Harman is amazing on a number of levels, and if you’re someone who comes from STS and/or contemporary philosophy, you should definitely be reading him for his academic musings.  Even if you don’t care about recent developments in post-Heideggerian object-oriented actor-network sociotechnicopistemology, the American sportswriter turned Egyptian professor is worth reading for his insights into academia, life, and academic life (which are three way different things).  But back to my original point, the man is prolific – he blogs as often as most people tweet, giving his thoughts on everything from the recent crisis at Middlesex philosophy to personal reflections on the writing process.

Obviously he formats his posts and checks them for errors, but it doesn’t seem like he spends that much time thinking about what he should blog about or if some particular topic is worth posting.  He just writes about what ever is interesting to him, sometimes just sharing a link, other times giving commentary, and (where I find him most invaluable) doing both, sharing an excerpt of something that someone wrote with his thoughts on the matter.  It might be an essay one of his colleagues wrote regarding speculative realism’s view of innate qualities of objects, but it is more likely to be about plagiarism by students, whatever fiction or non-fiction book he’s reading, the latest conference he went to, or the English-speaking abilities of Cairo taxi drivers.  This can sometimes be overwhelming — say, when I open up my feed reader and find ten posts written while I was sleeping — but I’ve realized it is the right approach.  Not only has he kept me informed about topics, ideas, books, conferences, controversies, and so on that I would otherwise not know about, but he also offers a window into his world. I’ve never met him, but I feel like I know Graham Harman.

Contrast this with me.  I haven’t posted an update in months, and the last one I did was formatted much like a short academic paper and took a good hour or two to write.  I have about a half dozen drafts of posts that I’ve spent way too much time on — not writing, but thinking, second-guessing myself, googling to see if I’m original, and so on.  They are long, but that’s not a inherent problem.  Rather, they are filled with things that just don’t need to be in a blog post: no specific words or phrasings, but  instead the awkward insecurities that permeate all formal academic writing at the beginning stages.

Maybe it is part of being a grad student, where I feel afraid that I’ll accidentally offend someone or, more likely, just say something stupid.  Maybe it is because my site is first and foremost an academic portfolio constructed with blogging software, a professional, polished, public space in which I can present a slightly more interactive CV.   Maybe it is because I’ve been part of an pedagogic culture in which blogging is overwhelmingly just a digital form of the standard one-page essay summarizing and responding to the week’s course readings.  And as I write that last sentence — which may be interpreted as a slight jab towards some of my favorite professors — I realize exactly what my problem is: I have to stop myself from obsessing too much, or else I’ll never actually blog.

Thus comes the title of this post (which, by the way, is a riff on the amazing We Have Never Been Blogging, a Latourian blog which itself is a rift on the book We Have Never Been Modern).  I haven’t been writing blog posts, I’ve been writing short essays about topics that are only worth the time and energy for blog post.  That’s not to disparage the people who do publish academic essays with blogging software, it’s just a different thing.  And having broken my new rule again with a good ten minutes of rewriting that last sentence, I’m just going to end this post now.

So all this to say that I’m going to be blogging again, and with a new understanding of what that means.  I don’t think I’m as interesting as Graham Harman and I don’t plan on being as prolific as him, but I do plan on easing up on the slack.  For me, blogging is an immediate activity, something that you  put out there when you think of something that you find interesting.  I hope you do and that is the ultimate point of this, but not something that can be dwelled on.

If you are interested in the history of contemporary science, particularly in the 1980s and ’90s, citation analysis can be a useful tool to discover broad trends in scientific research.  In this area, the ISI’s Web of Science is the de-facto source for this data, claiming to be the most comprehensive database of articles and journals. They index articles using a number of categories, including author, title, publication, subject, topic, and more. With a built-in results analyzer, it is very easy to chart the top authors in a subject, the journals that publish the most in a given field, or, as I was interested in, the growth of a particular topic over time.

I’m currently researching the history of a software suite for the simulation and modeling of molecules, and it is commonplace to cite its debut article if research has been done using the tool, making citation analysis quite painless. I learned though archival research that a certain feature was added in 1990 that would make the simulation of enzymes much easier.  The obvious question is if it had any measurable effect on the amount of research being done with this tool to study enzymes. So I told ISI to give me a list of all articles citing the original software article with the topic “enzyme” between 1985 and 1994. I found the most beautiful results:

According to the citation counts, it seems pretty clear that enzyme research using this program took off dramatically after 1990.  Knowing that correlation doesn’t equal causation, I restrained myself from thinking that the introduction of this new feature in 1990 caused the growth, but I knew that there had to be something here.   Perhaps enzymes were getting interesting after 1990 for some external reason (increased funding or relevance, new discoveries, etc) that caused both the new feature and the increased research.  So I did a database-wide search for all articles on the topic “enzyme” and analyzed it by year.  What I found was even more remarkable:

After 1990, all enzyme research appears to take off dramatically, with a 300% increase a single year.  I knew I was onto something here, and candidates kept coming into my mind: did the Human Genome Project spur this massive interest in enzymes?  Was there a general increase in science funding at this time, a worldwide biology research initiative (like the International Geophysical Year), or the takeoff of the biomedical/biochemical industries?  Whatever it was, I had a lead on something big, something that I hadn’t seen in any of the literature on the history of contemporary bioscience.

I began to search the literature for bibliometric research with phrases like “after 1990″ and “after 1991″, combined with various synonyms for rapid growth.  I found a number of other historians and sociologists of science who were making the same kind of argument that I was considering: important events happened in 1988-1990, and these events had to have at least some effect on the massive explosion of articles in a given discipline, subject area, or sub-specialty.  All of them used ISI, and all of them narrowed their search by topic.  While my intent was to find something in fields related to biochemistry, I these articles were making the argument across the sciences, including nanotechnology, materials science, mental health, oceanography, and more.  So I ran the same kind of analysis as before, but this time with a wide range of topic keywords (and scaled the results by the relative increase in citations from the previous year):

As is clear, topics from numerous disciplines and interdisciplinary fields remain steady until 1990, have a massive increase, and then plateau.  The effect is anywhere from 140% to 330%, but the fact that they all occur in the exact same year seems too perfect.  Even if there was a massive, across-the-board increase in science funding, research cycles are so varied – some kinds of studies can expect findings in six months, while others can take years.  The lack of residual effects after 1991 makes this even more unlikely: while the percent increase from 1990 to 1991 is varied, the growth from ’91 to ’92 is no more than +/- 10%.

