Wikipedia reigning in the media culture

[Parody of Language]

Okay, so I don't know exactly what "media culture" means in the title. It's just one of those blah terms that I've heard before, and passed on. Maybe it will make the article more interesting.

But I am reading the Wikipedia article about the Hunduras Coup D'etat and, while I was reading it, I was wondering whether I should trust the article. I supposed that's what all of us should be asking ourselves whenever we read anything. Thinking about this brought up some ideas that I think are interesting enough to share.

There are, obviously, some things that are different about Wikipedia, that distinguishes it from other media avenues. First is that it sees itself as a tertiary work, e.g., an encyclopedia. That is, the encyclopedia does no reporting itself, but sees it's role in collecting propositions from other works such as books, newspapers, and scientific journals. Second, Wikipedia is written by multiple authors and editors. Any Wikipedia article that you come across is undoubtedly written, and edited, by multiple authors. And third, there's no "vetting" process for you to contribute content. Virtually anyone who has access to the encyclopedia has the ability to make edits to it. And you can do so either anonymously, pseudonymously, or give your identity if you wish.

One of the media literacy sites says that all media is constructed. I take this to mean that the purpose of media is to be read, listened to, or watched, and the media itself is constructed for this purpose. The same thing can be said of Wikipedia as well, but perhaps in a different light. Going through the history of a Wikipedia article, you can see how any given article has been constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed through multiple incarnations. This history feature is one of the highlights of Wikipedia as a media avenue, as all other forms of media keep this process of editing media in the background. The biases, prejudices, and intentions behind a Wikipedia is often out in the open, or can be easily determined. Similarly, every Wikipedia page has a discussion page, accessible to anyone who can access the encyclopedia, that reflects the questions and concerns of editors of the article.

But what I find most interesting is the event that occurs often on Wikipedia called an editing war. Editing wars are unproductive, like all wars are, as different editors of the article find themselves unwilling to compromise with each other. Editing wars can stall development on the article, and this can often have the affect of locking up the article until the dispute has been taken care of.

What fascinates me about editing wars, however, is that they constitute a cost. This would probably be something for game theory to look at. This cost produces an incentive for editors to reign in their own obvious biases and to avoid talking points. Every editor to an article has something they want to get across, a point that they want to convey. But with multiple editors, this creates many different points and purposes for contributing to the article. These various interests within an article is political in the sense that these various interests compete with each other. But no single set of interests can dominate due to the cost of an editing war.

All else being equal, the article will eventually fall into an equilibrium, as editors compromise as much as they need to, and so that they can be left to construct the message as much as they can. Of course, when the information changes, that will change the equilibrium and the process continues again. Or when new interests begin to participate, or old interests decline to participate further, this will yield a new equilibrium.

But is seems to me that Wikipedia, as well as other wikis, are unique in this process. In all other forms of media certain interests always dominate. This is necessary, as the dominating interests are the existential determinant for that media, the reason for the media's existence. But with wikis in general, there is an explicit competition between interests, and that, I think, is it's primary virtue. This, in my opinion, makes Wikipedia more honest; which, it should be said, doesn't make it more true.

	Culture The collective ideas, values, and perceptions that members of a society use to generate behavior which is acquired by social conditioning rather than inherited biologically. Anthropologists make a distinction between the terms culture and society.

[Hugo Holbling]

That was a very interesting post for me, PoL. I've often considered editing a Wikipedia entry myself but I decided not to for exactly the reason you identify: the cost in what I predicted would be subsequent arguments. I supposed I would be helping readers if I posted alternative interpretations of a subject but I had neither the time nor the inclination to argue about it. It seems to me that something similar operates on message boards where, over a period of interaction, people who were initially keen to get involved in heated debate come to value their time for other endeavours and begin to steer away from confrontation.

In the past I've been critical of Wikipedia, particularly of the idea that multiple authorship will somehow lead to a kind of asymptotic improvement. On reflection, now I wonder if the openness and accountability are to be preferred to the (possibly) greater accuracy of a mainstream encyclopedia; that the access all readers have to the iterations that led to the current product is more important than verisimilitude if readers are not actively involved in the generation of the information. I suppose this is to say that the knowledge ostensibly found in Wikipedia is of greater utility and importance to readers because they can interact with it rather than merely receive it.

[Parody of Language]

Let me offer the following argument:

1. In any given activity, our motivation never exceeds our interest.
2. In constructing a message, our interest lies in the effect that the message has on the recipient (the interpretant).
3. Therefore, in constructing a message, our motivation never exceeds producing an effect in the recipient.

(Interest, here, is meant as an interest as we see it, as our rightful aim.)

So, compare a work that is written by authors who share interest in producing an effect in the readers to a work that is written by authors with competing interests. The latter is, of course, going to produce a sort of politics, as politics is nothing but a competition between interests. But with the latter we do two things: (a) Create a situation in which the cost of not compromising is high, and (b) we create an environment where it is impossible for any set of authors (e.g., any set of interests) to acquire dominance over the work. Then, between the two, which work is bound to have greater credence?

This is my suspicion right now. For instance, if I am motivated by a desire to make a certain political ideology sound more reasonable, or an opposing political ideology to sound less reasonable, I am not, on my own, going to turn over every rock to show that my propositions are true. This has to be forced on me by having vital opponents to my interests. And I think this is true of claims made by scientists or intellectuals as well. When a scientist has come up with a theory, he is not going to be motivated, on his own, to undermine his own theory. The theory, in the context of the above argument, is a message and he naturally wants to have an effect on the recipients. So with nearly all academics we have the process of peer review, which actually creates the motivation to increase the credence of the claims.

So consider an encyclopedia like Britannica, which is one of Wikipedia's primary critics, for obvious reasons. I guess what I'm imagining with an encyclopedia is that the interests, primarily, are business interests, and the degree of credence desired can only be "good enough"*. There isn't going to be any rock turning here either. This is similar to what Nietzsche said about the "scientific type" in that his primary interest is in being paid or in his family, but he isn't passionate about his work. But perhaps more important is when there is no one passionately against the work, credence of the work necessarily suffers, even if he isn't of the "scientific type".

Yet, my experience so far is that I haven't seen a lot of rock turning on Wikipedia either, and maybe that's the best argument against this post. But that's just my experience, and maybe I've stumbled across gems in this category that I haven't even looked very far into. Tentatively, however, it seems to me to be more possible with media such as Wikipedia where authors of competing interests collaborate together to produce a single work. This, I think, has to beat paying a high profile scholar to take both sides of an issue when his sole interest is necessarily in being paid. (Again, knowledge as simulation. Enough of that.)

* I think there is a point where having a good reputation, as either an encyclopedia or a scholar, is detrimental to the credence eventually produced in competition. It would be like, in a sprint competition, to give the medal or prize before the race, and then have them sprint. When a scholar's reputation already precedes him he has little more to prove. The same is true of reputable encyclopedia's. How many people, when they think they see an error in the Encyclopedia Britannica, report the error? How many would rather believe that they have erred rather than the encyclopedia? Reputation is an epistemological hazard.

	Race A social construct used to classify human beings into distinct groups usually based on physical traits. In the context of biology, race is a subspecies of a species. Races do not biologically exist for homo sapiens.

	Epistemology The theory of knowledge. Derives from the Greek epistéme ("knowledge" or "science") and logos ("speech" or "discourse"). Epistemology asks questions such as "what is knowledge?", "how do we know anything?", "how can we sure our knowledge is reliable?" and "what are the limits of what we can know?"