It this age of global connectedness, when significant amount of people are 'wired' to the Internet it is important to study its social and anthropological implications. With reference to Professor Langdon Winner's seminal paper titled "Do Artifacts have Politics?", in this blog I will speak about the political implications of the most popular reference site on the internet. There is nothing more political than influencing the way people think, with that respect Wikipedia stands at the top of all 'digital artifacts'.
Wikipedia is a freely licensed web-based multilingual encyclopedia which is collaboratively written and managed by volunteers all around the world. Wikipedia works on an open 'wiki' model, that is, anyone can edit it anonymously. Wikipedia was created in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and it grew into the most popular reference work on the internet having more than 365 million users. With more than six hundred thousand articles, Wikipedia is among the top ten most visited sites on the internet; thus forming a major influence among internet users today. Thus it become very important to understanding it anthropological implications.
Is the information in Wikipedia reliable?
Wikipedia works on an 'anyone can edit' policy; so the information in Wikipedia is generally the one agreed upon by the most of the editors. Lack of authority and chaotic nature of the community leads to inaccuracy of the information. Wikipedia has highly dynamic pages hard to monitor and is susceptible to 'vandals.' Many cases are inaccurate as it lacks fast-fact checking systems. Wikipedia may not always have the truth. In fact, Jimmy Wales in a talk at TED said:
“If we say we are only going to write the truth about a topic, that doesn't do a damn bit of good in figuring out what to write 'cause I don’t really agree with you about what's the truth.”
On this issue a satirical comedian Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report announced a neologism 'wikiality'. Colbert defined wikiality as "truth by consensus" (rather than fact).
Is the information in Wikipedia biased?
Before we get to the above question, we must understand what bias actually means. “It is an inclination to present or hold a partial perspective at the expense of (possibly equally valid) alternatives”. Is any information agreed by the majority always unbiased? Obviously not. Wikipedia articles are written by anonymous users who may or may not have a proper understanding in the subject. Wikipedia believes in being neutral, it claims to achieve it as the editors are a part of the general public and hence most of the articles are unbiased being agreed upon by the majority of people. As I said earlier, the information agreed upon by the majority need not always be unbiased. Moreover the community editing the pages is not evenly represented and hence the opinions of the minority are generally neglected. For example some surveys suggest that less than fifteen percent of Wikipedia’s hundreds of thousands of contributors are women, this automatically may make a few articles a bit gender biased.
The articles are written by a very small number of internet users. Hence the opinion and perspective of a person less exposed to the internet generally gets neglected. This might not happen if the articles are written by specialized scholars. The stress is on the point that the community editing the pages does not evenly represent the different sections of society and hence may not be neutral.
Wikipedia is also accused of being tainted with systemic bias. Since it is written by general public there is high weightage given to the pop-culture. Andrew Schlafly an American lawyer created Conservapedia accusing wikipedia to be liberal biased. Tim Anderson an Australian lecturer accused Wikipedia for being “U.S.-oriented biased”.
In April 2008 there was a concern among the Palestine advocacy about Israel-based biases in Wikipedia pages. Israeli diplomat David Saranga, when asked about these biases, said:
“It means only one thing: Israelis should be more active on Wikipedia. Instead of blaming it, they should go on the site much more, and try and change it”
Neutrality in this case can be only achieved if Israelis and Arabs are equally represented in Wikipedia.
In 2006 it was observed that lots of staffers of the US House of representatives started editing the Wikipedia to clean up their respective bosses' 'bios', and posted negative comments on the pages of their political opponents. This kind of activities make it hard for Wikipedia to maintain neutrality.
Wikipedia's 'anyone can edit' model has generated fostered interaction between people with different views and ideas. It has monopolized itself as a source of information and has become a major influence among the people. With various issues of biases, it may not be an ideal source but it has grown into one of the most powerful and influential websites. Being the most visited reference sites effects of its influence is huge. Influencing the readers with its biases and inaccurate articles Wikipedia has become one of the most political 'Digital artifact' as a British philosopher Martin Cohen argued:
“To control the reference sources that people use is to control the way people comprehend the world. Wikipedia may have a benign, even trivial face, but underneath may lie a more sinister and subtle threat to freedom of thought.”
- G Sujan Kumar
Wikipedia is one of the examples of the P2P tech->methodology i was talking about - This is one of the favorite poster examples of P2P advocates. :) check out http://p2pfoundation.net/Wikipedia to see
ReplyDelete-Bart