Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-06-15/Book review

Author's response

Mathieu O'Neil responded to the review in an email. His email and my reply are posted below (by permission).

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Hi Sage

I read your review of my book on the WP Signpost. I really appreciated how you engaged with the work, by applying it to WP, or by making some of the concepts work in your way. I also liked how it was illustrated with those pretty pictures;-). This is by far the best review I've had to date - OK, it's probably the only one, but still.

I do have a few quibbles which I'll mention briefly.

Overall purpose of the book
I didn't just set out to show how horrible the online environment was by "uncovering domination". I tried to have both a critical approach and one that showed how people can criticize and overcome injustice. A (possibly understated) objective of the book was to draw lessons from situations in which project / community governance operates with less hierarchy, which I (once again, perhaps too implicitly) see as a positive development - otherwise I wouldn't spend so much time talking about it. For example in the Introduction I wrote "And yet: the persistence of some forms of domination should not prevent us from recognizing instances where authority really is self-directed".

Meaning of index-charismatic authority
I use this as indicating a person / actor / node's _central position_ in an online network: many others link to the node, or the node operates as a link between separated clusters. Some people might refer to this as "social capital" - the benefits received from being well-connected. Preferential attachment (i.e. early entrance in the network) is a possible and convincing explanation for how nodes acquire index-charisma but you seem to equate the two things when you define index-charisma as "another form of charismatic authority, based on the concept from network theory of preferential attachment". It is based on the social network analysis concept of network centrality or popularity (which has been theorized as deriving from preferential attachment by Barabasi, a notion which I argue obscures social domination).

Google / LMD
I am a little puzzled as to why saying "if it isn't on Google it doesn't exist" reinscribes injustice and inequality in WP - it reinscribes definitions of what constitutes acceptable content but I don't see how this discriminates against a particular group? Finally, my LMD article is not really a wider discussion of WP - rather it focuses on (and expands a little) the analysis of expertise but eschews most analysis of governance and administrative power which forms the bulk of the book's WP-chapter.

Cheers,

Mathieu

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Mathieu,

Thanks for the comments!

Can I post your response on the talk page (and my reply, and we can continue the discussion there so that others can participate), or perhaps you'd like to write a more formal reply that could be published in next week's Signpost?

I didn't mean to imply that that you were merely explaining how horrible the Internet is, although now I see it kind of reads that way. My intent was to say that your book was primarily a sort of constructive critique of the Internet, rather than the more common modes of praising its best qualities or complaining about its worst: you show how the Internet's best qualities fall short and are imperfect (and thus how they can be improved upon). In the review I de-emphasized your discussion of the ways the Internet *is* already being used to criticize and overcome injustice, mainly because I think the Signpost audience for the most part takes those things for granted.

You're right, in trying to explain index-charisma concisely, I botched it. I was trying to emphasize what I found most insightful about the concept, that when one describes being socially well-connected in the language of network theory, the mechanism of preferential attachment makes it much easier to see how legitimate authority and unjust privilege are totally entangled even in the online social world. ("Social capital" seems too broad here; hacker-charisma is also a form of social capital, is it not?)

On "if it isn't on Google it doesn't exist": along the lines we discussed before in the context of your LMD piece, groups that don't get covered in online sources are already subject to social domination. Else why wouldn't they appear in online discourse, encompassing as it is? In our previous discussion, you gave examples of groups you thought got the short end of the stick in this regard.

I think your LMD piece *is* a broader look at Wikipedia. True, it focuses on expertise rather than authority, but it looks at expertise broadly, in a way that seems to me to encompass more of what goes on on Wikipedia. Your treatment of authority in the book is more particular, and you focus in on a set of examples that I would say are instructive but not representative. As I said in the review (approximately), I think your framework for thinking about authority is more valuable for Wikipedians than your particular applications of it *to* Wikipedia.