Occam’s razor leads me to believe that these anomalies are an artifact of ISI’s Web of Science, not scientific publishing itself.  The most likely situations would be that in 1990, 1) a large number of new journals (most likely less popular ones) were added, 2) new kinds of research materials (books, conference proceedings, data sets, etc) were added, or 3) ISI’s method for determining article topics was changed (such as including author keywords or abstracts).  I suspect #3, and after far too much digging, I found some confirmation in a 1994 essay written by ISI’s founder:

Through large test samples, we concluded that the titles of papers cited in reviews and other articles were sufficient to add useful descriptive words and phrases to the citing paper. This was later confirmed in studies by A. J. Harley, as Irv Sher and I recently reported.11, 12

In 1990, ISI (now Thomson Reuters) was able to introduce this citation-based method of derivative (algorithmic) subject indexing, called KeyWords Plus®. 7, 8 In addition to title words, author-supplied keywords, and/or abstract words, KeyWords Plus supplies words and phrases to enhance these other descriptors and thereby retrievability. These KeyWords Plus terms are derived from the titles of cited papers, which have been algorithmically processed to identify the most-commonly recurring words and phrases.

Unfortunately, this new algorithm for topic indexing appears to have been introduced without distinguishing it from the old one.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to just search for pre-1990 style keywords in post-1990 articles, meaning that ISI’s topics and keywords are useless for historical bibliometrics that span across this date.   And thanks to what I’m calling ‘the 1990 effect’ (someone give me a better term, please!), many researchers are being led down a deceptively misleading path!

Abstract:  Is computer-mediated discourse leading to collective political action in the public sphere, or simply more fragmentation? This question has been asked by social and political theorists ever since the Internet entered academia in the early 90s. However, this debate has been recently rekindled by Jurgen Habermas – one of the leading theorists of the public sphere – who recently broke a longstanding silence and spoke out against the Internet as a potentially democratizing medium. Instead of directly intervening in this debate, I interrogate the techno-epistemic conditions of possibility for ‘the blogosphere’ to exist as a sociopolitical entity. Specifically, I analyze social aggregation sites like Technorati, Delicious, Digg, and even Google, which make it possible for collective action to precipitate out of the Internet. I find that Habermasians should not fear fragmentation, but instead integration: the blogosphere as a public sphere is constructed and unified not by ideal discourse, but algorithms.

“Internet” is often spelled with a capital “I.” In keeping with current trends in internet studies, we prefer the lower case “i.” Capitalizing suggests that “internet” is a proper noun, and implies either that it is a being, like Nancy or Annette, or that it is a specific place, like Madison or Lawrence. Both metaphors lead to granting the internet agency and power that is better granted to those  who develop and use it.

I cannot disagree more.  First off, as someone who considers myself part of the emerging ‘Internet studies’ field, I did not know that this was a “recent trend” and had difficulty finding confirmation outside of this volume – although that can be forgiven, considering that we are at a very fragmented, even pre-paradigmatic point. (Readers: If you’ve seen this trend before, please comment!)

However, my most basic and linguistic objection is that the Internet satisfies the general conditions for being a proper noun: it refers to a unique entity.  While I do believe that the best category for the Internet is place-based, we capitalize far more than beings or places – which are the only classes that Markham and Baym give.  However, we don’t need to go into the whole ontological debate about whether the internet is a being, a place, an organization, a nation, a brand, an ideology, or any other class of entities that we capitalize.  There is only one Internet, and we can cleanly divide between on-line and off-line in the abstract – even if it becomes a lot murkier in practice, as with God and the Third World.

Given that the famed lowercase scholar danah boyd is one of the authors in the edited volume, I next thought that the editors may be taking from both boyd and feminist author bell hooks, who explicitly defy standard grammatical conventions in order to to make a political and/or philosophical point (they claim to de-capitalize their names to draw attention to their works and not themselves).  So I think it is better to focus not on the correct grammatical rules of Standard English, but the core motivation that they give: does capitalizing ‘Internet’ give it a kind of agency and power that we should instead attribute to the Internet’s developers and users?  I would argue that capitalization does give the Internet agency and power – and that this is a well-needed move.  Or to be more specific, this move does not magically give the Internet a power or agency it previously did not have, but rather acknowledges that the Internet’s technological infrastructure does things beyond what its developers and users intend.

In fact, one of my biggest frustrations with the proto-discipline of ‘Internet studies’ is that many scholars pass over the important roles played by the material technology upon which all of our interactions are mediated.  Now, I’m certainly not advocating a return to the technological determinism that was all the rage in the 60’s and 70’s. However, I do believe that the 80’s and 90’s have left us in a state where many of us are too wary of swinging back to Martin Heidegger and Lewis Mumford in order to seriously examine the materiality of the technologies that support the communities and practices we study.  A large amount of research in Internet studies focuses exclusively on human/social behavior in technological spaces, with only a few token gestures towards the way in which the ‘tubes’ fundamentally transform our interactions.  I think this is because we spend most of our time demonstrating that technology is socially constructed, leaving ourselves blind to how society is also technologically constructed.

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the social roles of software tools in the English-language Wikipedia, specifically focusing on autonomous editing programs and assisted editing tools. This qualitative research builds on recent research in which we quantitatively demonstrate the growing prevalence of such software in recent years. Using trace ethnography, we show how these often-unofficial technologies have fundamentally transformed the nature of editing and administration in Wikipedia. Specifically, we analyze „vandal fighting‟ as an epistemic process of distributed cognition, highlighting the role of non-human actors in enabling a decentralized activity of collective intelligence. In all, this case shows that software programs are used for more than enforcing policies and standards. These tools enable coordinated yet decentralized action, independent of the specific norms currently in force.

Download the full paper (PDF)

This week, I’m presenting a poster at WikiSym 2009 on “The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools.”  Most of the work is distilled from my thesis.

Abstract: This project investigates various software programs as non-human social actors in Wikipedia, arguing that their influence must not be overlooked in research of the on-line encyclopedia project. Using statistical and archival methods, the roles of assisted editing programs and bots are examined. First, the proportion of edits made by these non-human actors is significantly more than previously described in earlier research. Second, these actors have moved into new spaces, changing not just the practice of article writing and reviewing, but also administrative work.

Download the Poster (PDF)

Download the Extended Abstract (PDF)

And if you are interested in this topic, check out the full paper, The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal.

Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of presenting at the first (hopefully annual) WikiConference New York, sponsored by the Wikimedia New York City chapter with assistance from Free Culture @ NYU and the Information Law Institute at NYU’s law school. I know that I am atrociously late in writing this post, but I’m not really writing it for the Wikipedians out there. Rather, the WikiConference was an interesting experiment that seemed to apply Wikipedia’s philosophy towards editing to a conference, resulting in what the organizers called a “modified unconference.”

