Is it all about reliability?

15 August, 2012 at 14:24 | Posted in knowledge, Politics, Web 2.0, Wikipedia policy | Leave a comment
Tags: , , ,

Whom shall I trust? A typical newsstand in New York City.

Whom shall I trust? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These are some thoughts I had after reading Heather Ford’s thought provoking and most interesting research “Beyond reliability: An ethnographic study of Wikipedia sources“.

Walking in Tel Aviv, I saw an interesting magazine and decided to buy a copy. The price was printed on the magazine’s cover – EUR 2, but actually I had to pay ILS 20 at the cashier. Apparently, this magazine is not reliable at all, because it lies about its own price… It says it is available for euro, and yet I paid in shekel. I suppose we can live with that, because there is a worldwide accepted conversion rate between the euro and the shekel. Then again, according to this conversion rate, EUR 2 = ILS 10 (approximately).

On the face of it, I am the victim of a series of lies, and I should be careful not to trust this magazine too much (especially its business and economy sections). Or, perhaps it is this bookstore that I have to distrust, or perhaps the bank that provided the list of exchange rates. In fact, nothing dramatic happened here, and I don’t even have to explain why this story is so trivial and why there were no lies here.

And yet, when writing about sensitive issues on Wikipedia, I often felt like someone who tried to convince other people that he bought the New York Times in Tel Aviv for shekels. All the sources say it is a US magazine whose price is quoted in US dollars, and your own testimony is a primary source at best, and an unreliable testimony at worse.

When the issue is not sensitive, people are naturally more willing to accept unwritten testimonies or “common sense” inferences. For example, other editors were willing to accept my testimony that the Jordanian Television was easily received in Israel (hence, for example, color sets could be popular in Israel before the local stations broadcast in color, because these sets would show color films from Jordan). When someone suggested that the same was true for Norway and Iceland (Icelanders could receive color transmission from Norway before their local stations switched to color broadcasting), another editor said it was illogical, because the distance between Norway and Iceland was too large. It was a dialog of direct testimonies and pure logic. No sources were involved.

Things are different when it comes to sensitive political issues, and you are welcome to browse this blog for some examples (forgive me for feeling a bit tired of repeating them, just like that hypothetical example about the magazine’s price.

So actually, it’s only reliability that is at the focus here. We are not concerened only about the accuracy of the information and how trustworthy it is. It is also a question of whether we want to have the information at all, how we plan to put it into use and how we want it to be “wrapped”. We often argue about the wrapping paper of the “present” (namely, the information), rather than the accuracy of the information itself. Sometimes, this “wrapping paper” is indeed more important than the content.

Wikipedia takes a u-turn – The change in the editing concept of Wikipedia (Part Two)

26 September, 2011 at 18:51 | Posted in Collaborative work, knowledge, Politics, Web 2.0, Wiki systems, Wikipedia policy | Leave a comment
Tags: , , , , , ,

The following is the second part in a series of essays, which ellaborate my talk on Wikimania 2011. The first article is here.

Heated debates are not about the facts but rather on how to present them

Five cartoon images in various colors sitting or leaning on the Wikipedia puzzle-globe, engaged in deep reflections

Quo Vadis, Wikipedia?

How to call Ireland?

Looking at some of the heated debates on the English-language Wikipedia reveals that facts are never the core of such debates, but rather the way they should be presented. For example, in December 2008, the debate about Ireland culminated. The issue at stake had nothing to do with actual facts about this northeast Atlantic island, its people or the two geopolitical units on its land. Rather, the controversy was about how to name the articles about Ireland. With the name “Ireland” being used in the English language (and most other languages) in both political and geographical contexts, and considering the conflict that affected the island for several decades in the recent past, it is not surprising that the right way to present the facts about the island is a matter of controversy. It is not unusual to have polysemies like this, and there are simple ways to overcome them, especially with a flexible tool like a Wiki system (the software infrastructure upon which Wikipedia is built), but here, the decades old conflict reflects on the work of the Wikipedians. They can agree about the facts, they cannot agree on how to present them.

Is it “pro-life” or “anti-abortion”?

A similar case is the set of articles about abortion. In August 2011 the bitter debate about the articles on the English-language Wikipedia dealing with the termination of pregnency reached the “Arbitration Committee”. No one argues about the facts presented in the article or about the method in which they were collected. The controversy is about whether to call the movement that objects abortions “pro-life” or “anti-abortion” (see here and here) and whether the article about abortion should include this image of  a ten weeks old live fetus inside a uterus which was removed from a 44-old woman (for pure medical reasons, in this specific case, according to the photograph’s uploader). The lead of articles is often a matter of harsh debates, and this case is no exception. While Wikipedia is committed to fairly present all significant views about a subject, the lead is often perceived as if presenting the prevailing or most valid view. It is probably also assumed that many people read the lead and disregard the details that follow. Here, a question was raised several times whether the process should be described as “causing the death [of a fetus or embryo]” or “causing the termination [of a pregnancy]”. Once again we see that the facts are in consensus. It is how to present them that causes the controversy. 

English-language Wikipedia’s mechanism of conflict resolution 

At this point, and before moving ahead in my analysis, it might be worth while to shed some light on one of the ways in which the English-language Wikipedia resolves conflicts. In this partial overview, I will address one of the more recently developed methods, which seems to have gained prominence quite quickly. More details can be found in one of the excellent articles and presentations about Wikipedia written by Ayelet Oz. One of her peresentations about this subject is available on the Wikimania 2009 website.

