[Upd-discuss] The political importance of the Wikipedia Project : the only true Encyclopedia of our days. Wikipedia : towards a new electronic Enlightenment Era ?

[Zapopan Martin Muela-Meza]

http://soufron.free.fr/soufron-spip/article.php3?id_article=71

The political importance of the Wikipedia Project : the only true
Encyclopedia of our days. Wikipedia : towards a new electronic
Enlightenment Era ?

Tuesday 16th November 2004.
Article written by Jean-Baptiste Soufron, <soufron(at)gmail.com>
 
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free
access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing." --
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

I am convinced that Wikipedia is the only real Encyclopedia of our days
because it’s the only one that relies on a real political goal : to pursue
freedom over content and information.

On the other hand, books like the Encyclopedia Britannica are nothing else
than simple knowledge compendiums without any political soul and usurping
the term "Encyclopedia".

Here is a quite interesting article about Wikipedia written by Robert
McHenry, former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Not interesting in the sense that the author wrote something worth
reading, but interesting in the sense that it’s quite a good summary of
critics commonly made to Wikipedia and that it could well be the
demonstration that, far from being just a candidate to become an
encyclopedia, Wikipedia might well be the only real encyclopedia of our
days.

A classical debate over methods and accuracy.

Robert McHenry begins by making fun of Wikipedia and its smallest versions
like the Gaellic or the Klingon ones. I am not sure it’s really a good
idea for a British writer to make fun of these attempts to develop the
influence of local or uncommon languages on the Internet. It is morally
quite shocking, to say the least, and it is scientifically irrelevant to
the debate over the interest of Wikipedia as a source of acccurate
information.

Then, Robert McHenry rapidly describes the "asymptotical" way of writing
articles used by Wikipedia. He looks surprised that anybody can actually
believe that a process of errors and corrections is able to lead toward
accuracy. He explains that accuracy is not the main objective of Wikipedia
anyway, that the first goal of the project is to be free. Then, Robert
McHenry ends up by telling us that an encyclopedia should tend to accuracy
and that its underlying writing principles will never allow it to compete
with classical expert-based writing of "real" encyclopedias.

But Yochai Benkler already described why this model has systematic
advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies when the object of
production is information or culture, and where the capital investment for
communications capabilities is widely distributed instead of concentrated.

First, it is better at identifying and assigning human capital to
information and cultural production processes through the principle of
"information opportunity cost" : it loses less information about who the
best person for a given job might be than either of the other two
organizational modes do.

Second, there are substantially increasing returns to allow very large
clusters of potential contributors to interact with very large clusters of
information resources in search of new projects and collaboration
enterprises. Removing property and contract as the organizing principles
of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs involved in
allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review and
select which resources to work on, for which projects, and with which
collaborators. This results in allocation gains, that increase more than
proportionately with the increase in the number of individuals and
resources that are part of the system.

Then, I won’t even elaborate on the final and abject argument of Robert
McHenry that wikipedia should be compared to public restrooms where people
come to pee without knowing who came before... Wikipedians who spend hours
a day to review articles and to organize the website will appreciate it
for what it’s worth.

Also, I won’t even try to take a relativist point of view by arguing that
there is no such notion as "accurate information". I already explained
that Wikipedia is the only know encyclopaedia to be able to get rid of
subjectivity by showing the discussion around an article and the way it
constructs itself through time and the various contributions of
Wikipedians. Careful readers will also notice that Robert McHenry did not
conduct a scientifical survey of Wikipedia as a whole. He simply examined
one article he was an expert of and found one inaccuracy in it. There is
no way this partial examination can be considered as a scientific
comparison of the accuracy of Wikipedia against the accuracy of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. But the very low scientific accuracy of Robert
McHenry’s methods will give us an interesting insight on the way we should
react to his advices on how to create a top-level encyclopedia.

Then, I would simply answer that it may be surprising but I am convinced
that Wikipedia is the only real encyclopedia of our days and, that books
like the Encyclopedia Britannica are nothing else than knowledge bases
usuparting the term "Encyclopedia".

And here comes my main argument. Reading the work of former Encyclopedia
Britannica editor in chief, Robert McHenry, I suddenly realized that he
believed an encyclopedia should only be a place where to find accurate
information, that people just want correct answers to their questions.