I had never heard of unconferences before, but they are apparently growing increasingly common in tech/programming circles, especially as precursors or followups to traditional conferences. The idea is that in order to keep administratve costs low, you don’t really organize the conference into pre-determined panels, roundtables, and keynotes. Instead, you have a general theme, a good number of open rooms, and a good number of eager participants, who set the topics of individual sessions for themselves and move from room to room on a fluid, ad-hoc basis.  The only rule is the “rule of two feet” – if you don’t like what is going on in the room you are in, leave and find another one.

The conference organizers apparently decided that this was too anarchistic, and instead opted to have a limited number of traditional sessions.  I was on one of the structured sessions, presenting my research on bots and assisted editing tools on the “Quality and Governance” panel.  It was also decided that the “open space”  time was to be segmented into blocks of concurrent sessions.  There was going to be a specific agenda for each of the open space sessions, but they were to be determined at the conference, not before; in addition, the process was to be open to anyone who wanted to propose a session.  While it seemed like an odd way to run a conference (and a bit scary seeing blank space dominate the schedule), it worked incredibly well.

Open space board at WikiConference NYC, by me, CC BY-SA 3.0

We had use of five rooms of various sizes, and one of them was dedicated for refreshments and mingling.  Outside of the largest room (which was used for each day’s opening keynote), there were sheets of paper taped to the wall, creating a table for rooms and timeslots.  After the first day’s opening keynote, sheets of paper, tape, and markers were passed around, and anybody could write something down, tape it to the wall under a timeslot/room combination, and that would be part of the initial schedule.

Given that most of us had never participated in this before, there was a good amount of milling around in front of the schedule wall – five minutes in, nobody had put up a single topic for any timeslot.  Feeling compelled to ake some initiative, I asked someone who was going to be on my panel that afternoon how he felt about a topic on macro-level decision making.  Specifically, I was interested in the approval of flagged revisions – the controversial software feature that would require some edits be approved before going live.  He suggested that I make it broader, and simply write “How do we make decisions?”

The open space wall, by Cary Bass, CC BY-SA 2.5

That seemed like a better and broader topic, so I grabbed some paper and one of the markers, wrote it down in my chicken-scratch handwriting, and taped it to the wall under the first timeslot for the second-biggest room.  Shortly after, three other sheets came up, on quite diverse topics: notability standards, libraries and librarians in Wikipedia, and translation/foreign languages.  Some had even put up sheets for other time slots, touching on nineteen issues that touched on just about every topic in and around Wikipedia.

According to the conventions of open space, the person who put the topic up was expected to start the session on time, say a few words to frame the issue, and then wrap things up at the end.  As the session began, I did just that, telling the room that I had originally thought of this as a discussion about the decision-making around large scale issues like flagged revisions.  However, it is probably good that I was not the moderator, because the room quickly got off the topic of macro-level decision-making and moved into the micro.  We ended up talking extensively about the wide variety of decisions that are made every day – whether to keep or delete a potentially unnotable article, to make an editor into an administrator, and more.

NewYorkBrad asking a question, by Sage Ross, CC BY 3.0

While this was not what I originally envisioned for the session, I was glad that the format had allowed such a swift change.  Had I been delegated to craft a speech, panel, discussion, or roundtable in a traditional conference, I probably would have taken it into a direction that most people did not want to go – of the twenty-something open sessions in the two days, nobody proposed a session on flagged revisions.  Unconferences are supposed to be directed by and for the benefit of the participants, and this was certainly the case.  In any case, the discussion on decision-making went rather well, although a moderator did end up emerging because our session ended up being one of the most popular open sessions, filling up the 75-person classroom.

Yet like in Wikipedia, the unconference didn’t simply devolve into a mass populist mob, reaching for the lowest common denominator.  The fact that we had multiple rooms, a couple of them small conference rooms, meant that less popular topics got their fair share of space.  One open session that I found interesting was on systemic bias – the fact that Wikipedia tends to implicitly favor certain topics, styles, or stances because of the demographic makeup of its contributors.  This tends to not be that popular of a topic, and only a handful of us showed up to discuss this (in my opinion) quite important issue.  However, this resulted in a very thought-provoking discussion among the five of us – that’s about three percent of the conference – who felt a need to identify, theorize, and fix Wikipedia’s systemic biases.

Open session: editing an article for the Wikipedia Signpost

Taken by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0

Another strength of the open unconference is its radical flexibility.  On the second day, the question/answer session in opening keynote speech turned into a strong debate among a few of the participants.  Because this stops others from asking questions, the typical move at conferences is to stop the debate and pledge to continue it later.  I’ve seen it happen at many conferences, but due to the rigid structure of most conferences, the continuing discussion rarely happens.  Yet in this case, the keynote speech was to be followed by open space sessions.  Realizing that there was an empty slot avaliable in one of the small rooms, the debate that emerged in the keynote Q/A was instantly given its own session.

We also had sets of lightning talks, which were presented in a keynote style.  For those of you who don’t know, lighting talks are short 3-7 minute presentations that anyone can give on the fly.  While lightning talks are held in many conferences I have been to, they tend to be pushed to the background.  Like poster sessions, lightning talks usually take place during established break periods (like lunch), or during other sessions.  This means that the only people who view them are other lightning talkers.  In our case, the lightning talks were after the lunch hour and when no other sessions were being held.  This way, I feel that the presenters got a much broader audience.

Andrew Gradman giving a lightning talk, by Sage Ross, CC BY-SA 3.0

In all, I think that the open unconference was a great success.  However, I don’t think that the “open space” model is adequate on its own – which is why I was glad that there were a limited number of keynotes and pre-arranged panels.  I was on one of the panels (discussing “Quality and Governance”), and got to give a standard 15 minute structured conference presentation, as did my fellow panelists.  I feel that that format is valuble, because I don’t think my research findings on bots and assisted editing tools (or any research findings, for that matter) could have been presented in an open space session or a lightning talk.  The two kinds of sessions are meant to facilitate two different kinds of activities: structured panels and keynotes frame discussions, while the open spaces let participants take it in any way they desire.  For example, I was very excited when the last open session of the conference turned into a user-driven showcase of assisted editing tools – completely unprovoked by myself, I promise.  Another session (one of my favorite) was a workshop in which all the participants worked collectively on writing a news article about the conference for Wikipedia’s community newspaper, the Wikipedia Signpost.

I’m not sure if these kinds of activities would have happened at a more traditional conference – and if they did, they would have probably required a lot more planning. One thing is certain though: the cost of the conference, which was the main reason for the unconference movement, was practically nil. It was completely run by volunteers, and only expenses were refreshments and food.

