Fair warning and full disclosure: the work-in-progress nature of this blog is even more, well, “in progress” in what follows. I just couldn’t help it, and isn’t that what blogs are for?
I continue to find some of the meta-content on Wikipedia of intense interest. Wikipedia is a collaborative public information site. Its wiki design reflects its commitment to the idea of consensus, not necessarily at the level of every specific piece of information, but certainly at an epistemological level, and also (I’d say necessarily) at an ethical level. That is to say, the Wikipedia implicitly argues for the existence of external reality, even if questions about the conditions, reliability, and verifiability of our access to that reality are more-or-less bracketed, as they typically are in this discourse. Wikipedia also implicitly argues for the human ability to transcend ideology, and against the Foucaultian idea that discourse is nothing more (and nothing less) than the circulation of power. While I wouldn’t say that Wikipedia is entirely a child of the Enlightenment, I would say that it is faithful to many of the items in that creed.
It’s the latter argument that fascinates me today, particularly because it’s counterintuitive in this instance. At Wikipedia, authors are not named. [EDIT: there are no “bylines,” because there are no single authors, but one can see every registered editor who’s worked on an article by looking at the article edit history.] The effort is intensely collaborative. The entire site seems to reflect exactly the kind of paradigms that inform some strands of postmodern thought, especially concerning the Internet. And yet … the Wikipedia has just launched a new project called “Wikinews.” Launched in November, 2004 and still in its beta version, Wikinews’ mission (ah, another agency word, even if the agent or agents go unnamed) “is to create a diverse environment where citizen journalists can independently report the news on a wide variety of current events.”
Now things get even more interesting. The Wikinews article on Rachelle Waterman, the blogger who is now charged by police with the murder of her mother, occupies a special category called “Articles Under Review,” and it features this disclaimer:
This article is currently under review.
For readers: This article is currently subject to change or removal, and we make no guarantee whatsoever for its content. You may want to wait for the final published version before citing it as a source.
For editors & writers: Freely edit the article in accordance with content and style guides. During article review, please provide detailed edit summaries and/or comments about the quality, neutrality, accuracy, legality, writing, and comprehensiveness of the article. If the article passes review, replace the {{review|…}} tag with a {{reviewed}} (at bottom). If after 7 days it does not pass review, use {{reviewfailed}} tag instead.
What’s interesting here is that “currently subject to change or removal, and we make no guarantee whatsoever for its content” would seem on the face of it to apply to every single Wikipedia article and also to Wikinews, which I would argue is a current-events version of Wikipedia. Aren’t constant change and no guarantees the very conditions of postmodernity? Perhaps … not … quite. This “special case” category and others like it, such as “protected” or “needs additions” or “needs cleanup” (e.g. the Wikipedia entry on the historicity of Jesus), in my view reveal the epistemological and ethical assumptions that underlie the entire site. (I’d develop this notion here if I had time right now, which I don’t.)
The really interesting tidbit, however, is the article-under-review disclaimer’s link to the “neutrality” article. Clearly the Wikipedia/Wikinews administrators (even democracy has administrators, it seems–and I’m not objecting) believe that neutrality is not only possible but important. That’s not to say that anyone can be completely neutral. “Completely neutral” is a straw man, in my experience, attractive to those who want to mount pure Foucaultian arguments or to hide their own primary and debatable assumptions behind narratives of inevitability. The question, instead, is whether any kind of neutrality is possible. Can one be fair? Can the Wikinews article on Rachelle Waterman be written to explore points of view more than to argue for one point of view over the other? If not, then why review it at all? If so, then review becomes a necessary step in the process. Not total objectivity, then, but not trapped in the prison of the self.
My point is that the Wikipedia implicitly rejects the belief that we are all “trapped in the prison of the self,” and that it has to reject that belief because otherwise the idea of the Wikipedia project as it is currently enacted at Wikipedia.org is absurd. I would also argue that radical philosophies of solipsism or their interesting variants in philosophies of pragmatism make the very idea of ethics an absurdity, but that’s material for another blog.
Yet my own blog entry on this topic must end with the humble recognition of a striking fact: as of this writing, the “neutrality” link in the Wikinews “article under review” disclaimer leads to an article that has not yet been written.
A colleague at my university alerts me to the “BOB” awards just announced by Deutsche Welle, an organization he describes as roughly similar to the BBC World Service. Here are the categories (quoted from the site, with descriptions where needed). The site notes that prizes were awarded “by an international team of blog experts.”