Arbitration Committee: Popular idea that fails in most cases

 The English-language Wikipedia has an “Arbitration Committee” to which Wikipedians appeal when they think their debates with other Wikipedians have reached a dead end. The appeals are either against alleged misbehavior of another Wikipedian, or about a certain topic, at the center of one or several article, which seems too controversial. This whole system is quite peculiar. The Arbitration Committee is not supposed and usually not expected to act as an editorial board or a fact-checking committee. They actually act as a court of law judging where Wikipedia’s procedures of editing went wrong. The committee is supposed to offer remedies that would bring the procedures back on track and move away the “blocking element” that prevents the normal flow of the debate, when it heads toward a solution.

The Arbitration Committee method has become very popular for various reasons, even though it fails in most cases. In most of the cases, the Committee ends the heated discussion by repeating the main principles of Wikipedia in a general language, and declaring the topic in question a danger zone, so to speak. This means that Wikipedia’s administrators have the right to be much less tolerant toward editors who wish to introduce changes to these articles. They would be able to punish them in various ways, or even ban them completely from editing on the English-language Wikipedia, if they deem their edits contentious.

Eventually, it is the politically motivated that are heard

The debates on the pages of the Arbitration Committee are open to all, but just in theory. First of all, you have to know such a committee exists. Then you have to read long pages of instructions and recommendations. Filing a request or commenting on an open case improperly can have unpleasant consequences if you wish to keep editing the English-language Wikipedia. The structure of the debates and their languages is a mixture of debating club sessions and juristic discussions. You have to be very acquainted with this structure, as well as the language and jargon in order to have a say in the arbitration process. Finally, you need to have a lot of time and dedication. These debates are long, tiring and often frustrating. In real life, we often hire lawyers to do this kind of works for us. Here you have to do it all by yourself. Those who have political interest in the phrasing of the certain article in question, are usually those who have the motivation to make the time and effort, and they are the ones who will be heard. Those who have an innocent wish to contribute some of their knowledge will give up.

TO BE CONTINUED

Related articles

Wikipedia takes a u-turn – The change in the editing concept of Wikipedia (Part One)

20 September, 2011 at 19:28 | Posted in Collaborative work, knowledge, Politics, Web 2.0, Wikipedia policy | 3 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Notes – These are the first few paragraphs of an article I write about the concept behind the editing of Wikipedia and how it has changed. I will publish the next ones shortly. In the mean time, comments are welcome. Please note that this is a draft, so it might include mistakes or inaccuracies. If you find one and would like to correct me – I’d be grateful.

The three principles of Wikipedia

Wikipedia's puzzle piece stands between Veritas, the goddess of Truth, and the Mouth of Truth, which she holds in her hand.

Veritas, the Mouth of Truth and Wikipedia

Wikipedia has three basic rules to govern its editing policy, namely Neutral Point Of View (commonly known as NPOV), Verifiability and No Original Research (commonly known as No OR). The first rule, which, for many years, was also considered the most important one, was NPOV. The other two were added during the early stages of Wikipedia’s emergence. No hierarchy was set for these three rules. Perhaps they were considered harmonious, and in some respect they are indeed. For example, the “No OR” rule caters for neutrality and verfiability by screening out new analyses and views that were not subject to thorough examination and criticism, hence, are likely to be unreliable or biased politically, commercially, ideologically or otherwise. The Verifiability rule requires that every statement be attributed to a certain person or body, so that controversial statements would not be presented as commonly accepted facts.

And yet, quite often do these three rules contradict one another. For example, in case a place or a phenomenon have two names, each of which carries some political or emotional meaning. In such cases, using any of these names harms the NPOV principle, while inventing a new neutral one is a violation of the “No OR” rule. Most of the examples for this problem come from the field of geopolitical conflicts. Is it “the Malvinas” or “Falkland Islands“? Should the leading name be “the West Bank” or “Judea and Samaria”? Is this port city on the Baltic Sea called “Danzig” or “Gdansk“? In the latter case, Wikipedians on the English-language Wikipedia debated for months and eventually developed a scheme matching between periods in the city’s history and the appropriate name to be used in the certain context. They figured that neutrality would be better served if the city be called “Danzig” when referring to it in the time between the two world wars (for example) and as Gdansk in the post-World War II era. Such a solution would be futile for the West Bank/Judea and Samaria and for the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, since the conflict is ongoing and any choice could be interpreted as siding with one of the parties.

The term “massacre” is sometimes used to denote events that did not involve mass killing. The Boston Massacre in 19770 is a good example. The loss of lives is regrettable ofcourse, and yet the number of people killed is not considered a massacre by commonplace standards. The name “Boston Massacre” is, however, the name by which this event has come to be known, and after so many years, and after time healed most of the wounds, no one really cares  any longer about the title given to this event. This, however, is not the case with recent events, especially those which still have political, emotional or ideological significance.

Sometimes, even using or rejecting a certain terminology in an article about seemingly innocent subject might be problematic in terms of NPOV. Is Pluto a “planet” or a “dwarf planet”? You may ask, who cares, but I won’t be surprised if this issue touches sensitive nerves in the astronomical community. If you are in the business of Linguistics, think of terms like “pro drop” versus “null subject”. The two describe the same phenomenon. The former is a Generative Linguistic term that assumes the existence of an abstract “pro” element in certain languages. Linguists who reject the Generative (Chonskian) theory might frown upon such a title for an article about what they prefer to call “null subject”. In all of these cases, you cannot satisfy both neutrality and the “no original research” principles.

