User:Llywrch/CPOV review

The CPOV Wikipedia Reader is divided into five sections, of which the first section, "Encyclopedic Knowledge", consists of four essays addressing Wikipedia's place in the tradition of the encyclopedia. These essays address this theme at varying levels of success.

First is Joseph Reagle, "The Argument Engine", which addresses the nature of the criticism of Wikipedia by various authorities and experts. This essay serves to frame the entire collection; as the introduction explains, the CPOV project is intended to encourage constructive criticism of not only Wikipedia but the ideas explicit and implicit in its creation. He touches on many themes in this essay, for example the implicit role of the encyclopedia as a normative standard, and the controversy that engenders in this essay, as he had in that chapter, but at more length. Another is his discussion of the accusation that Wikipedia is a manifestation of "Digital Maoism", and how Wikipedia is a successful example of "Web 2.0" while pointing out that label is a vague and unhelpful one. One intriguing suggestion he makes is that the origins of much of the negative reaction to Wikipedia can be explained in terms of a generation gap.

Yet I was surprised and disappointed to find it covers the same ground as in chapter seven, "Encyclopedic Anxiety", of Reagle's book, Good Faith Collaboration. Many of the same themes and insights have been repeated, often word for word, from his book. Repeating these arguments do not make them less valid. This is not to say that Wikipedia has no flaws, or even fatal flaws, but far too much written about Wikipedia is simply not worth reading. What Robert MacHenry, former editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, has to say about Wikipedia is as thoughtful and as useful as anything Steve Ballmer has to say about Apple's latest products: both will talk trash about their competitor because their paycheck depends on their competitor looking bad. Anything Larry Sanger says about Wikipedia will sound like sour grapes, the bitterness of a man who quit the project because he felt unappreciated for his efforts and frustrated because he failed at proving he could create a better encyclopedia. The large amount of commentary on Wikipedia like these examples threatens to drown out truly useful criticisms, like Nathaniel Tkacz's interview with Edgar Enyedy, one of the leaders of the Spanish fork, which is included in this Reader.

Dan O'Sullivan's essay, "What is an Encyclopedia? From Pliny to Wikipedia", is a pioneering effort which is long overdue. On the one hand, almost all of the works on Wikipedia -- Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution, and Andrew Dalby's The World and Wikipedia -- focus on the community around it, not the product itself nor its relationship to the genre of the encyclopedia. O'Sullivan not only makes a first attempt at this untouched problem, but presents a history of the genre of the encyclopedia which goes into more detail than the usual list of Pliny-Isidore of Seville-Diderot-Encyclopedia Britannica. He makes the important distinction between the definition of the encyclopedia as a reference work, and the encyclopedia as the basis of general knowledge.

Unfortunately, there is far more needing to be discussed in this vein. A genre is a discourse with a specific structure and conventions, which does evolve over time. Proper criticism helps the practitioner to improve its expression. Yet there has been practically no attention paid to how to make better encyclopedias. Can anyone provide a reasoned argument showing that knowledge is best presented by a collection of articles of varying length and depths of coverage connected by hyperlinks? On a more down-to-earth level, we should accept the fact that the most likely place to find stat-of-the-art discussion about the genre of the encyclopedia is not an academic, peer-reviewed journal, but on the talk pages of Wikipedia.

My first impression of Lawrence Liang's essay, "Brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century" was not positive. The title led me to expect it to be yet another exercise in obfuscation along the lines of a bad imitation of Jacques Derrida. My misadventures in reading that author must have put my B.S. detector on permanent high sensitivity, because the metaphor Liang uses in this title is very apt. As Liang shows in this essay, prior to the introduction of print, texts were as mutable as any Wikipedia text. To quote him at length,

Acting as annotators, compilers, and correctors, medieval book owners and scribes actively shaped the texts they read. For instance, they might choose to leave out some of The Canterbury Tales or contribute one of their own. They might correct Chaucer’s versification every now and then. They might produce whole new drafts of the Tales by combining one or more of Chaucer’s published versions. While this activity of average or amateur readers differs in scale and quality from Chaucer’s work, it opens us to new questions about the relationship between author, text, and reader in the Middle Ages and of how to understand contemporary practices of knowledge and cultural creation.

There are many fascinating parallels between the events of that information revolution, and the present one. One that I stumbled across accidentally involves the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, as described by Edward Muir. This group of writers, who hid their identities "behind metaphorical language and pseudonyms" attacked the dominant paradigm as enforced by the Roman Catholic church with satires advocating an extreme libertine ethos, yet Muir admits they were hardly revolutionaries: "No matter how much they rebelled against the dogmas of the Church, they failed to imagine an alternative society or to embrace an ideology of progress, as would the Enlightenment thinkers whom the Incogniti anticipated in other respects." Instead, their writings were obsessed with sexuality, with offending and disgusting their opponents. Re-reading Muir's portrait of the Incogniti, I can't help thinking of gangs of Internet trolls like the GNAA or 4chan, who consider themselves rebels without a cause.

I don't know what to make of Almila Akdag Salah, et alia, "Generating Ambiguities Mapping Category Names of Wikipedia To UDC Class Numbers". The folksonomy of Wikipedia's category system has fascinated scholars, as have the folksonomy created by users of social software, and its study is still in its early stages, but after reading this contribution I failed to see how it relates to the goals of the CPOV project, let alone how it relates to the other essays in this section. Where the other essays in this section illumine Wikipedia in new and exciting ways, here I failed to find a similar spark here; it is a comparison of Wikipedia's folksonomy with a standard categorization system, written for the expected audience of an academic journal.