We throw around the words “collective intelligence” and “wisdom of the crowds” quite a bit to describe “Web 2.0″ sites like Wikipedia, but we hardly define what we mean when we use any of those terms, which is why they largely remain scare-quoted. Because of this, the door has been left wide open for scientists and journalistic defenders of science to critique Wikipedia and other social media sites as being relativist, collectivist mobs who can do no more than aggregate the baseline opinion of what the masses perceive to be Truth. While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. To answer such a question, I examine Wikipedia in light of a distinction between an infrastructure of knowing (everything required to evaluate a statement as true/false) and an infrastructure of knowledge production (everything required to bring forth new statements with claims to truth/falsity). While the Wikipedian epistemology on the encyclopedic level is purely evaluative, refusing to publish original research and instead relying on reliable sources, this process is made possible by a non-encyclopedic form of knowledge production.

In short, in order for there to exist an infrastructure of knowing such that the evaluation of encyclopedia articles becomes possible, there must exist an infrastructure of knowledge production to generate and evaluate claims regarding the acts of editing. These include statements like “this edit is vandalism and needs to be reverted” or “this user is disruptive and needs to be blocked” – which require their own epistemic order for evaluation. Taking a cue from laboratory studies of scientific practice, I detail the way in which epistemic standards are “black boxed” into material technologies. In the same way that a mass spectrometer is the reification of dozens of now-unproblematic theories from physics, chemistry, and mathematics, so do various technological programs used by self-described “vandal fighters” reify Wikipedia’s epistemic standards. Similarly, in the same way that various technologies had to be developed to allow experimental science to trump philosophical reasoning (like laboratory reports, which made experimental findings circulatable), so have various technologies been developed that make Wikipedia’s mechanisms of epistemic verification and enforcement possible.

By detailing all the human and non-human actors at work in the banning of a vandal, I show how a group of seemingly-disconnected editors contributed to a process of knowledge production necessary for the enforcement of epistemic standards. In this way, collective intelligence was made possible in Wikipedia, but not because of a mystical or anarchistic wisdom of crowds. Instead, these encyclopedic epistemic standards were able to be enforced because various human and non-human actors were constantly working to hold together an infrastructure of non-encyclopedic knowledge production.

Link: Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production (PDF, 901 KB)

These non-encyclopedic wikispaces in and around Wikipedia are used to organize most of the largely invisible work required to maintain and further develop the encyclopedia. In fact, some of the project’s most active pages are not hotly-contested encyclopedia articles, but rather these ‘meta’ pages which are used to make collective consensus decisions about various issues. In maintaining and developing this aspect of the encyclopedia, the Wikipedian community takes advantage of the wiki media to do so in a unique form of digital governance. Social power structures still exist, but the wiki-based nature of the site allows authority to be largely distributed and decentralized, in stark contrast to traditional forms of knowledge production.

However, such a social structure and media use has not always been present in Wikipedia. In the first year of its existence, most of the coordination of invisible maintenance work and resolution of ‘meta’ issues took place almost exclusively on e-mail listservs. I demonstrate that this media use corresponded to a social structure that took founder Jimmy Wales to be the unquestioned leader of the project, in charge of resolving issues when they arose among the small community of editors. Yet as the project grew, this listserv-mediated, “benevolent dictator” governance model did not scale to meet the rapid increase of both individual editors and editorial issues.

In response to various controversies in which the benevolent dictator model led to backlashes from the project’s growing editorial base, I show how pages in the wiki began to be used for a new, distributed form of governance. Instead of a monarchical model tempered by a centralized discussion forum, this model took advantage of features in the wiki media to enable a more direct and participatory system of governance. However, both the wiki media and the governance model proved inadequate and were subsequently refined in response to various issues faced by the project. The result, I show in this historical account, is the current instantiation of authority and media technology in and around Wikipedia, which has evolved significantly since in the project’s seven year history.

Scholars have long theorized how media technologies fundamentally reshapes the way in which we exist both as individuals and as a society. In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era.

When others ask about my academic works and interests, I usually describe myself as someone who comes from a rather multidisciplinary background – philosophy, anthropology, rhetoric, Science and Technology Studies (STS) – and am interested in collaborative and user-generated content on the Internet. Specifically, I talk about my interest in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The last item in this list usually raises some eyebrows, as it seems that everyone in academia has some sort of opinion on this radically new form of knowledge production that pops up nearly every time one queries any major web search engine like Google or Yahoo. Assuming that such a conversation was not merely a formal pleasantry, the following line frequently arises in some form or another: “Here is the problem I have with Wikipedia.”

Often spoken slowly, this sentence is uttered as if it is the preface to what will be a devastating argument, one that will innocently erode my entire research and undermine the subject of my study. “Here is the problem,” they say. “No matter how good on average Wikipedia becomes, no matter how many times Nature certifies it as accurate, and no matter how many people are there checking every edit, there is always the chance that someone has slipped in some disinformation immediately before you visit an article.” Despite the fact that I have heard this critique of Wikipedia countless times, I am still unsure how to answer it. For now, I have settled on the strategy of making myself look confused and asking, “So?”

This usually evokes an intended response of subsequent confusion by my inquisitor. “So? What do you mean, so? It means that Wikipedia can never be reliable, no matter how much time and effort is put into it,” I am told. I can do nothing but agree, although I have absolutely no idea why any of this should matter. “Obviously, there are going to be errors” I begin, but am interrupted. “But the errors in academic publications are different,” comes a pre-emptive response to an objection I did not intend to make. Who said anything about academic publishing, and why is it being compared to Wikipedia? When I tell them that I do not see Wikipedia as a reliable source, and especially when I state that academic publications are far more trustworthy than the user-edited encyclopedia, the conversation shifts dramatically. I apparently was on their side after all.

But whose side am I on, anyway, and more importantly, who are we fighting against? This is revealed with another type of conversation I tend to have with academics – one that happens less often, I should add. After I talk about how I come from philosophy, anthropology, rhetoric, and STS and that am also interested in Wikipedia, their eyes light up. “You know,” the conversation sometimes starts, “I used to not allow my students to cite Wikipedia in their papers.” The confessional continues, sometimes with a rather lengthy narrative about how they started spending time browsing the encyclopedia and found it to be an invaluable resource in their own work. Triumphantly, they often conclude by stating something to the effect of, “And even Science and Nature have to print retractions sometimes, right?”

So these are the battle lines: to cite or not to cite. Those who are “pro-Wikipedia” see the encyclopedia as a valuable and reliable academic resource that can be cited like any other reference work. Those who are “anti-Wikipedia” see the encyclopedia as one that is inherently unstable, and most assuredly not something that should be cited in any scholarly work. In short, it draws on the question: Is Wikipedia accurate?