Problems exist anywhere. If they are not too harsh, they make our life more interesting. The issue here is not whether Wikipedia encounters problems. Sure it does. It is bound to encounter problems. The question is how Wikipedia resolves these problems, and more generally, what is the new concept (if any) behind its editing policy. Such concept is, and will always be, reflected in the way Wikipedia solve such contradictions as the ones I mentioned above.

There is another principle, never formulated explicitly but very much present, especially in the early days of Wikipedia. This is the principle of collaborative work. Now, most of our lives we work with other people and cooperate with them. There is no other way to live, let alone build projects. But Wikipedia, especially after its inception, presented the idea of building a systematic corpus of knowledge without a strict blueprint or editorial line, but rather by constant productive negotiation among the various editors. This constant negotiation was supposed to be the solution, or at least one of the major solutions, to the abovementioned problems. Productive negotiation would highlight the points on which all agree, single out the controversial issues and lead to an accepted decision on how to present the controversies fairly. This concept is somewhat utopic, and in my humble opinion, it indeed failed. However, I also believe it was not given much chance. Wikipedia took a sharp turn and adopted a different concept before a system of real collaborative work could evolve.

TO BE CONTINUED

My Talk on Wikimania 2011

11 September, 2011 at 15:03 | Posted in knowledge, Web 2.0, Wikipedia policy | 1 Comment
Tags: , , , ,

You can now see (embedded below) my talk and two other interesting talks about Wikipedia’s policy and conflict resolution on Wikipedia as recorded last month in the Auditorium Hall of Haifa at the Wikimania 2011 conference. If you follow the film’s link, you will find the YouTube channel of Wikimedia Israel, where you can find some more interesting talks and views of Wikimania 2011.

It is advisable that you also follow the slide presentation of this talk while listening to it. You can find it in the following link. It is downloadable, but can also be viewed online. Wikimania 2011 website – “Where Wikipedia has gone wrong, what we can do to bring it back on track”

Enjoy, and feel free to post comments.

Related articles
My previous posts about Wikimania 2011
Other news items and posts about Wikimania 2011

Second Wikimania report: The issue of language in Global South outreach

13 August, 2011 at 06:47 | Posted in Collaborative work, knowledge, Wikipedia policy | 1 Comment
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

This is my second account of insights I have had following talks and discussions at Wikimania 2011 in Haifa, Israel.

New terms, old problems

language variety on cadbury's choc

Language is knowledge (Image by nofrills via Flickr)

Just to make things clear, the term “Global South” is equivalent to what we used to call “developing countries” or “the third world”. While I can understand why people are uncomfortable with the former terms, the new term seems too ambiguous. Imagine that we look for an alternative term for “ice”. First we come up with “water in a bad temperature state”, but who said cold is bad? So, we replace that term with “potentially liquid water”. When we realize that this term also implies the wrong attitude, we decide to call it “thing to be found at the South Pole”. So be it.

Why add a language barrier to a technological gap?

During the discussions about how to reach out to people in the Global South countries (particularly sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian sub-continent), the question of language kept rising. Many people argued that we must provide people with free content materials in their own mother tongues. While this sounds very reasonable, especially for someone like me who comes from a culture that fosters the use of local languages, people in the Global South seem to prefer a different approach. As far as I could understand from people who had been to these countries, and from occasional talks with people who live there, the idea of having education in a European language (usually English, French or Portuguese, depending on the country’s history) rather than in one mother’s tongue is taken to be the right strategy, as it has many advantages. In a multilingual country it ensures one egalitarian educational system to all children, and it provides them with a nationwide lingua franca. It helps them to seek higher education in the universities of Europe an North America, or at least allow them to access to the educational and cultural material provided by these countries, which, like it or not, are today the center of the world.

In fact, the experience that Wikimedia Israel and the Ben Gurion University‘s Africa Center had in Santchou, Cameroon, proves exactly that – while there is a technological gap which people from Cameroon, Israel, Switzerland and other countries strove to level by providing offline versions of Wikipedia, there was no language barrier, as school children and adults can easily read the French-language Wikipedia, which has been enjoying contributions from Francophones all over the world. Why have extra barriers, when you are already coping with a serious one?

Writing in your own language is sharing linguistic knowledge with the rest of the world

And yet, developing free content projects (e.g. Wikipedias and Wiktionaries, and also non-Wikimedia free-content projects) in African, Indic and other local  languages,  is by no means redundant. The flow of knowledge must be bidirectional from the “Global North” to the “Global South” but also vice versa. Language is knowledge. The very structure of a language, its vocabulary, its semantic fields, the way it constructs words and phrases, is an invaluable corpus of knowledge. People who speak lesser-known languages must write in these languages, because they have to share this human knowledge with the the people “up north”.

So, even if you are educated in a European language and happy with that, and even if you can do with the English, French, Portuguese or Spanish Wikipedias or whatever other free-content project, you still have the obligation to share your linguistic knowledge with the rest of mankind, and the simplest way to do it is to write in your own native tongue.

