Wikipedia as a knowledge system

Source: "Word War III," by Tom Dunkel, The Washington Post Magazine, August 10, 2008;

Launched in 2001, Wikipedia now ranks among the most frequented sites on the Web. In December 2007, English Wikipedia became the largest compendium of knowledge in history with some 2.4 million articles. There are spinoffs in more than 250 other languages accounting for some 8 million additional articles.

Wikipedia is based on two principles:

1. No original research or hearsay is allowed in Wikipedia entries. All facts must be derived from reliable outside sources, primarily old-media magazines, newspapers and books.
   
2. Objectivity rules. Articles must adhere to a neutral point of view, or "NPOV" in Wiki shorthand.

An army of several hundred thousand volunteers collectively produce Wikipedia. The organization has only 18 salaried employees; "the rest are all unpaid volunteers, who, on English Wikipedia, come from the ranks of 7 million registered users." There are of course many millions more of unregistered users.

There are about 1,500 Wikipedia administrators or "admins." These unpaid uber-editors are selected by their fellow admins, who entrust them with shepherding online discussions and with enforcing the rules of polite engagement. Admins, however, are supposed to tread softly. Wikipedia is a stubbornly egalitarian enterprise that depends on the magic of mass consensus.....

Wikipedia has a two-track system for handling intractable disputes.

1. Complaints about member misconduct go to arbitration;
2. disagreements over article content qualify for mediation.

(There are about a dozen volunteer arbitrators and mediators. Periodic Wiki elections are held to fill arbitration posts. Mediators are subject to approval by the mediation committee.) In either procedure, civility is usually an early casualty.

Wiki-Scanner is a free, easily searchable Web site based on 34 million Wikipedia edits made between February 2002 and August 2007, and cross-referenced with the IP (internet protocol) addresses of the computers from which the edits originated and the organizations assigned to those IPs. It allows users to track down the authors of edits in order to ferret out biases or interests of those doing the posting.

Attached to each entry in Wikipedia there is a discussion archive and a history archive capturing the changes that have occurred during the development of that entry and the reasons for those changes.

Ahmadinejad on Wikipedia

As soon as he became president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad touched off a boisterous debate on Wikipedia--a conflict as unruly and entertaining as the online encyclopedia itself

The history of the creation of the Ahmadinejad entry illustrates some of its characteristics of Wikipedia as a knowledge system. The entry was created on June 8, 2005 by a 26-year-old computer software engineer in Tehran as a 73 word "stub". Amadinejad was then the only one of seven candidates for president of Iran for whom there was no entry.

THE AHMADINEJAD ENTRY ATTRACTED LITTLE ATTENTION during its first week on English Wikipedia. Only two users materialized, making minor tweaks to Pournader's biographical sketch. By June 19, 2005, about a dozen people had weighed in. The text grew to 850 words. Readers now knew Ahmadinejad was the son of a blacksmith, objected to the veto power of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard during the Iran-Iraq war. The last paragraph declared he "possibly had a hand in international assassinations" and "covert operations in Iraq" -- juicy but unsubstantiated tidbits that later would be dropped. The introduction noted that he was "considered by some to be an ultra-conservative hardliner." All those cumulative details led to the removal of the stub designation by an anonymous Wiki administrator

As Amadinejad became more important and more famous, his entry was further elaborated and controversy over its contant increased. When he was elected thirty-four comments were posted on the discussion page by nine different users over two days.

Wikipedia's in-house statistics show that from June 2005 through December 2007, the Ahmadinejad profile was edited 5,742 times. A WikiScanner check reveals that the users were far-flung: Barcelona, Budapest, Dublin, Dubai, Hamburg, Haifa, Paris, Stockholm, multiple locations inside Iran, and one from within the CIA.

The entry has gone to mediation at least twice, in which various participants in the drafting of the entry called for assistance in coming to an acceptable compromise. The entry now contains about 5,800 words and 151 footnotes. Gary Sick, a well known U.S. foreign policy guru criticizes some aspects of the entry, but finds it to be the best Amadinejad primer around.

Comment: Wikipedia is not unique, and indeed the WP article identifies Citizendium as another similar effort with slightly different knowledge processes. Wikipedia is, however, the prototypical example of a knowledge system with high standards of epistemological quality that is produced by an army of volunteers networked via the Internet. It is interesting to know that its quality assurance process too is based on volunteers selected by democratic practices. This may be an example of something that works in practice if not in theory. Of course, there has been less than a decade to develop the theory needed to explain why it works. JAD