In this war, the lines have been drawn and academics are taking sides: Nature famously published an article in which they compared Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and found that they roughly contained the same amount of errors. Subsequent comparisons have been published in academic journals, most notably The Chronicle of Higher Education, which gave high marks to some articles and near-failing ones to others. The article, titled “Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?” ended with a note of ambivalence that implied a negative answer to the question raised. In a well-cited article published in The Journal of American History, Roy Rosenzweig made the same argument, but suggested that academics should work on Wikipedia. The History department of Middlebury College famously voted to ban the use of Wikipedia in papers, and have been called the most reactionary when it comes to the encyclopedia.

Let us examine one of the most widely cited academic articles on Wikipedia: Nature’s 2005 “Internet Encyclopedia’s go Head to Head.” The editorial staff at Nature sent two copies of the same scientific article from Wikipedia and Britannica Online to experts, and asked them to review them for “factual errors, omissions or misleading statements.” With 162 total errors in Wikipedia and 132 in Britannica, the journal concluded that “Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries.” In slightly more than one-thousand words, Nature significantly increased Wikipedia’s credibility in the academic eye, without materially changing any of Wikipedia’s content. Simply by being vetted by Nature against Britannica was taken as a sign of accuracy by many. Subsequent studies of a similar nature followed, the most notable being Roy Rosenweig’s “Can History Be Open Source?” published in The Journal of American History and Brock Read’s “Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?” published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In both, the goal and result was the same: to examine the reliability of Wikipedia’s articles and come to a conclusion regarding their scholarly quality; both gave mixed reviews indicating that Wikipedia was good, but far from perfect.

Taking a look at scholarly articles regarding Wikipedia, the most cited and/or relevant articles according to various databases are almost always about the project’s reliability, and implicitly or explicitly its worthiness of being an academic source. What follows are EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier’s top ten scholarly articles about Wikipedia, sorted by the database’s relevance scale. Below each title is a quote from the article.

Wikipedia(s) on the language map of the world. [1]

Wikipedia contains nonsense alongside the sense; it contains propaganda and error alongside the facts. It is fiercely up to date, except when it isn’t. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia for the world as it is. It seems likely that it will continue to be the encyclopedia that the world deserves.

Wikipedia and Psychology:Coverage of Concepts and Its Use by Undergraduate Students. [2]

Wikipedia’s coverage of psychological topics was comprehensive and prominently displayed on the major search engines. In addition, a majority of undergraduate students reported referring to Wikipedia for both personal and school-related activities; however, few students reported using Wikipedia as a formal reference in academic work.

Wikipedia and academic peer review: Wikipedia as a recognised medium for scholarly publication? [3]

[The title should be self-explanatory.]

Evaluating authoritative sources using social networks: an insight from Wikipedia.[4]

Findings – Finds that the question of the reliability regarding Wikipedia content is a challenging one and as Wikipedia grows, the problem becomes more demanding, especially for topics with controversial views such as politics or history.

Beyond Wikipedia.[5]

[This article is not actually about Wikipedia.]

Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.[6]

To that end, this article seeks to answer some basic questions about history on Wikipedia. How did it develop? How does it work? How good is the historical writing?

Wikipedia rival calls in the experts.[7]

Wikipedia has never given experts special standing when it comes to determining content. And that, critics say, deters the people who ought to be contributing from doing so. Just how big a drawback that is will now be tested, with the launch of an online encyclopaedia that will give privileged status to scientists and other experts. Citizendium, a pilot version of which is due to go live in the next week […] Editors with appropriate academic qualifications will have the power to settle disputes about wording, for example, and stamp articles they perceive to be accurate as ‘approved’.

Wikipedia in the Newsroom[8]

While the line ‘according to Wikipedia’ pops up occasionally in news stories, it’s relatively rare to see the user-created online encyclopedia cited as a source. But some journalists find it very valuable as a road map to troves of valuable information.

Citing Wikipedia.[9]

The words “according to Wikipedia” occasionally appear in newspapers. Some editors’ thoughts on newsroom Wikipedia use:

Wikipedia, DDB, and the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF).[10]

Concluding page: The arrangement is mutually beneficial: Wikipedia obtains a highly structured authoritative crossreferencing structure for access to its biographies; DDB [a German biographical database] obtains new visibility and a means of bringing new patrons to its catalog.

Publications in The Chronicle of Higher Education follow a similar trend, as the five most relevant articles about Wikipedia are (again, according to the site’s own relevance feature):

Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?[11]

The openness that makes Wikipedia so alluring to its contributors is precisely what discomfits scholars. Because anyone can post, the site is in a constant state of flux — which creates plenty of opportunity for abuse. The common scholarly perception that the site is error-prone is true, if momentary lapses in accuracy are counted.

Building an Encyclopedia, With or Without Scholars[12]

Mr. Colbert portrayed a stereotype that may resonate with some scholars — that of the ignorant rube who wields Wikipedia as a weapon against expertise. “Who is Britannica to tell me George Washington had slaves? If I want to say George Washington didn’t have slaves, that’s my right.

Adventures in the Land of Wikipedia[13]

For now, Wikipedia works. I can hardly wait to start another entry drawn from my research. After my experience receiving an excellent assist from this anonymous knowledge army, I’m prepared to believe that Wikipedia’s millions of eyes will continue its evolution and improve its quality.

Co-Founder of Wikipedia, Now a Critic, Starts Spinoff With Academic Editors[14]

This month Mr. Sanger announced the creation of Citizendium, an interactive online encyclopedia that will be open to public contributors but guided by academic editors. The site seeks to give academics more authorial control — and a less combative environment — than they find on Wikipedia, which affords all users the same editing privileges, whether they have any proven expertise or not.

Middlebury College History Department Limits Students’ Use of Wikipedia[15]

This spring students in history courses at Middlebury College will find a new disclaimer on syllabi warning them that, while Wikipedia is fine for some background research, it is not to be used as a primary source.