Related articles

First Wikimania report: Achal R. Prabhala’s project: “People are Knowledge”

9 August, 2011 at 10:35 | Posted in Collaborative work, Israeli-Arab conflict, knowledge, Web 2.0, Wiki systems, Wikipedia policy | 3 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Achal Prabhala speaks to the group

Achal R. Prabhala, image via Wikipedia

It has been a long intensive week of fascinating events and this time,  this enchanted intellectual and social experience landed at home. Well, almost. I’m not a Haifa guy, rather a Tel Aviv one. To be more precise, I’m from a southeastern suburb of Tel Aviv, which makes me a “Tel Aviv wannabe”. Anyway, I came to know Haifa in the past several months and it is a beautiful well organized city. Tel Aviv has a lot to learn from Haifa.

I’m talking of course about Wikimania 2011, the annual Wikimedia conference that ended two days ago. My job at the organizing team was relatively minor, and yet I do feel part of this great success. Luckily there is plenty of pride to share… Pride is often said to be a sin, but in this case we truly worked hard for it, and the fact that people enjoyed and enriched themselves through this conference fuels this pride, so let’s allow it at least for the time being.

This year I served as an organizer, a presenter and a participant. It was way too optimistic and ambitious to think that I can play all these roles in one single conference, so actually I missed many interesting presentations. I gave three rather brief talks about Wikimedia Israel’s cooperation with the Africa Center of the Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, a cooperation that brought offline versions of the French-language Wikipedia to rural regions in Cameroon and Benin, and also about the flaws in the current editing system of Wikipedia and how they came to be (in my opinion). I also had many interesting talks at the conferences’ lounges and during its parties and tours. As for the “formal” schedule, I am waiting to see the video films of the presentations.

I will publish more information about the ideas raised in the conference, especially about issues related to my presentations and the topics I am interested in. In the meantime, I strongly recommend this film by Achal R. Prabhala, a veteran Wikimedian from India. He presented this film during Wikimania 2011, and I admire this initiative of his (and him personally): “People are Knowledge“. You can also read Noam Cohen’s report about Achal’s presentation.

Suska Döpp from Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR, West German Broadcasting) interviewed me about the Israeli-Arab conflict as it reflects on Wikipedia. It is not the first time I am interviewed about this issue, but Suska Döpp did a wonderful job and produced a concise straight-to-the-point report. Unfortunately my German is very basic, so I had to read it with machine translation and some help from German-speaking friends. Other reports about Wikimania and Wikipedia from WDR are available in this link.

Related articles

Dostor-Wiki – A very modest attempt to “wikify” the Egyptian revolution

1 July, 2011 at 09:53 | Posted in Arab spring, Collaborative work, Israeli-Arab conflict, Politics, Web 2.0, Wiki systems | 3 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The "Dahd" maze on the web

The "Dahd" maze on the web (the "Dahd" letter is a symbol of the Arabic language and its speakers; image via Wikipedia)

The Arabic-language Wikipedia has a mailing list, in which some very interesting information is occasionally exchanged. The mailing list is public, and yet Modern Standard Arabic, despite being the language of some 20 countries, an official UN language, and used by more than 250 million people (at least to some extent), is still considered a “secret language”, unintelligible by people who enjoy rain in August…

By the way, this is an opportunity to warn all of you who carry their umbrellas well into July, that Wikipedia has two Arabic versions – the bigger more established one is ar-wp, which is in Modern Standard Arabic (a.k.a Fuśħa “the purer language”), the other one, arz-wp is written in Egyptian Arabic (a.k.a. Maśri, which is in fact the dialect of Cairo, Alexandria and the surroundings). Egyptian Arabic is the language you would probably hear in dialogs of Arab films and plays, but its use as a written language is still controversial, so many Egyptian Wikipedians prefer to write on ar-wp rather than on arz-wp.

Egyptian Wikipedians to establish Wiki project for collaboratively writing new Egyptian constitution

In a recent thread on the Arabic-Wikipedia mailing list, one of the Wikipedians suggested opening a Wiki project for drafting the new Egyptian constitution. This project is not supposed to be related to Wikimedia, but he tried to recruit people to the mission through the Wikimedia mailing lists (after all, this is where you would find a large group of Wiki-system enthusiasts).

Hello people,

This message has been sent to two mailing lists, that of the working group of the Arab celebrations for Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary and that of the Arabic Wikipedia.

I came to know a person who encouraged me to undertake the idea of a Wiki for the Egyptian constitution, so that the Egyptians use the Web for writing a constitution collaboratively. We could bring forth a draft (or drafts) to the Egyptian constitution, as the Egyptians think it should be. I liked this idea a lot and became very enthusiastic about it. I was also encouraged by the fact that the brothers in Tunisia had already started such a Wiki for the Tunisian constitution, about three months ago, and it was very successful.

What do you think? Who should take part?

As this Wikipedian said, the idea is not new. In fact, he himself mentioned the Tunisian Wiki project – destour.org  – last March, which made me curious enough to look at it and report about it in the general mailing list of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The reactions to the idea were very welcoming, and a temporary website was soon set by another veteran Egyptian Wikipedians. A special domain name was later registered – dostorwiki.org – leading to the same temporary website. Dostor or Destour, by the way, is the Arabic word for “constitution”. There is not much to read on this website at this point, even if you can read Arabic (and by the way, it is Modern Standard Arabic, this is a political revolution, not a linguistic one…) And yet, as someone pointed out in a response to my report to the general mailing list, and another person, in a respond to the recent discussion on the Arabic mailing list, Google groups for the purpose of collaboratively drafting the new Egyptian constitution have already been established. These are the two mentioned in the aforementioned mailing-list messages:

http://www.google.com/moderator/?hl=ar#15/e=581e0&t=581e0.40&f=581e0.1501bd

https://groups.google.com/group/dostorna

Some of the debates on these groups seem quite naïve. For example, an article currently brought  to a virtual vote says “Limiting working hours to prevent abuse of workers. Setting a clear system for extra hours, and improving working conditions and salaries. Providing official bodies that would look into complaints within the shortest time”. There is also an invitation to a “real life” meeting about the status of women under the new regime and how it can be improved.

