User:Sjosephsartifacts1236
Sam Josephs Artifacts of Self Regard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sjosephsartifacts1236
“Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ ( listen) WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ ( listen) WIK-ee-PEE-dee-ə) is a free online encyclopedia with the aim to allow anyone to edit articles.” This is the first line on the Wikipedia entry for Wikipedia, a text describing itself. Already the first line shows the sheer profundity of Wikipedia as a massive change in the way we understand texts and knowledge. It is multimedia; by clicking a button, one can listen to the pronunciation of Wikipedia. It is fluid and connected; the underlined “online encyclopedia” allows the reader to click to another page describing online encyclopedias. And by telling the reader that anyone can edit articles, the reader recognizes that anyone could have written and edited the very sentence they are reading – and that they can too.
Wikipedia has become a massive force on the internet. It is the largest and most popular reference work on the internet. It is the fifth-most popular website on the internet. Wikipedia exploded from from just over 8000 articles in August 2001, to the more than 40 million articles in 299 different languages it has today. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month – that is roughly one fifteenth of the world each month. While Wikipedia had previously been feared by most of academia, it has now been generally embraced. Search for anything – from classical music, scientific principles, to presidential candidates – and Wikipedia is almost always one of the top suggestions, making it the first place to look for information for many people. Having one’s own Wikipedia page has even become a status symbol of sorts. Wikipedia, a premise that many doubted, has proven to become an undeniable force in disseminating information across the world and therefore a powerful force in everyone’s life.
Given that all this information was found on the Wikipedia page for Wikipedia, the site is not only impressive in heft and force but in artistic and philosophical achievement as a text. Being able to read a book and then go in and edit that book so that others could read it would have been absolutely unheard of, but Wikipedia makes that a reality. In many ways, Wikipedia became the culmination of what theorist Roland Barthes described in The Death of The Author. While The Death of the Author was more of a philosophical exploration of reading and the community of literature, many of the concepts Barthes explores become literal and more complicated in the context of Wikipedia. Wikipedia poses an unheard of experiment that, all in all, has worked and theoretically changes the basic understanding and relationship of knowledge, author, and reader by tearing down the hard rigid walls between these labels by fundamentally uprooting them through tools only available through the internet. Under the guise of total and complete democracy remain some vestiges of the days of authorship, but ultimately these failures of Wikipedia do not take away from Wikipedia’s power as a text in changing our classical concepts of knowledge, texts, authors, and readers.
Many of the original criticisms of Wikipedia stems from the ideological cult of the author that Barthes seeks to tear down. In this way, Wikipedia becomes the perfect solution for the problems Barthes notes. People thought that Wikipedia could not possibly become an accurate source of information without an author. They did not trust that a community of networked individuals could come up with properly sourced accurate information without biases, mistakes, profanity, and nonsense. They thought that the only true source of knowledge could be an author or a realistic number of authors, not a blurry shapeless cyber blob of writers, editors, and readers. “The image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions” (Barthes 2). As Barthes notes, as literature is imagined, it centers entirely on the celebrity of the author, with the author as a specific person with which the work is to be understood within the context of. He notes that the source of this cult of the author is “positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology which has accorded the greatest importance to the author’s person’” (Barthes 2). Because of the way that literature must be bought and sold, and therefore understood, in a capitalist society and the idea that knowledge and truth exist objectively to be experienced through the lens of humans, it derives this obsession with the author as the locus of objective knowledge production, simultaneously standing outside society and its biases and and within society and a popular figure. The original doubt in Wikipedia stemmed from this incorrect assumption that only a true author could properly produce knowledge as there must be someone to take responsibility for the claims in the text: “it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered ‘his confidence’” (Barthes 2). How could you trust a source without an author? How could knowledge be trusted without someone claiming it? Barthes suggests that the work of criticism and understanding texts was thought to be “discovering” the intentions of the author, but that this mindset takes away from the true power of texts (Barthes 5). Wikipedia complicates this relationship immensely, because to understand a Wikipedia page one can work to understand what the previous authors wrote, or if a reader finds the text unclear, can simply edit it themselves to make it exist in their own understanding, hopefully clearer for future readers - this process of reading and editing going on forever. Barthes saw that the ideological focus of texts as the work of authors and therefore trying to understand texts as synonymous with understand authors is problematic, and Wikipedia answers his call by blurring the line between reader and author, removing the author as the important figure in understand texts.
