User:Anuran/Wikipedia as a Panopticon
Although Bentham's original panopticon was merely a prison, Foucault's was the more abstract idea of any system that was self-norming by way of unpredictable checking. A rather complicated version of this idea is at work in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's purpose is to provide an accurate encyclopedic knowledge base from the constantly expanding and changing knowledge pool of its readers. As such, it functions as a machine which forms organized knowledge its final product. It does this by letting any reader edit articles as they read them. This means that each person is analogous to the center of a panopticon that has the articles as its cells and, indirectly, the other readers. Because there are so many of these panopticons intersecting on every article, malicious edits are quickly reverted. This means that trolls (aimless vandals seeking attention) are quickly silenced, and because they do not do much noticeable damage, they soon lose interest. In effect, the machine has disciplined the readers not to act as trolls.
Other Methods of Organization
[edit]Many individuals do not have a malicious intent, but instead have strong opinions that are at odds with others. This leads to "revert wars" in which oppositely minded groups attack and destabalize an article. These people are not as easily dealt with as trolls because they are acting with a higher purpose. In fact, Wikipedia in its original form could not deal with this type of attack, and in fact no panoptic system can deal with a problem where the subjects do not care if they are caught. However, the same self assembling tendency that caused Wikipedia to form a panopticon allowed it to develope heuristics to discourage this behavior. For example, temporary locks were created to stabalize articles and talk pages began to be used as a place to discuss proposed edits and agree on NPOV solutions. It is a testament to the effectiveness of this approach that even the abortion page is now open for editing.