The “good guys” are always a step behind

So, do we witness a real Web 2.00-induced revolution in Egypt? I doubt it. Most of the Egyptians do not have access to this new medium, and it is well reflected in the relatively small number of participants, and the fact that almost all of them come from the same background more or less. And yet, even if the Internet became the new medium of communication of Egypt, and even if we adopt the assumption that Wiki systems and Google groups allow debates which are more democratic than those held in other media, at the end of the day, it is not the medium that makes the revolution. Iran uses the Internet as a main medium of communication, and yet the abundance of Iranian blogs, forums and FaceBook accounts did not make the recent protests there successful. The Iranian regime quickly learned how to control this new medium. Also, what we currently hear and read on Egyptian websites is a lot of antisemitic and anti-Israeli commentaries and conspiracy theories.

The Islamist movement of the Muslim Brothers has been using Media-Wiki systems to spread their propaganda for several years now. Here is one example called in Arabic “The Wikipedia of the Muslim Brothers” or “Ikhwan-Wiki” in English. Jihadist web-forums in Arabic teaching people how to carry out terrorist attacks are also hardly new. The “bad guys” are always one step ahead.

There is an Egyptian FaceBook group called “I am the first volunteer to the Egyptian Army in case of a declaration of war against Israel“. 141,950 people “liked” this group. Surely not all of them fully understand the idea behind this group, but still, comparing this number to the number of participants in those Wiki and Google projects is depressing. There is an Egyptian website which translates reports and articles from the Hebrew press into Arabic and adds harsh anti-Israeli propaganda to them, occasionally also hideous anti-Semitic essays. The talkbacks are always supportive. No criticism is heard below these writings.

So the future does not look too promising. The new medium is there, its use is often inspiring, but those who make positive use of it are still quite scarce. On the other hand, we should seize and encourage every sign of hope, shouldn’t we?

“Manufacturing” or “engineering” of consents – A follow up on my previous post

30 June, 2011 at 08:18 | Posted in knowledge, Politics, Web 2.0, Wikipedia policy | 4 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

This is a follow up on my previous post about the 25-January Revolution in Egypt and the way it was introduced into Wikipedia. First of all, I saw that post was cited by the Wiki-Watch blog in German. My German is very basic, so I had to consult some friends and machine translation tools in order to read it, and I might not have got all the content accurately. In any event, I appreciate this reference and the initiative to start a broad discussion about this issue. I also stand corrected, the term “manufacturing consents” was coined by Walter Lippmann, later to be used and redefined by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman.

I learned Chomsky’s theories from Tanya Reinhart at the Tel Aviv University. Perhaps, I should play fair and say in advance that I am rather reserved about many of Chomsky’s, as well as Reinhart’s, ideas, and yet I value some of their observations. I totally reject some of the moves Noam Chomsky took as an implementation of his theories, but then again there is a huge gap between any theory and its implementation, and it is important not to judge a political theory or an ideology only by the attempts to implement them, because other practical interpretations of the very theory might also be feasible.

Edward Bernays - "Engineering of consents"

Edward Bernays - "Engineering of consents" (Image via Wikipedia)

The lessons taught by Tanya Reinhart at the Tel Aviv University about Noam Chomsky’s political theory were recorded and printed after her death in a short book in Hebrew. The English title (every book published in Hebrew has an English title for the sake of foreign catalogs and libraries) is “Written in the Paper, Language Media and Ideology“. It was edited by Tanya Reinhart’s disciple Ran HaCohen. In this book (page 12) Reinhart mentions the term “Engineering of Consent” coined in 1947 by Edward Bernays. Apparently, he thought of this process, which might as well be called propaganda, as a positive, even vital, part of a democratic discourse. According to this book, Chomsky heavily criticized this approach, and claimed that the academy and institutions of scholars were used to preserve the mainstream political positions, hence limit the democratic liberal debate.

In my opinion, this is a terrible exaggeration. After all, Bernays wasn’t that wrong. “Engineering of consents” is legitimate and part of any democratic society, if (and only if) it is done in a fair manner, namely without brainwashing and without limiting the right and opportunity of others to make their own “engineering”. But, coming back to the issue of Wikipedia, the academy has lost much of the power Chomsky and others attributed to it during the 1950s and in the later decades of the 20th century. In the late 20th century (not so long ago, actually), television was considered the “devil” that can turn people’s opinions from one side to another, and many times this was the case indeed. The Web 2.00 “revolution”, brought a promise of decentralization that would render the “engineering of consents” a thing of the past, but that was too much to hope for. People with interests simply learned how to use this new medium in order introduce better “engineering” of this kind. Wikipedia, despite its initial attempt to be a scene of creating factual objective accounts through dialogs and negotiations among people who bring various pieces of knowledge, is gradually turning into a new, somewhat more sophisticated scene, for “manufacturing consents” or “engineering of consents”. The main problem is the fact that Wikipedia is left alone in this arena. It has some competitors, but for most of the world, especially the vast English-speaking world (including countries where English is spoken as the main foreign language), it is the main source of knowledge for the past five years or so.