Barthes thought the cult of the author was problematic because he saw language and texts as existing in an ever present “here and now,” constantly unfolding before us. While he meant this more philosophically, that the work of text happens in the present not in the past, Wikipedia makes those philosophical notions literal by screening a text that is theoretically constantly changing and updating, plainly ever-present to the reader. “Once an action is recounted… this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins” (Barthes 2). The act of writing obsolesces the author; the way we understand text is not in the specific voice of the author, but that literature itself is the invention of a neutral voice that seeks to relay knowledge and information to us, that we as readers must always constantly choose to accept. This is exactly what Wikipedia is: an authorless text that solely seeks to inform the reader in a neutral identity-less voice. By writing that “it is the language that speaks, not the author” Barthes suggests that the author is falsely seen as the source of knowledge – even in myself writing that sentence, I have fallen into the trap of attributing that to Barthes rather than to language itself, which Barthes did at some point arrange, but which I – and now you – have to arrange and understand oneself for it to mean anything (Barthes 3). While “every text is eternally written here and now” explicitly refers to the process of reading and understanding a text, for Wikipedia this is true – Wikipedia is theoretically in a constant state of change and the very text one is reading could be written or re-written and then streamed at the same moment of reading.
Barthes gives the power of knowledge and text to the world and language itself rather than to the author, which is also literalized in Wikipedia. “The internal ‘thing’ he claims to ‘translate’ is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum” (Barthes 4). The claim of authorship is a false claim to language, when really language can only be understood by relation to itself. Therefore “the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture” (Barthes 4). While not every single word of Wikipedia articles are connections of citations, Wikipedia does make many of these citations to the sources of culture explicitly clear with links to other articles and other web pages. While the author claims to be the source of knowledge, Wikipedia gives the reader a sort of epistemological circular experience of travelling through the infinite cultural and linguistic connections that depend on each other for meaning. Although Barthes was referring to books, books as a form of media are contemplative, while screen is rapid and connection based; books try to persuade the reader, while screens prompt action from the reader (Kelly 104). Unlike traditional texts, it could be argued that Wikipedia articles are not even meant to be read in a linear fashion. The reader itself constructs the text, not just by editing it, but by flying from one article to the next with the click of a button in a manner they chose. Wikipedia makes clear that the act of reading texts is one that works to understand the text by connecting it to other texts, making an infinite web of meaning.
While Barthes suggests that reading is the active process in writing, he could not have possibly predicted that Wikipedia turns this whole idea on its head by allowing the reader to become the writer with the click of a button. “The reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consist of; the unity of a text is not in its origin it is in its destination” (Barthes 6). It is the reader where the information is understood and transferred, not by the writer – the text only exists through the reader. “The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes” (Barthes 6). Barthes critiques classical criticism for the obsession with the author, when really the important part of a text is in the way it is received and brought into other minds, not who first put it down. Wikipedia rejects this binary entirely; any reader of Wikipedia could be a writer. So while a reader works to understand the text in their own head, they can also do that same work on the page. Wikipedia allows the work that Barthe suggests happens in the reader to be written by that reader for other readers, this constant flux of reading and writing happening continuously. While Barthes suggests that “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author,” what Wikipedia presents is that the death of the Author was not caused by the birth of the reader, but by the endless constantly shifting liquid pool of readers and writers.
But is this really the true death of the Author? Does Wikipedia back up its democratic idealistic claims? Could there be genuine drawbacks from this crowd-sourced encyclopedia? The main feared drawback from running away from classical authorship is that without anybody seen as specifically responsible for the text, it’s open to inaccuracies and vandalism. While many were sure Wikipedia would fail for its open structure, because of other aspects of its design it has become a massive and accurate source. Nature published a peer reviewed paper that found that Wikipedia’s level of accuracy approached that on Encyclopedia Britannica with an immensely greater breadth. Wikipedia is increasingly used by institutions like the US Federal Courts, proving it has reached mainstream acceptance as a valid source of knowledge, despite its lack of authorship. The reason for its success is that the structure of Wikipedia promotes collaborative construction over destruction as it is easier to undo the damage – a single click undoes other’s changes – than it is to do the damage. I decided to delete a random chunk out of Emilia Clarke’s page, an actress on Game of Thrones, and it was restored within ten minutes. My small act of evil was easily and relatively quickly undone by the power of the collective readers and writers who want to make Wikipedia accurate, constantly surveilling the site. Because no one is held responsible for mistakes, failures do not endanger the enterprise of Wikipedia as a whole as the critical process is decided by all participants in constant flux micro-interactions.