Yours in discourse, Sage

Futher discussion

Hi Sage

OK, I guess my first point has to be a question: since you say that you "botched" your analysis of index-charisma should we modify the review? I understand that this is not an encyclopedia entry so I'm not expecting that to happen but perhaps you should add a parenthesis or something indicating that the wording is not quite right and referring people to this discussion? Just a thought. Hacker-charisma would be more like cultural capital (possession of esoteric knowledge) than like social capital (possession of many valuable connections). --Mathieu O'Neil (talk) 13:40, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I adjusted the explanation of index-charisma.--ragesoss (talk) 14:12, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Great, thanks.--Mathieu O'Neil (talk) 01:00, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Re. "If it isn't on Google": I am unsure about equating discriminating against pre-1995 marginal / subcultural forms which have flown under the radar of legitimate cultural arbiters and hence have not been digitised and hence find no corroborrating hyperlinked source when they are submitted to WP as legitimately worthy of inclusion (my original point in our earlier discussion about notability) with "social domination" on the project or in society in general which I would venture derives from class, gender, ethnicity etc. These two things strike me as quite different.. I can see how the analogy might work if someone was pointing to cases in which (for example) black art forms were not considered as notable as white ones but since that's not what I was talking about I would be more careful about saying that. But I don't really detect any archaic force at work when someone says "Your music / art / fanzine isn't notable enough because not enough trace exists of it online". --Mathieu O'Neil (talk) 13:40, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm unclear about the distinction you're making here. Are "subcultural forms which have flown under the radar of legitimate cultural arbiters" not just class at work—this is art because it conforms to the standards established by the powerful, this is trash and unworthy of attention because it does not? Are the injustices of class, gender, ethnicity, international economics, etc. not part of the reason why some things are extensively documented online and others are not?--ragesoss (talk) 14:12, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi again - you make a valid point re. the role of taste in reinforcing social hierarchies. However the problem here is that what we are discussing is based on a personal anecdote whereby the cultural artefacts and events deemed un-notable in an AFD case were not in fact produced by disadvantaged groups. They were rather an example of what could be called "underground distinction"... i.e. they were counter-cultural rather than subcultural to use the definition made by 1970s cultural studies... In other words a product of the educated middle-class, or to use a Bourdieuan chestnut, of "the dominated fraction of the dominant group". So while the mechanism of cultural domination you describe is certainly a reality in many circumstances in this precise instance I don't know to what extent it is at work.--Mathieu O'Neil (talk) 01:00, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Re. whether my Le Monde diplomatique (LMD) article is broader or not... My main observation in the book about WP in governance terms is that its lack of clear constitutional principles, proliferation of admins / rules and simultaneous embrace of slightly fuzzy "consensual" practices was stronly related to the still-strong presence of charismatic authority in the project, which can legitimately (but not democratically) make controversial and / or arbitrary decisions. Whether that is a "broader" point than the ones I make about expertise in LMD is an open question in my view.Cheers,--Mathieu O'Neil (talk) 13:40, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Fair enough. Maybe I misremembered your LMD article, which I read before the book but not since.--ragesoss (talk) 14:12, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

No worries. PS. I just added the correct timestamps to some above paras which were originally one single block of text and therefore unsigned.--Mathieu O'Neil (talk) 01:15, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

"If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist"

Mathieu O'Neil - I'm no apologist for Jimmy Wales - as I'm sure he'd be the first to confirm - but he's really gotten a bum rap on the "If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist" pseudo-quote. I did a long blog post debunking it, Google: 1, Michael Gorman: 0, and wrote about this in a column about Britannica's blog: "This arose from misreading a very short discussion in a print article. The saying is attributed to Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia. But he never said it with that truncated form; his own intent was to point out the weakness of complete reliance on search engines, and that there's still value in reference books." -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 04:34, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

@ Seth Finkelstein - I accept that the quote attributed to Jimmy Wales may have been taken out of context – I trusted the source... thanks for pointing it out. It does raise the issue of Wikipedia editors possibly relying overly on online sources, particularly when deciding whether some topic or other is notable, or during deletion debates. Following the publication of my article on expertise and WP in Le Monde diplomatique, I was contacted in early May 2009 by Sage Ross who offered some comments and we had a discussion about various issues relating to the article, one of which was precisely the question of online sourcing. Since it's relevant to this discussion I thought I should include it here. Rather than rehashing the discussion I asked Sage if it would be OK to post the relevant excerpts and he agreed.

[Sage wrote:] On an unrelated note, you write later in the article that "marginal cultures which have not been digitised and uploaded run the risk of becoming invisible." I have two comments. First, Jimmy Wales' facetious comment that "If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist" is not, and has never been, normative on Wikipedia; rather, it seems to me like a statement of the zeitgeist of the Internet age. Second, if marginal cultures are not covered in any digitized content, they don't run the risk of becoming invisible...they already are invisible. If they aren't on Google, that means that there are essentially no books or scholarly articles about them and that publishing institutions (including, in recent years, the Internet-connected public) have been ignoring them since the rise of electronic publishing. That's not to say that Wikipedia doesn't play a role in re-enforcing patterns of marginalization; through the "Reliable sources" guideline, in particular, it does do that. But I think it's unfair to lay that marginalization at the feet of Wikipedia, since that only causes problems when marginal cultures have already been made invisible (or rather, have never been made visible) by the forms of media that Wikipedia builds on and is built from. I would argue that Wikipedia actually levels the field for the unjustly marginalized, who are normally crowded out by the popular. There were thousands upon thousands of newspaper articles and television stories about Anna Nicole Smith; there are just a few dozen corresponding Wikipedia articles. Conversely, there are Wikipedia articles for small villages with no particular claim to fame for which the only sources are census and geographical data...the invisible and marginal made visible and human-readable. In a paper encyclopedia, editors would have to find content to remove for every bit that got added, so that encyclopedia sets would not grow without bound and could still be sold to suburban families by door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen.