True, Wikipedia offers the opportunity to use its texts as a basis for new texts. Namely, I can alternate and manipulate the texts of Wikipedia and create a new source that would better reflect my views, as long as I give reference to the original text. This is a great opportunity to create fruitful debate, and this is the essence of “free content” or “copyleft”, and yet no one seems to seize this opportunity. Instead, people with special interests do their best to penetrate into Wikipedia and manipulate it from within.

Parallel “online” and “real world” Egyptian revolutions, or Wikipedia’s Tahrir Square

25 June, 2011 at 15:36 | Posted in Arab spring, Politics, Web 2.0, Wikipedia policy | 10 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Illustration: PC-keyboard with arab letters, fotographed by ...

Keyboard revolutionists (Image via Wikipedia)

For the initial discussion of this subject see here.

The article about the Egyptian Revolution on 25 January 2011 is an example on how the editing of Wikipedia is sometimes used for sheer political interests. Of course, the events themselves are worthy of a Wikipedia article, no doubt about this, but the way the article was initiated and written demonstrates a serious problem in the editing policy, which allows users to promote events and opinions through Wikipedia rather than merely documenting and reporting about them, as the encyclopedic nature of the project requires.

The 25-January protests were planned at least a week in advance, mainly through FaceBook groups (see Is Egypt About to Have a Facebook Revolution?, by Abigail Hauslohner, reporting from Cairo for Time Magazine, 24 January, 2011), but these protests did not become a real actual event before around noon (Cairo time) on Tuesday, 25 January 2011 (see this news blog on the Guardian‘s website), when thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to demonstrate.

The first version of the Wikipedia article about the demonstrations was uploaded on 25 January 2011 at 13:26 UTC (i.e. 15:36 Cairo time), by an editor who calls himself “The Egyptian Liberal“. Hence, the protests were “perpetuated” as a Wikipedia article 3-4 hours after they had been launched, and only an hour or two after their real extent could have been realized. Interestingly enough, only the English Wikipedia had an article about the protests at this point in time. Other major Wikipedias followed suit only about 24 hours after the onset of the events, and when their magnitude was already realized. The first few sentences of the Arabic-language equivalent (on ar-wp) were recorded about seven hours after the demonstrations started, by the same user who initiated the English-language article, and the Egyptian-Arabic Wikipedia (arz-wp) started its own version only on 28 January.

In fact, “The Egyptian Liberal”, who also has an account on Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia’s media file repository), prepared the ground for them in advance, when he uploaded on the 24th of January some political cartoons calling on Egyptians to overthrow Hosni Mubarak on the 25th of January (see here and here for examples; the caricatures also depict the face of Khaled Mohammed Saeed, an Egyptian youth who died in June 2010 following his arrest while surfing the Internet, and whose birthday was on the 27th of January). Unlike Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Commons website, which is supposed to serve other Wikimedia projects, allows the upload of purely political images providing they are free-licensed.

Going back to the article about the recent Egyptian unrest on the English Wikipedia, its first version is short, but includes relatively advanced Wiki syntax. It would be fair to assume that this stub was prepared in advance, because the upload process lasted only one minute. The second version, by the same user, brought the article to its full initial shape. A single Egyptian user (he voluntarily revealed his identity) expanded the article for about two and a half hours. Within this period of time he made 14 edits, i.e. an edit every 10 minutes, in average. From the third edit onwards he merely added updates and journalistic references. In fact, he acted as a journalist rather than writer of encyclopedic article.

The person behind these first versions of the article, namely “The Egyptian Liberal” is somewhat mysterious, despite waiving his “Wikipedian right” for privacy. He offers quite a lot of details about himself, according to which he is English-Arabic bilingual by birth, he lives in the center of Egypt and defines his political-ethnic-religious affiliation as Pan-Arabist, Muslim and liberal. He is quite veteran on the English language Wikipedia, having edited articles since September 2009. In one of the older versions of his userpage he mentions that he started editing Wikipedia much earlier, but under a different username. Following the link to the allegedly alternative userpage shows a statement that the user has an intermediate level of English, which is contrary to the newer allegation that this editor is bilingual.

Anyone can suggest any kind of lesson to draw out of this interesting, somewhat amusing, Wikipedia affair. Many newspapers prepare reports about upcoming events in advance, in order to publish them as soon as the event occurs. I know about one case where a duty editor was fired, having accidentally uploaded a ready-made report about the happy ending of an event, seconds before that event ended in a tragedy. The poor editor removed the wishful-thinking report immediately, but it was intercepted by one of the news website’s readers who decided to go public with his outrage…

But Wikipedia is not a newspaper and the motivation here is not time saving or improving business efficiency. In this case the motivation is political and ideological, and the idea is to use Wikipedia for influencing the public opinion. There is an assumption here about average reader of Wikipedia, as if s/he attaches special significance to events described by the online encyclopedia. Whether this assumption is true or not, I cannot tell, but I do feel that Wikipedia is the new scene of “manufacturing consents“. This political process, described by Noam Chomsky, basically aims at limiting the public debate by instilling the notion that certain views and positions are inevitable. In this case – the fall of Mubarak’s regime in Egypt is a fait accompli even before the actual protests started. It is not as if it should fall, it has already fallen, and we have Wikipedia to prove it.

It has indeed fallen eventually, but who is going to remember that Wikipedia played a role in this Egyptian revolution rather than describing it after its completion.

The development of the NPOV rule on the English-language Wikipedia

24 May, 2011 at 15:44 | Posted in Web 2.0, Wikipedia policy | Leave a comment
Tags: , , , ,

Explanation of the electric neutrality of an i...

Image via Wikipedia

It is hardly a secret anymore that my initial enthusiasm about Wikipedia has turned into a deep concern. This concern stems from Wikipedia’s inability to resist damaging trends in the world in general, in the business and academic worlds in particular, and most particularly in the high-tech business world (damaging, that is, in my humble opinion, though I think I’m not alone on that). Wikipedia is not commercial, but its promoters often treat it as a business or corporation that needs to yield as much profits as possible and overcome competition. I believe this approach is unintentional, resulting from the fact that we live our lives by pseudo-business models; and yet Wikipedia was meant to be different. Its drift along in global trends is perhaps not surprising but deeply disappointing.  This is just one example, and it is not directly related to the core issue which I would like to discuss in this post, so I’ll hold my horses here, and get to the main point.

A final note before doing so – My ideas here are influenced by the CPOV conference in Bangalore, India (January 2010), which is one of the most interesting conferences I have ever took part in (so far…). The products of that conference and several others are compiled in the CPOV Wikipedia reader, edited by Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (I gave a modest contribution to this reader together with Johanna Niesyto). I’ll give reference to articles on that reader in the course of the text.

Phrasing of the neutrality principle; then and now

While preparing a presentation for this year’s Wikimania conference, to be hosted in Haifa, Israel this August, I looked into the history of Wikipedia’s NPOV rule. NPOV stands for “neutral point of view”, and the rule basically says that Wikipedia, being an encyclopedia, is obligated to unbiased presentation of any subject, particularly when describing controversies.

I went to the archived first online version of Wikipedia and found the following phrasing of the NPOV rule:

The neutral point of view attempts to present ideas and facts in such a fashion that both supporters and opponents can agree. Of course, 100% agreement is not possible; there are ideologues in the world who will not concede to any presentation other than a forceful statement of their own point of view. We can only seek a type of writing that is agreeable to essentially rational people who may differ on particular points. (November 2001)

Ten years later, the rule is phrased in much more words, but the leading paragraph says as follows:

Editing from a neutral point of view (NPOV) means representing fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources. All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view. NPOV is a fundamental principle of Wikipedia and of other Wikimedia projects. This policy is non-negotiable and all editors and articles must follow it. (May 2011)

The differences are evident, and yet one may argue that this is simply putting the same idea in different words. I am going to explain why it is not the case.

Collaborative work

The 2001 phrasing emphasizes collaborative work as the meta-policy of Wikipedia[note below]. Wikipedia’s articles should be written in a way that is “agreeable to essentially rational people who may differ on particular points”. This wording brings to mind a vivid picture of people working together to find a consensual written version that would be acceptable on all. Also, like a good scientific principle (even though we are not talking about pure science here), this phrasing suggests a test by which the principle can be verified – If you are a rational person (more or less), and you feel uncomfortable reading a certain article, because it seems to be advocating for a certain opinion, then something must have gone wrong.

Of course there are problems embedded in this phrasing. First and foremost, the danger of avoiding hard truths because many people are unwilling to accept them. Even when people are willing to write about such hard truths, there is a risk that they would try to “soften” them by using unpointed words in order to account for the NPOV rule.

[Note]

Andrew Famiglietti writes:

Wikipedia’s most important content policy, NPOV, also took shape to recruit labor. Based on Nupedia’s ‘Non-bias’ content policy, NPOV was one of Wikipedia’s first policies, and early versions of NPOV quickly evolved to meet the  needs of collective labor […] Textual evidence from later versions of NPOV, as well as early Wikipedia press releases, demonstrates Larry Sanger and others saw NPOV as a key to ensuring Wikipedia would attract free contributions. [Andrew Famiglietti, CPOV Reader, “The Right to Fork – A Historical Survey of De/centralization in Wikipedia” p. 305; Nupedia = A project that preceded and eventually developed into Wikipedia – DK]

Blurring the phrasing, subduing NPOV to other principles

The new presentation of the NPOV rule has done little, if anything, to overcome the problems embedded in that 10-year-old abandoned phrasing. In fact, it represents a strong drift into a different direction altogether, not necessarily a better one (and you can tell my opinion about this by now). First of all, while it seems well-phrased, the new version is actually highly ambiguous.

Saying that “neutrality” is “without bias” is a tautology

Since “neutrality” and “bias” are antonyms, saying that “a neutral point of view [is] without bias” is a tautology, or if you will, a mere play of words. You might as well write that keeping clean is avoiding being dirty. Interestingly enough, many people fall into the trap of tautologies when they try to define something for the first time. After several attempts, they realize the problem and come up with a more meaningful definition. Here we see the a process moving in the opposite direction – the first phrasing is more meaningful than the current one.

Of course one bad choice of words doesn’t make a whole phrasing inappropriate, and we often use “redundant” dictionary definitions just to make sure that people understand us correctly. However, even if we ignore this seemingly minor fault, we still find heavy problems.

What does “proportionately” means?