One valid critique of Wikipedia is that there is an extreme gender bias and many controversies on articles surrounding issues of gender. Studies found that Wikipedia’s contributor base is around 13-19% women. Various universities have hosted edit-a-thons in an effort to get more women to contribute to Wikipedia, both in explicitly feminist articles and in other contexts. For example, when Chelsea (formerly known as Bradley) Manning announced that she was trans, a contentious battle occurred over those wanting to call Chelsea Manning a man named Bradley, rather than by her chosen name. This resulted in her page being slandered with her dead-name and various other transphobic slurs so the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee ultimately locked the article and banned several editors, both those making the transphobic remarks and those accusing others of transphobia. Despite the failings of Wikipedia to fall prey to internet trolls, predominantly young straight cisgendered white men with traditional views, to suggest that these biases are only caused by the crowd and not also committed by singular authors is false. However, controversies like these do reveal that Wikipedia is not the free bottom-up encyclopedic utopia it claims to be – at times there is not necessarily authorship, but more explicit structure where many participants are blocked from editing.
Wikipedia is not the free-flowing utopia it projects to be. In an effort to increase accuracy and because of the structure and user interactions, it still ends up having traditional authors in many senses, but with a guise of hive-mind democracy. There are different levels of protection on many articles on controversial and vandalism-prone pages so that only confirmed editors are able to modify it, thus giving these editors a hierarchy over other people. Only registered users may create a new article – although anyone can register, it still works as somewhat of a filter. One study found that merely 1,500 users are responsible for the majority of editing, revealing this supposed idyllic anarchy created by and for the people, to still have much of the old systems of authorship (Kelly 151). The more edits someone makes the more likely their edits endure so it favors the work of those who put in a lot of work and allows those veteran users to act as managers or editors for everyone (Kelly 151). Going back to the first line on the Wikipedia page about Wikipedia, that it has “the aim to allow anyone to edit articles,” yet on that line itself, the typical user in unable to edit. The Wikipedia page for Wikipedia is semi-protected meaning that users must be with registered IP addresses, at least four days old, and have ten valid previous edits on open pages. The key word in the interpretation of Wikipedia is “aim” – yes, anyone can edit articles, but one has to go through these steps first with the risk of the edited being reverted. Behind the guise of the total freedom and dissolution of reader and writer, is, an of course needed, but structured system that keeps everything in place.
But all of this is about Wikipedia’s attempts for accuracy in trying to be the best encyclopedia. The most stunning facet of Wikipedia as a text is not that it can be changed before your eyes, not that you can immediately bring that change into existence, not the countless interactions, but that Wikipedia itself recognizes its own fluidity and makes no claim of truth; it is an accurate encyclopedia with no author with nobody held responsible and no claims of truth. The most brilliant line in the Wikipedia page on Wikipedia is that “Wikipedia ‘makes no guarantees of validity’ of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it.’” Wikipedia presents itself as an encyclopedia, but holds nobody accountable for its validity and therefore cannot give the guarantee of authorship to be correct. What is the point of an encyclopedia that does not claim to be accurate? This whole paper was written with information from Wikipedia, so can this paper still make a guarantee of validity as expected by a typical college paper? Wikipedia lists five main pillars: Wikipedia is 1) an encyclopedia, 2) written from a neutral point of view, 3) free content anyone can use and edit, 4) treat each other with respect, and 5) “Wikipedia has no firm rules.” Wikipedia, by allowing users to edit, constantly undermines the very things it claims to produce – an order that can be changed by almost anyone, an encyclopedia with no claim to truth. Wikipedia lays bare the truths that Barthes sought – that all understanding is within the reader themselves and that the author is a myth to suggest validity and power, when that power only comes from the constant flowing connections of language and culture. Perhaps Wikipedia was never an encyclopedia – it may have said it was, but it also said it could not guarantee that it saying it was encylopedia was true – but rather a work of art that seeks to blur creator and participant into a collective sea of interactions – that just so happens to have assembled itself into an accurate collection of information on the world.
Whatever Wikipedia truly is, it is undeniably deeply powerful in our world. It is likely that Wikipedia will contribute to the brain of artificial intelligences (Kelly 39). And what if this premise – letting users create and edit the content – that in some ways seeks to destroy itself, but works incredibly well, could be applied to other areas? Could a fictional book be written by a collective? A digital painting? A movie? What structures would need to be established for this and who could claim ownership? What if laws were created this way? Surely those same complaints about Wikipedia, that it can be biased and vandalized and manipulated for personal gain would be true about the Law-pedia, but is that not true of most, if not all, governments anyway? Is this supposed Law-pedia the truest form of democracy now possible, or would it become just another hierarchy under the name of people? Maybe that is the wrong question; maybe the better question is not whether the Law-pedia would be just and fair, but if it would be beautiful and flowing and a work of art that happened to assemble itself into a code of law.
If you have any problems with this paper, please edit it.
� Work Cited
Kelly, Kevin. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. Viking, 2016.
Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. Ubu Web Papers, www.tbook.constantvzw.org /wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdf.
“Wikipedia: Five Pillars.” Wikipedia, Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars.
“Wikipedia.” Wikipedia, Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia.