And so Gardner, in turn, told an auditorium full of Wikipedia contributors and supporters in Haifa, Israel, the host city for the seventh-annual Wikimania conference where meetings and presentations focus on the world’s most used, and perhaps least understood, online reference work.
Once routinely questioned about its reliability — what do you mean, anyone can edit it?— the site is now used every month by upwards of 400 million people worldwide. But with influence and respect come responsibility, and lately Wikipedia has been criticised from without and within for reflecting a western, male-dominated mindset similar to the perspective behind the encyclopedias it has replaced. Seeing Wikipedia as The Man, in so many words, is so 2011.
Some critics of Wikipedia believe that the whole western tradition of footnotes and sourced articles needs to be rethought if Wikipedia is going to continue to gather converts beyond its current borders. And that, in turn, invites an entirely new debate about what constitutes knowledge in different parts of the world and how a western institution like Wikipedia can capitalise on it.
Achal Prabhala, an adviser to Gardner’s Wikimedia Foundation who lives and writes in Bangalore has made perhaps the most trenchant criticism in a video project, “People are Knowledge,” that he presented in Haifa (along with its clunky subtitle, ‘Exploring alternative methods of citation for Wikipedia’).
Stickling rules of citation
The film, which was made largely with a $20,000 grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, spends time showing what has been lost to Wikipedia because of stickling rules of citation and verification. If Wikipedia purports to collect the ‘sum of all human knowledge,’ in the words of one of its founders, Jimmy Wales, that, by definition, means more than printed knowledge, Prabhala said.
“There is this desire to grow Wikipedia in parts of the world,” he said, adding that “if we don’t have a more generous and expansive citation policy, the current one will prove to be a massive roadblock that you literally can’t get past. There is a very finite amount of citable material, which means a very finite number of articles, and there will be no more.”
Prabhala, 38, who grew up in India and then attended American universities, has been an activist on issues of intellectual property, starting with the efforts in South Africa to free up drugs that treat HIV. “Publishing is a system of power and I mean that in a completely pleasant, accepting sense,” he said mischievously. “But it leaves out people.”
But Prabhala and the video’s directors, Priya Sen and Zen Marie, spoke with people in African and Indian villages either in person or over the phone and had them describe basic activities. These recordings were then uploaded and linked to the article as sources, and suddenly an article that seems like it could be a personal riff looks a bit more academic.
The idea of treating personal testimony as a source for Wikipedia is still controversial, and reflects the concerns that dominated the encyclopedia project six years ago, when arguably its very existence was threatened. After a series of hoaxes, culminating in a Wikipedia article in 2005 that maligned the newspaper editor John Seigenthaler for no discernible reason other than because a Wikipedia contributor could, the site tried to ensure that every statement could be traced to a source. Then there is the rule, “no original research,” which was meant to say that Wikipedia doesn’t care if you are writing about the subway station you visit every day, find someone who has written reliably on the colour of the walls there.
“The natural thing is getting more and more accurate, locking down articles, raising the bar on sources,” said Andrew Lih, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, who was an early contributor to Wikipedia and has written a history of its rise. “Isn’t it great we have so many texts online?” But what works for the most developed societies, he said, won’t necessarily work for others. “Lots of knowledge is not Googleable,” he said, “and is not in a digital form.”
Perhaps Prabhala’s most challenging argument is that by being text-focused, and being locked into the Encyclopedia Britannica model, Wikipedia risks being behind the times.
An 18-year-old is comfortable using “objects of trust that have been created on the Internet,” he said, and “Wikipedia isn’t taking advantage of that.” And, he added, “it is quite possible that for the 18-year-old of today that Wikipedia looks like his father’s project. Or the kind of thing his father might be interested in.”