At this point, a poignant objection can be made to this line of inquiry: given that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, why should we be focusing on the fact that academics are looking at Wikipedia’s reliability and accuracy? What else is there to look at, besides whether or not the articles present in Wikipedia are encyclopedic and how they are referenced outside of the project? To answer this, we should turn to the Wikipedian Community, and see what they are talking about at the past Wikimanias, the annual conference of Wikipedians:

In 2005, the first Wikimania was held in Frankfurt, Germany. The keynote speeches were: “Ten Things That Will Be Free,” in which Jimmy Wales discussed applying Wikipedia’s model to other cultural products; “Wikis Then and Now,” in which Ward Cunningham talked about Wikipedia’s predecessors; “Enterprise Wiki Use,” in which Ross Mayfield showed how businesses are using wiki technology; and “Copyright and Community,” in which Richard Stallman argued that copyleft publishing (which Wikipedia uses) is the only way to foster a meaningful, egalitarian community in the digital age. [16]

In 2006, the second Wikimania was held in Boston, USA. Lawrence Lessig spoke on “The Ethics of the Free Culture Movement.” Benjamin Mako Hill, in a related speech, argued that Wikipedia and the Free Culture Movement do not have a unified definition of what freedom is, and need one desperately. David Weinberger, in a presentation titled “What’s Happening to Knowledge,” claimed that Wikipedia undermines traditional concepts of knowledge and works to create meaning instead of knowledge. In “Universal Access to All Knowledge,” Brewster Kahle argued that all knowledge should be made freely available on the Internet for the good of humanity. Florence Devouard, in “Wikimedia Foundation: Building in Diversity,” spoke about increasing cultural diversity and decreasing systemic bias in Wikipedia.[17]

In 2007, the third Wikimania was held in Taipei, Taiwan. Samuel Klein talked about countering systemic bias by partnering with organizations which distribute computers to third world nations. David Beall and Sabahat Ashraf both gave presentations advocating the use of the project to advance social justice worldwide. A panel was held in which the participants discussed how Wikipedia’s power structure could be more democratic. Delphine Ménard spoke on multiculturalism and how problems of social and cultural conflicts function in Wikipedia. Mathias Schindler compared the economic model of Wikipedia’s web-based publication with that of paper-based encyclopedias throughout history. [18]

Of course, these are only a small sample of the presentations and speeches given at these conferences, and there was much discussion regarding reliability, quality, and Wikipedia’s use in other systems of knowledge production. However, these did not dominate the conferences. Interestingly, out of the almost seventy presentations and speeches given at Wikimania 2007, only about fifteen discussed Wikipedia’s role in educational settings, and most were not focused specifically on the issue of Wikipedia as a reliable, academic source. In fact, a search for “Middlebury,” referring to Middlebury College (who banned Wikipedia as a reference source in February of 2007) on the Wikimania 2007 database of abstracts, presentations, proceedings, and conference-related discussion returns zero results. Considering that the conference was held six months after the well-publicized event that is still being debated in academia, this may be seen as rather surprising omission.

Not so, from the Wikipedian point of view. Wikipedians have perpetually occupied a liminal space with respect to the concept of reliability. Wikipedians have always wanted their project to be considered a reliable, citable source, but simultaneously have known that they are not quite at that level, yet. The first instance of this can be seen in an article published on Kuro5hin in September 2001, a mere eight months after the project was founded. Co-founder Larry Sanger wrote that:

We think we are–gradually, and sometimes from very rough first drafts–developing a reliable resource. […] It seems very likely that, in coming months, Wikipedia will set up some sort of approval process, whereby certain versions of articles receive the stamp of approval of some body of Wikipedia reviewers. […] But after it’s in place, we will be able to present a set of genuine expert-approved articles that can favorably compare with articles from any general encyclopedia–Britannica included.[19]

The project has long had a set of disclaimers, and a specific statement regarding Wikipedia’s lack of accuracy has, with a few short exceptions, been a part of the article “Citing Wikipedia” since February of 2004: “As with any online source, you should be wary and independently verify the accuracy of Wikipedia information if possible; see also our General Disclaimer page.”[20] Furthermore, when examining the history of articles that are to guide readers who are interested in citing Wikipedia, references to a proposed system of certification frequently appear and vanish. Such a system has never been a part of Wikipedia in the seven years of its existence, and is the main reason for Larry Sanger’s resignation from the project and establishment of Citizendium.

While students often express outrage and claims of censorship when they learn of professors or departments forbidding the use of Wikipedia as a citable source in papers, the Wikipedia community is generally understanding, if a bit disappointed. However, when Jimmy Wales told a group of students that he had no sympathy for them when they failed a paper because they used Wikipedia as a source, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s headline was “Wikipedia Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation.”[21] Such a characterization shows that, at least for the Chronicle, the only possible use of Wikipedia in an academic setting is as a reliable source that could be cited in papers.

So what? All we have shown is that academics and Wikipedians construct two different Wikipedias: academics view anything that claims to be an encyclopedia in terms of its value as a reference, and Wikipedians often have a radically different conception of their project and how it should be judged. Obviously, we should not assume that the academics are wrong and Wikipedians are right simply by virtue of the Wikipedians knowing their project better, just like we should not assume, apropos science, that social constructivists are wrong and scientists are right for the same reason. Instead of framing this issue around who actually represents Wikipedia correctly, we should instead interrogate the conditions of possibility for this disconnect in the first place. If the Wikipedian community generally understands that Wikipedia is not a reliable source and should not be definitively cited in papers, then why has the debate over Wikipedia’s status as a reliable source emerged in academia? Why are there two Wikipedias: one literally created by Wikipedians and not deemed to be a reliable source, and the other co-constructed by two opposing factions in academia despite the warnings from the source of the controversy?

In order to answer this, we must return to my personal experience. I must confess that I may have a conflict of interest, as I saw myself as a Wikipedian long before I saw myself as an academic. Granted, I was producing knowledge in a the academic fashion long before Wikipedia was even founded, but I saw my essays on Shakespeare for English class and my lab experiments for Chemistry class more as artificial hurtles as opposed to works that contributed to a grand conversation of knowledge. However, I have been a part of Wikipedia for some time now.

I also come from a technical background, which assuredly affects how I see the encyclopedia. From age 11 when I learned the BASIC programming language until my freshman year in college, I was sure I wanted to program computers for the rest of my life. I was heavily involved with what can be described as “nerd culture,” and was a passionate advocate of the Open Source Software movement. Therefore, when I look at Wikipedia’s historical predecessors, I see Project Gutenberg, the pre-Internet digital repository that made public domain documents (the first was the U.S. Constitution) available to other computers connected to the Department of Defense’s ARPANET. I see the GNU/Linux project, a rather successful attempt to create a free operating system entirely built by volunteers. I also see WikiWikiWeb, the first website which allowed any user to edit any page. I see Slashdot, a user-written technology news website, and Kuro5hin, which took Slashdot’s model and gave full editorial control to their visitors, who voted on which stories should be published. In terms of people, I see Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, Ward Cunningham, and Lawrence Lessig among others as integral in Wikipedia’s formation.

Now that I am in academia (and especially in the humanities), I see a much different progression. I see line of thought that intends to document the objective world following Roger Bacon, Auguste Comte, and Denis Diderot. However, I also see a radical critical nature in Wikipedia that has striking similarities to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, who questioned the existence of universal truth and established authorities of knowledge. I see Edmund Husserl, whose phenomenological approach bracketed out questions of truth in relation to the external world. I see the work of Jean-François Lyotard, who criticized the existence of meta-narratives, or universal attempts to explain the world in a positivist fashion. I see Michel Foucault, who delegitimized existing historical and scientific narratives and favored an approach to knowledge production that focused on creating problems as opposed to solving them. I see Jacques Derrida, whose differance embraced the multiplicity of meanings present in a text. I finally see Bruno Latour, whose social study of science questioned scientific inquiry by showing how the output of scientific effort is materially affected by the technosocial institutions. In terms of schools of thought, I see social constructivism, postmodernism, post-structuralism, and critical theory as the philosophical basis of many of Wikipedia’s assumptions.