The other interesting word in this first paragraph of the contemporary NPOV rule is “proportionately”. This word, as far as I know, was introduced in order to account for “fringe ideas” and “conspiracy theories”. There is a just claim that Wikipedia, or any other encyclopedic source for that matter, should not present any far-fetched idea published or brought up by someone. Of course many things that we accept today as truths started as far-fetched ideas, but as long as we cannot be sure, the best we can do is to go along the mainstream view, with a pinch of healthy criticism and a watchful eye on new discoveries. Also, there is a just claim that Wikipedia should give precedence to majority views, because they are more likely to be true, especially when we talk about communities of researchers and experts in a specific field (if you take your car to a garage, and nine out of ten mechanics there tell you the problem is with the electricity, rather than the fuel system, then the problem might be with the fuel system, but it is still much more likely to lie in the electricity mechanism).

Playing down the collaborative work method by calling for “proportionality”

However, the current phrasing of the NPOV rule does not say “keep rational”, like the 2001 version did. It doesn’t say, if this idea surprises most people, or treated with total reject by knowledgeable people, then Wikipedia can do without it. I know these two suggestions sound rather blur themselves, but we can think of a more specific rule: Before mentioning an idea or theory, look for articles that criticize it, and see whether at least part of it is widely accepted. In fact, the word “proportionately” is not only equivocal in this context, it also leaves out the notion of collaborative work and its contribution to neutrality. It calls upon people to play down views that seem to them non-conventional, instead of trying to find words and phrases that would cover them as well, preferably with the help of people who actually hold these views.

Subduing neutrality to “reliable sources”

Perhaps the most dramatic change in the course of Wikipedia’s first decade is the fact that NPOV is no longer the first rule of editing. It is not even equal in importance to other rules, even though it is still presented as such. In fact the current phrasing of the principle subject it to the rule of “verifiability”. Now, one may ask where is the problem with that. After all, we want neutrality, but not on the expanse of truthfulness. I would have agreed to such claim, unless the current phrasing of the “verifiability” rule did not talk about truth.

The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true. (Wikipedia:Verifiability; May 2011)

Unsurprisingly, this rule too had a different versions, that changed in to the current one more or less at same time in which the NPOV rule assumed its current shape. Here are two examples, shortly before the most recent major revision:

The goal of Wikipedia is to become a complete and accurate encyclopedia. Verifiability is an important tool to achieve accuracy, so we strongly encourage you to check your facts.  We also aim to be informative and neutral. (May 2005)

Wikipedia should only publish material that is verifiable and is not original research.  The goal of Wikipedia is to become a complete and reliable encyclopedia. Verifiability is the key to becoming a reliable resource, so editors should cite credible sources so that their edits can be easily verified. (August 2005)

As you can see, summer 2005, about four years after the creation of the English-language Wikipedia, saw the rise of the “verifiability” rule, and its detachment from its original purpose – to support truthful and accurate presentation. At the same time, “neutrality” lost power and become subject to the rule of “verifiability”, because the NPOV rule now states that neutrality should account for “all significant views that have been published by reliable sources” (emphasis added), namely only those that passed the “verifiability” threshold, which doesn’t really talk about verifiability, but more about bringing references, which is not exactly the same thing. In fact, this phrasing now calls upon Wikipedia’s editors to describe the discourse about reality rather than reality itself , in strong contrast the principles that underlay Wikipedia when it came into being.

It should not come as a surprise to learn that in the current state of affairs Wikipedia’s editors are not discussing issues, but rather debating about them. Furthermore, no one bother to ask what is actually out there, but rather, can you find a source that so says, and once such a source is brought forth, there start a debate whether it can be considered a reliable source (it is not it reliability that is usually contested, but rather the possibility to include it in the “reliable source” category).

The terminology dilemma

Things gets even more problematic when terminology is debated rather than facts. People can often agree about what is there, but disagree profoundly over how to name it. In this case, assuming you don’t have an editor-in-chief or a binding style guide, working collaboratively toward consensual terminology is crucial. Instead, the “verifiability” rule (or “providing reference rule” as it should be called) prevails, and send people to argue about which source carry more weight, hence should be used for borrowing terminology. The fact that source can be reliable and use biased terminology at the same time is ignored because the rules assume that anything brought by “reliable sources” is valid.

Truth and domination

In their introduction to the CPOV Reader I mentioned above, Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz say,

Living in the shadow of decades of postmodern,‘deconstructive’ thought, claims to neutrality, however qualified and reconfigured, still make us shudder. Humanities and social science scholars and generations of artists and activists  have been trained to be deeply suspicious of such claims. We look to truth’s power, not its enlightenment.

Has Wikipedia’s editors simply got “cold feet” and returned to the safe haven of “let’s not talk about truth”? Perhaps, but there is another issue that must be taken seriously, as Mathieu O’Neil describes:

Means of domination are not limited to the crude use of blocking tools. In fact, such measures are less effective than more subtle means relying on superior project knowledge. The easiest way to defeat an opponent is to assert that their views are not authoritatively backed up by a proper source, that they are violating the sacrosanct WP:NPOV (Neutral Point of View) or WP:RS (Reliable Sources) rules. By extension, all references to editorial, stylistic, and behavioral policies and guidelines serve as battle weapons. Every single action having to do with the project seems to be distilled  into a handy WP:SLOGAN, whipped out at the slightest provocation [Mathieu O’Neil, “Wikipedia and Authority”, CPOV Reader]

As George Orwell showed in his Animal Farm, changing the principles on the wall makes these means of domination even more effective. And yet, Wikipedia is supposed to be different.

Next Page »

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and comments feeds.