Who pays the ferryman? Will Wikipedia as a “democratic process” survive, or cross the Styx?

Citation

Gorman, G.E. (2013), "Who pays the ferryman? Will Wikipedia as a “democratic process” survive, or cross the Styx?", Online Information Review, Vol. 37 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2013.26437daa.001

Who pays the ferryman? Will Wikipedia as a “democratic process” survive, or cross the Styx?

Article Type: Editorial From: Online Information Review, Volume 37, Issue 4

Wikipedia was the place where the radical rethinking of the encyclopaedia began. Yet its future may now be threatened by a strain of conservatism and parochialism that its early supporters frowned on in traditional publishing (Giles, 2013).

This concluding remark by Jim Giles in his New Scientist piece, “Wiki-opoly”, warmed the heart of your editor, long a Wikipedia-sceptic. In a 2007 editorial I drew on the Encyclopaedia Britannica Online (EBO) in a critique of Wikipedia, arguing that it was neither transparent nor terribly reliable, as follows (Gorman, 2007):

• •

  The central policy of inviting readers to serve as authors or editors creates a potential for problems as well as their partial solution. Not all users are scrupulous about providing accurate information.

• •

  Wikipedia’s method is to rely on its users to monitor and clean up its articles.

• •

  Unlike other encyclopaedias, Wikipedia has no editors or authors who accept responsibility for the accuracy and quality of their articles, yet identifiable individuals are far easier to hold accountable for mistakes, bias, and bad writing than is a community of anonymous volunteers.

Six years on, equivalent to decades in web-time, we can credibly argue that not much has changed. Through a series of controversies and critiques of Wikipedia, now seemingly taken more seriously by the ever-smooth Jimmy Wales and his colleagues, we have seen how intransigent the status quo remains.

• •

  Not all authors are “scrupulous about providing accurate information” (check the web for “Seigenthaler Incident”, 2005) – nor, it seems, are the still-anonymous editors necessarily truthful or carefully vetted (check the web for the “Essjay Controversy”, and also Read, 2007), which may call into question their ability as editors. They are anonymous, they argue (“bicker” might be a better term) among themselves and sometimes appear to play editorial table tennis with entries (see Giles, 2013 on these issues). That is, the gate-keeping function of Wikipedia’s editors continues to be shrouded in mystery and appears somewhat laughable – something that editors of scholarly journals with active editorial boards must find perplexing.

• •

  To the above statement that “not all users are scrupulous about providing accurate information” one might add that “not all editors are willing or able to set aside their particular biases when determining which entries are fit for inclusion”. The reliance on users to monitor articles seems to have evolved to the point that editors are frequently editing or disallowing entries by individuals in part because of the editors’ predominant cultural context: Euro-American, presumably white, largely male. Giles (2013) discusses this at some length. Moreover, Giles opines that certain factors mitigate against some areas receiving anything like reasonable coverage in Wikipedia: for example, the dearth of female editors reflects a bias in Wikipedia content away from the arts and philosophy, where women tend to excel. Equally, the significant shortfall in editors from the developing world is reflected in the dearth of Third World-focused entries: Antarctica, according to Giles, has more articles than all but one African country, and then there is the “Makmende Incident” in which a Kenyan entry for a local, fictitious superhero was initially rejected by Wikipedia’s editors (Giles, 2013) for lacking “notability”.

• •

  The statement that “Wikipedia has no editors or authors who accept responsibility for the accuracy and quality of their articles” remains as true today as it did in 2007, and this is the crux of one’s continuing discomfort with Wikipedia. If this project is to be taken seriously as an example of the democratisation of information, then a sine qua non is that editors and contributors are named; democracy, after all, demands transparency and accountability. Wikipedia itself waxes lyric about its editorial policies, discussing content policies, dispute resolution and arbitration most convincingly (Wikipedia, 2013).

However, these policies to some extent are called into question when Giles mentions several Wikipedia initiatives intended to improve and simplify the process of contributing, drawing in contributors from developing countries and so on, and then tempers this discussion with a sombre warning:

Will these efforts be enough to create a truly global encyclopaedia? Some Wikipedians think not. The reason, they say, is that no amount [sic] of new editors will be able to plug Wikipedia’s gaps until the rules that govern the encyclopaedia are changed (Giles, 2013).

Our view, however, may be somewhat more pessimistic. These initiatives described by Giles appear to be nothing more than a plaster on a gaping wound, and instead some drastic surgery is required (but never raised publicly by the Wikipedia elite) – remove the anonymity of contributors and editors, let us see their bona fides so that we can judge for ourselves their potential reliability. Nothing less will ensure the survival of this encyclopaedia and give it a genuine place in the history of literature as a forum for democratic experimentation in transparent, accountable information creation and dissemination. The alternative is for Mr Wales to begin collecting coins to pay Charon when he ferries Wikipedia across the Styx into Hades.

G.E. Gorman