These are two radically different ways of seeing the same entity, especially considering that those who are heavily grounded in one area more than likely not aware of the other narrative, as I was before my entrance into the so-called postmodern humanities. However, are we already making an error in stating that these two narratives – one the story of institutions and the other a story of theories – are focusing on the same entity? After some thought, it is clear that these two narratives are constructing two radically different subjects of inquiry. It is the same process by which academia’s Wikipedia and Wikipedia’s Wikipedia were constructed. In fact, they are the same opposing Wikipedias.

I now see that my conversations with academics I described at the beginning were more influenced by the statement, “I come from philosophy, anthropology, rhetoric, and Science and Technology Studies” than “I study Wikipedia.” And this is because academics, like all people, understand new things in terms of what they have seen before. In this case, I was completely oblivious to the fact that most academics had lived through a conflict that had quieted down a few years before I began my foray into academia: the Science Wars. When most academics see Wikipedia, they do not see it as an emerging organization that owes its existence more to the open source software community than anything else. Most academics, I suspect, frame it as the newest battle in a war that they thought they had played to a draw: the Science Wars.

The Science Wars was (some may say are, but most place the event in the past tense) a series of disputes across academia in the late 20^th century regarding the objectivity and authority of science, particularly the “hard” or natural sciences. The postmodernists claimed that science, like everything else, was merely a social construction and provided no privileged access to the world. In fact, these scholars claimed, science often was complicit with various nefarious ideologies, specifically patriarchy, militarism, and capitalism. The scientific realists countered by claiming that the scientific method was the only way to arrive at objective knowledge, and that the postmodernists were merely relativists who lacked the scientific knowledge to even understand the subject they were critiquing.

Bruno Latour’s 1987 book Science in Action was an influential publication in the Science Wars. In it, he studies scientific theories as they are being developed, and concludes that scientific controversies are settled not because scientists in the winning camp were objectively correct and had the facts right, but rather that scientific proof is more a performance than anything else, with scientists acting primarily as “spokespersons” for various theories and discoveries. In fact, Latour claims that “Laboratories are now powerful enough to define reality”[22], and that most of us cannot challenge this reality as we do not have the skill to perform as a spokesperson in a laboratory or in scientific literature.

Many of the positions by social constructivists were along similar lines. Some scholars, such as Nancy Tuana, began to investigate science by “documenting the ways in which scientific theories have reinforced sexist and/or racist biases.”[23] She cites the work of McClintock and Lorraine Code, who prefer a science that is more relational and based on accepting that “our knowledge of nature will always be partial, always changing, always in process.”[24] Stanley Aronwitz critiqued science’s exclusive nature and argued for a “a new scientific citizenship in which democratic forms of decision making were shared between the scientific community and the public” that opposed the status-quo “democracy [that] is only appropriate for the few.”[25]

The climax of the Science Wars came with the publication of the Winter 1996 issue of Social Text, a journal published by Duke University that could be placed definitively in the postmodern camp. This issue was focused on the Science Wars, and contained many passionate criticisms of scientific realism. Among them was a paper titled “Transgressing the Boundries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” by Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University who argued that recent developments in Quantum Gravity “has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.”[26] The only problem with the paper was that Sokal claimed it was a hoax, an experiment to see if “a leading North American journal of cultural studies [would] … publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”[27] He claimed that its publication showed that the social constructivist approach had few, if any, claims to authoritative knowledge.

Richard Rorty characterizes the controversy as one between traditional scientists and those who:

think that “postmodern philosophy” — roughly, the anti-metaphysical doctrines common to Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida — has “unmasked” science. Starting with the claim that homosexuality, the Negro race, and womanliness are social constructions, they go on to suggest that quarks and genes probably are too. “Ideology” and “power,” they say, have infiltrated sterile laboratories and lurk between the lines of arcane journals of mathematical physics.[28]

However, Rorty’s essay is not titled “Phony Science Wars” for nothing, as he concludes by calling the Science Wars “in part a product of deep and long-lasting clashes of intuition, but mostly … just media hype — journalists inciting intellectuals to diabolize one another.” When faced with this conception of the Science Wars, it is no surprise that academics in the past few years have divided over Wikipedia as they did. Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, easily can be seen an attempt to validate the social constructivist approach to knowledge production. Like the alternative forms of science proposed during the Science Wars, Wikipedia is portrayed as more transparent, more democratic, and more accessible than scientific modes of knowledge production. It is no wonder that when academia heard about Wikipedia, they heard “that Callicles’ mobs are coming to ransack their laboratories,”[29] to take from Bruno Latour’s characterization of the response by scientists to his own theories.

Even though we can point to the Science Wars as a way that academics frame Wikipedia’s place in the academy, we have yet to interrogate the conditions of possibility for this conception of Wikipedia. What does it mean to ask whether or not Wikipedia should be cited in an academic paper? What fundamental assumptions are we making when we inquire into Wikipedia’s reliability as if it actually matters?

To ask if Wikipedia is reliable is an inherently relational question that it presupposes another one: reliable according to whom? In this case, Wikipedia is being compared to a source we already consider authoritative; or more precisely, it is being compared to a source whose authority is not questioned in our current society. This has generally been the Encyclopedia Britannica, and most of the studies on Wikipedia’s reliability have taken articles on the same subject from both of these encyclopedias and compared the number of errors. In this case, we are not actually asking if Wikipedia is reliable, but rather asking if it corresponds to Britannica which is assumed to be reliable. However, it seems that we have mischaracterized the Nature study, which did not compare Wikipedia to Britannica, but compared Wikipedia and Britannica to the world and detailed how many errors each had. To ask if Wikipedia is reliable is therefore ask if it accurately reflects the world – Nature instead of Nature.

Yet Latour proves insightful in showing how this question is rather unanswerable and rests on a particularly frustrating philosophical foundation. As he claims in Science in Action, “we can never use the outcome – Nature – to explain how and why a controversy has been settled,”[30] as Nature is something that is produced, a result at which science arrives. Instead of looking at science as a way of coming to objective facts about the external world, Latour describes science as an activity that generates its own objectivity. Specifically, he claims that “Laboratories are powerful enough to define reality.”[31] Applying these insights to Wikipedia, it is clear that to ask if it is reliable is therefore to likewise ask if it generates its own objectivity; in Latour’s terminology, it is to ask if it is powerful enough to define reality.

