Week 7 - Response to Content

Wikipedia, revolutionary or unreliable?

There is a lot of contention around the reliability of Wikipedia, and in an educational setting teachers warn their students off it as if it has the ability to corrupt and skew our views. In a way, I can see why. The concept of produsage, as coined by Axel Bruns, is the idea of the consumer becoming the producer and user of a product. So in a participatory, collaborative community such as Wikipedia, a lot of people think 'anything goes' as there is no hierarchical, authoritative structure to ensure there are no discrepancies and trivial content. In line with this argument is Internet critic Andrew Keen (as cited in Niederer & Dijick 2010, p. 1371), who praised Sanger's (Larry Sanger split from Wikipedia to create 'Citizendum') realisation of the "debased value of amateur contributions in favour of expert professionals."

But there's many Wikipedia fans who have praised its democratising elements and its ethos of participation and collaborative community; creating a source of knowledge open for everyone to read and write (Benkler, & Jenkins as cited in Niederer & Dijick 2010, p.1371). There's also Fallis in his article 'Toward a epistemology of Wikipedia" who argues that the epistemic consequences of Wikipedia are quite good. He explains that epistemologists evaluate an institution on whether people are more or less likely to gain knowledge from its existence or not. This means in terms of Wikipedia, the advantages of its existence far outweigh some reliability arguments, as empirical studies show that it compares favourably to that of traditional encyclopaedias, and even more so compared to sources people would use if it didn't exist (p. 1662-3).

Although Wikipedia is in constant battles within itself, such as the deletionist/inclusionist dichtomy (Kostakis 2010), it appears that it can be viewed as a positive addition to knowledge resources, as long as people remain wary of its present flaws and use it as a start point for further research. 

Reference List:

Fallis, D 2008, 'Toward an Epistemology of Wikipedia', Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 59, no. 10, pp. 1662 - 1674 , viewed 10th September 2011 via CAUL Wiley, DOI: 10.1002/asi.20870

Kostakis, V 2010, 'Identifying and understanding the problems of Wikipedia's peer governence: The case of inclusionists versus deletionists', First Monday, vol. 15, no.3, 1st March 2010, viewed 10th September 2011 via firstmonday.org

< http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2613/2479>

Niederer, S and van Dijck, J 2010, 'Wisdom of the crowd of technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system', New media and Society, vol. 12, no. 8, pp. 1367-1387, viewed 12th September 2011, DOI: 10.1177/1461444810365297