such a store of information of almost every subject, without the limits of space, and constraints of time that a physical encyclopedia offers. For example, Christine Aguilara's SSB error made Wiki by the next day.
The Art Project showed flaws in Wiki's approach, but also it's success, in that it was deleted within a day. Really, didn't the art project prove Wiki to be a success?
The controversy of low participation by women is really a non-issue of Wikipedia. It doesn't come about due to some rule or guideline held by Wikipedia, it's just a reflection of all the other systems in our culture. Go fix those, where guidelines and discrimination actually exist, and I bet Wiki would fix itself over time.
Your article and the art project make a critique that was widely known within a nanosecond of Wikipedia's creation. People like Richard Dawkins, the most famous science education in the UK, mocked the idea years ago and then had to publicly retract his comments once he browsed the "Biology" article and found it to be impeccably sourced and pristinely written.
The only thing that needs to be said about your critique is that Wikipedia is a starting point, and anyone that's informed knows that but since it's used by everyone a lot of lazy thinkers don't, and those people will be immune to the witty/annoying insights of some art project regardless. A well-written article sources anything that's important and this makes citing Wikipedia unnecessary, because you can simply look up the source of a given statement and then cite that instead.
I'm in no way involved with Wikipedia.
— Jimmy Wales, quoted in Robin “Roblimo” Miller, “Wikimedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds”, Slashdot, 28 Jul 2004. (http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1351230/Wikipedia-Founder-Jimmy-Wales-Responds)
I think that probably qualifies as a “totalizing claim to knowledge”, at least in regard to intent.
Wikipedia is analogous to a multinational timber conglomerate that clear-cuts living forests to crank out its lumber and its pulp, with no understanding of the living system that it sucks on like a destructive parasite.
People used to make money doing what Wiki is doing for free?
Otherwise, it's a bad analogy.
Timber conglomerates don't operate on a nonprofit basis.
Information and knowledge aren't finite resources that get consumed.
I am saying that Wikipedia Culture, as it currently exists in reality, and not in the fantasies of those who promote it, exploits the contents of our common culture in a way that undermines the very dynamics that created it.
1. Wikipedia has developed a unique presentation layout, far superior to the models used for academic research, more succinct, objective and organized, with little room for nonsense.
2. Wikipedia elevated the use of hypertext to the state of the art. It is impossible to calculate how much I expand my knowledge by clicking the links in the body of the articles.
3. Wikipedia managed to popularize scientific knowledge at a level that surpasses all initiatives of the academy.
The academy nourish a great rancor for success and the non-commercial model of wikipedia. The academy should try to learn from wikipedia. I hope rancid complaints like the one I just have read cease as newer and better academics are formed with the help of wikipedia.
Is that anyone would put all of their trust in any one source of data or news.
Double check everything, and then being skeptical is still the way to go, then keep checking a 3rd, 4th, and 5th source. Critical thinking and common sense just may help a bit as well. - Just sayin
According to Wikipedia's own survey data, the most highly represented, most "typical" age group is 18-year-olds.
- A quarter of all users are below 18.
- Another quarter of users are below 22.
- Another quarter is aged 22-29.
- The last quarter is made up of people aged 30 or older.
This means that in democratic Wikipedia processes making content decisions and the like, half the editors "voting" are below 22, if participation follows general demographics.
12.5% will be female.
http://www.wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_Age_Gender_30March%202010-FINAL-3.pdf