Yet before we answer this question definitively, let us take one more step back and examine the implications of this question. When we ask if Wikipedia is powerful enough to define reality, when we treat it as a self-generative system of knowledge production, what essential claims about not simply Wikipedia but knowledge as well are we making? For this, we turn to Martin Heidegger, whose theories of technological enframing reveal much about what we are excluding from this line of questioning.

With Heidegger’s early philosophy, we get a concept of being-in-the-world as the foundation of metaphysics. The human condition is one in which we are thrown into the world and attempt to make sense of it through our various projects. It is on the surface a deeply individualistic and material conception of being that rejects any possibility of a singular, transcendental ontology in lieu of an incessant becoming that is continually a problem for itself. This grounds Heidegger’s later work on modern technology, which he claims fundamentally changes how we conceptualize the world on an ontological level.

For Heidegger, it is impossible for an individual (whom he refers to as Dasein) to overcome the conditions of the world. Specifically, he states in Being and Time that:

The primordiality of a state of Being does not coincide with the simplicity and uniqueness of an ultimate structural element. The ontological source of Dasein’s Being is not ‘inferior’ to what springs from it, but towers above it in power from the onset; in the field of ontology, any ‘springing-from’ is degeneration. It we penetrate to the ‘source’ ontologically, we do not come to things which are ontically obvious for the ’common understanding’; but the questionable character of everything obvious opens up for us.[32]

Here, Heidegger rejects any philosophical attempt to place the Being of humanity over the conditions of its existence (the world). In some sense, it is the claim that we need the world far more than the world needs us, and any structural system of thought wherein we produce for ourselves the possibility of freedom over the world (specifically Hegelianism) is fundamentally flawed. However, Heidegger was not opposed to a social conception of the world; in fact, he spends an entire section of Being and Time on being-with others and claims that “Being-with is an existential constituent of being-in-the-world,”[33] He states that “So far as Dasein is at all, it has Being-with-one-another as its kind of Being.” However, he immediately follows with the claim that “This cannot be conceived as a summative result of the occurrence of several ‘subjects’” as this leads to an “’inconsiderate’ Being-with [that] ‘recons] with the Others without seriously ‘counting on them’ or without even wanting to ‘have anything to do with them’” (125).

Heidegger’s problem with conceptualizing being-in-the-world in terms of the social (that is, with intersubjectivity) is that it is on a fundamentally different level than individual interpersonal relations. Instead of focusing on an other through a process of empathy and care, we shift to what Heidegger calls the “dictatorship of the ‘they’” (126), in which:

We take pleasures and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasures; we read, see, and judge about literature as they see and judge; likewise, we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The ‘they’, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness.”[34]

The problem therefore with a conception of metaphysics as necessarily intersubjective is that it leads not to an egalitarian, non-hierarchical community of shared practice in which everyone offers up their own version being-in-the-world and then compromises with each other. To be blunt, Heidegger claims that most of us are too lazy or otherwise preoccupied to even figure out our own being-in-the-world, much less offer up an alternative version to others. Instead, we simply take from the dominant mode of thinking.

Much later, in The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger builds on certain parts of this framework in order to critique what he calls enframing. Our mode of being-in-the-world for the later Heidegger is one in which we continually reveal the world through our various imaginative projects, as he explains:

Whoever builds a house or a ship or forges a sacrificial chalice reveals what is to be brought forth … This revealing gathers together in advance the aspect and the matter of ship or house, with a view to the finished thing envisaged as completed, and from this gathering determines the manner of its creation. … It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth.[35]

The problem with the essence of what he calls “modern technology”[36] is that it structures how we reveal the world in a rather exclusive and dangerous way. For example, Heidegger shows that after a hydroelectric power plant was built on the Rhine, we conceptualized the river in a radically different way. He claims that we see the river “namely a water-power supplier” and that this “derives from the essence of the power station.”[37] It was not the mere adoption of technology in relation to nature that caused us to view the river as “something at our command,”[38] as there have been several bridges that were built in relation to the river that did not lead to this ontological framing. Furthermore, it was simply the specific introduction of a power plant that led to this revealing, but rather what he calls “the essence of technology [which] is by no means anything technological.”[39]

What Heidegger criticizes is an entire system of modern thought he calls enframing, or “the way in which the actual reveals itself as standing-reserve.”[40] Instead of seeing a river, for example, we only see what the river can provide for us, namely electricity. If the river for some reason loses its current, this is seen as undesirable simply because it stops providing electricity. Something that is revealed as a standing reserve is not even on the level of objectification, as objects are disparate and be distinguished from one another. The standing-reserve simply reveals the world as pure instrumentality, and Heidegger warns that “So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain transfixed in the will to master it.”[41]

When asking whether or not Wikipedia is now powerful enough to define reality, we should first pause, as this question is complicit in Heidegger’s enframing. In asking if Wikipedia is a possible producer of reality, we are in effect asking how we can use it for our own purposes. Specifically, we are asking how Wikipedia can instrumentally function epistemologically, which forecloses its other possibilities. The objection is not that we have delegated reality to the mere realm of the social, to the whim of the masses. Nor is it that we have merely changed masters and still remain shackled to a system of knowledge production that masks certain potentially harmful ideologies. Rather, what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? We only experience Wikipedia as a standing-reserve, one for producing (or failing to produce) objectless citations that, independent of the article they reference, can universally fit into an existing network of knowledge production. This mode of enframing Wikipedia as a reality producer leads us back into a rather problematic inquiry; specifically, as Heidegger claims:

Thus when man, investigating, observing, ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.[42]

Steven Colbert’s famous lampooning of Wikipedia, in which he coined the term wikiality to designate reality according to Wikipedia, can be seen not as a criticism of Wikipedia, but rather of those whose conceptualization of the project has been destined in this fashion. It must be stressed that this does not mean we cannot come to some conclusion as to Wikipedia’s reliability or authority as a reference work. In fact, for academics, this is an unavoidable question that must be answered, as academic scholarship is inherently based on the reliability and authority of sources. The problem is in asking this question as if it matters for Wikipedia’s sake; that is, as if Wikipedia is somehow good or bad, worthy or unworthy based on its answer. In looking at the project this way, it forecloses a fantastic possibility: that we could be a part of a system of knowledge production in which its relation to its own truth is not that of the social constructivists, the scientific realists, or anyone in between who offers some sort of epistemological compromise. Rather, Wikipedia enables a frighteningly wonderful system of knowledge production that gives a rather startling indifference as to questions of its own instrumentality, reliability, and truth claims.