[Mathieu responded:] Re. your second and related point, I did not say that J. Wales' comment was normative, but it does encapsulate a certain reliance on a handy http page to link to buttress one's point. I think there might be a "loop effect" deriving from Google's ranking of WP as well. This is a complicated issue, which also depends on whether one does believe that everything which could have been digitised has been (I don't), or on where one stands on the notability question, or perhaps even on what constitutes original research in an encyclopedia which has no space limitations. So, while I appreciate your point that WP may level the playing field in some respects, I would have to reserve judgement until some more definite form of empirical evidence has been produced.

[Sage reponded:] Following up a bit on marginalization and sources...

You say:

> So, while I appreciate your point that WP may level the playing field in some > respects, I would have to reserve judgement until some more definite form of > empirical evidence has been produced.

Fair enough. But you seem willing to judge Wikipedia for marginalizing topics that don't have digital sources, without presenting definite empirical evidence and despite the fact that, in both policy and practice, Wikipedia encourages the use of print sources (including ones that are not available online). Online sources are treated as a convenience for readers, but there is no hesitation to use offline sources when they are superior.

Do you have particular cultures in mind that you see as being marginalized by Wikipedia's Verifiability requirements?

[Mathieu responded:] In general, I would venture that marginal / underground / subcultural / counter-cultural events, people and artefacts that existed before 1995 would not necessarily have been comprehensively digitised. I had some anecdotal evidence of this when I created an article for a by no means insignificant art / cultural group active 1988-1993 which was judged not notable because no online sources were available. The point being, the group in question definitely made an impact on the cultural scene at the time but the sources which document this (art or music magazines, exhibition catalogues, concert flyers, fanzines, radio shows, etc) are not online. Now, I didn't even know about the whole AFD process then; and the art / cultural group was active in Paris, while I created an entry on WP-en. So things might have turned out differently on the French WP... people might have known about it or been more receptive or whatever...

[Sage responded:] Thanks. It's true that Wikipedia creates threshold for inclusion that re-enforces existing patterns of marginalization. It sounds like what you've run up against has more to do with Wikipedia's definition of Original Research than Verifiability; offline magazines, and possibly exhibition catalogs as well, would be considered Reliable Sources on Wikipedia that could be used to establish at topic's Notability. Of course, Wikipedia is only the most prominent example of a whole class of wiki venues that follow the model Wikipedia created but often have different social structures; some of these are open to a wider array of content, and in a both a cultural and technical sense they exist because of Wikipedia. So I think I understand where you're coming from now, but I still think it's misleading to blame Wikipedia for the shortcomings of cultural institutions whose role it is do the kinds of things that on Wikipedia are called "Original Research". (The problems with that definition are interesting; there is a gap that exists for some areas of knowledge between what is allowed on Wikipedia and what is considered original enough to merit publication elsewhere, e.g., in terms of the analysis of literature.)

The other problem you ran into, perhaps, is the opaque complexity of the way Wikipedia works, so that your work was pushed out because it didn't conform to Wikipedians' expectations even though it might, in principle, have been made into something stable. That kind of thing is a big problem, and one that the community is constantly struggling with.

[Discussion ended] --Mathieu O'Neil (talk) 02:57, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Authority as a factor in diffusion/adoption of ideas in online environments

I found the review of Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes interesting. Although I've not read the book yet I found inspiration for some tangential work I'm doing for my own doctorate, updating classic work of the Diffusion of Innovations within complex organisations in which communities of practice via online communication is becoming the norm. I am exploring some of the factors (including authority) which may be significant, but wonder whether the book has also examined power relationships and homophilly along with the general and context specific psychological antecedents which influence ways in which people decide to participate in public welfare/non profit endeavors. I am looking for/at evidence sources which illustrate that behaviours are different in these contexts than in those where financial reward is the driving force. The review has made me seriously consider buying the book (or at least hassling my institutions library to get a copy).— Rod ^talk 16:17, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Good review

I liked it. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 16:01, 11 March 2010 (UTC)