User:Markworthen/sandbox/Feminist critique of Wikipedia's epistemology

Note

See also User:Markworthen/sandbox/Feminist critique of Wikipedia's epistemology/2nd draft. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 18:54, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Purpose

This is a space to write an article for the Wikimedia Research Newsletter about the Menking & Rosenberg academic article referenced below. (See also How to contribute.)

The Article

Citation

Menking, Amanda, and Jon Rosenberg. "WP:NOT, WP:NPOV, and Other Stories Wikipedia Tells Us: A Feminist Critique of Wikipedia’s Epistemology." Science, Technology, & Human Values. Published ahead of print, 13 May 2020. HTML | PDF | EPUB

Abstract

Wikipedia has become increasingly prominent in online search results, serving as an initial path for the public to access “facts,” and lending plausibility to its autobiographical claim to be “the sum of all human knowledge.” However, this self-conception elides Wikipedia’s role as the world’s largest online site of encyclopedic knowledge production. A repository for established facts, Wikipedia is also a social space in which the facts themselves are decided. As a community, Wikipedia is guided by the five pillars—principles that inform and undergird the prevailing epistemic and social norms and practices for Wikipedia participation and contributions. We contend these pillars lend structural support to and help entrench Wikipedia’s gender gap as well as its lack of diversity in both participation and content. In upholding these pillars, Wikipedians may unknowingly undermine otherwise reasonable calls for inclusivity, subsequently reproducing systemic biases. We propose an alternative set of pillars developed through the lens of feminist epistemology, drawing on Lorraine Code’s notion of epistemic responsibility and Helen Longino’s notion of procedural objectivity. Our aim is not only to reduce bias, but also to make Wikipedia a more robust, reliable, and transparent site for knowledge production.

Key Quotes from Article

Knowledge Is Situated

Human knowledge, of any kind, is not held by featureless or abstract agents. Instead, it is held by individuals situated in a contingent historical, social, and political context—contexts that shape both the content of knowledge and the epistemic agents capable of grasping that content. "Social location" includes broad categories of social and political significance such as race, class, and gender. It also may include more idiosyncratic aspects of the situation in which a particular epistemic agent finds themselves, such as sources of funding, intellectual lineage, and institutional features of an epistemic agent’s place of work.

Further, because of the way evidential relationships between data and theories are mediated by an epistemic agent’s background beliefs and values, social location enables and constrains the knowledge available to an epistemic agent at any given time (Longino 1990, 100). Knowledge is enabled by social location insofar as sets of background beliefs enable specific evidential relationships. So social locations uniquely associated with particular background beliefs and values may enable lines of evidence and reasoning unavailable to epistemic agents that do not occupy that location. In other words, ways of being situated may be associated with particular or unique kinds of evidence and knowledge content.

Process Orientation

[T]his new position moves away from a concentration upon products, endstates of cognition. It turns [ . . . ] to an examination of process [ . . . ] It does so from a conviction that concentration upon products restricts the possible results of inquiry . . . . (Code 1987, 8)

This focus upon products can also lend an unwarranted finality to those epistemic products. Particular results of an inquiry are often neither precise nor specific and are rarely definitive. Thus, epistemic subjects must remain mindful of their limits and fallibility (Code 1987, 250). For Code, they must foster a certain vigilance or wariness against failing to recognize the complexity of our cognitive situations and the choices we face in how to proceed through our cognitive projects. These choices are, in part, the root of the epistemic responsibility we take on as members of a community of inquiry. Code offers her version of virtue epistemology—what she calls epistemic “responsibilism”—as a corrective to our inappropriate focus on products. It takes up the task of articulating the processes that successfully lead limited epistemic agents to knowledge, and how those agents ought to act to facilitate that success: a task which becomes of critical epistemic importance when we recognize the limits to our individual epistemic situations.

Concerns

One concern I have is that this might either be too hard to follow due to terminology... or seem too simple once the terminology is taken out. But providing examples could start to misrepresent the author. I guess this is a line we walk.

We could try fleshing this out with examples. social-historical-political context could allow you to recognise relevant literature or ideas. There are often shadows of ideas in different literature. E.g. legal perspectives versus philosophical ones.

Epistemic responsibility: analogy to when a journalist asks different people for comment, so you might allow different people to think about whether they know relevant literature.