I can’t agree.

The importance of political principles as one of the main element of the
French Encyclopédie.

Maybe there was one point that seemed pretty obvious to me. Maybe it was
because I am French and because, half-asleep during junior high schools
history lessons, I hypnotically learned when my French professors used to
teach me about the famous French philosophers Diderot and d’Alembert, the
famous French Enlightenment of the 18th century, the famous French
Encyclopédie : how can someone pretend that an encyclopedia is only a
place where information should be accurate ?

It seemed to me that, first of all, a real encyclopedia should be a place
directed toward a political project of its own, and not only toward some
sort of simple scientific dictionnary project.

The Encyclopedia of the French philosophers was not just a knowledge base
project, but it was also a political project designed to propagate the
ideas of the Enlightenement and to establish the reign of "Reason" as the
basis of modern public debate.

And then, I would argue that Wikipedia is the only modern encyclopedia to
offer a political project rather than a simple scientific project. Thus,
Wikipedia is the only knowledge base project that deserves to be called
encyclopedia because it is not only aimed at making some knowledge
available to the public but it is also aimed at being free.

It’s easy to forget that the original encyclopedia from Diderot and
D’Alembert was not simply a knowledge catalog, but a " -reasoned-
dictionnary of arts, science and crafts" as its final title states. Here,
the adjective "reasoned" is not to be understood as "organised" but as
being a part of a vaster political project to bring out reason as the main
axis of public and political debate in the European 18th century. It was
certainly a vast compendium of the technologies of its period, describing
the traditional craft tools and processes. But most of this information
was already available from other knowledge bases like the "Descriptions
des Arts et Métiers" published earlier. In the end, even if the great work
comprised 28 volumes, 71,818 articles, and 2,885 illustrations, it only
became famous and valuable because it was politically-oriented and because
it reached its political goal of transforming the 18th century society.

It’s quite obvious that many of the most noted figures of the French
enlightenment contributed to the work, including Voltaire, Rousseau, and
Montesquieu. The encyclopedia was a political weapon aimed at destroying
superstitions and providing access to human knowledge. It was a
quintessential summary of thought and belief of the Enlightenment. The
encyclopedia did not hesitate to praise Protestant thinkers and to
challenge Catholic dogma. The entire work was banned for political
reasons, but because it had many highly placed supporters work continued
and each volume was delivered clandestinely to subscribers.

In ancien régime France the Encyclopédie caused a storm of political
controversy and, obviously, played an extremely important role in the
intellectual ferment leading to the French Revolution.

Where can you find anything similar in Robert McHenry’s Encyclopaedia
Britannica ?

Where can you find any clue that Robert McHenry is conscious of the
importance of the political project underlying any true encyclopedia ?

Wikipedia as the only true encyclopedia of our days : the political goal
of freedom over content and information

It’s quite clear today that Wikipedia is not only a catalog of knowledge
available on the web : it is a wiki that can be edited by anyone and it
features an open content made available under the terms of the copyleft
GNU Free Documentation License. To sum it up, Wikipedia is a free catalog
of knowledge, which means that the underlying principle of Wikipedia is
not only to use the Internet as a media but also to deliver a content that
is free and will stay so.

This may lead to funny effects like an encyclopedia written in Klingon or
superdetailed articles about high-tech subjects but we must really
understand that this freedom is the real difference between Wikipedia and
other so-called encyclopedias of today : Wikipedia relies on the political
principle to extend freedom, to change the society of the 20th century by
giving control over content to everyone.

In that sense, it’s also clear today that only Wikipedia can pretend to be
a real Encyclopedia.

To quote Robert McHenry, the user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some
subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is not in the position of a
visitor to a public restroom. He is able to control the content of what he
sees, he is able to understand how that content was constructed, he is a
free man helping to build a free society.

In the meanwhile, maybe we should leave Robert McHenry alone when he
writes innacurate papers to explain his views about accuracy to us.

Let’s go on.
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ENG: "Corporations are not democratic institutions --their directors and managers owe no accountability to anyone but the shareholders that employ them."
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ESP: "Las corporaciones (empresas) no son instituciones democráticas: a sus directores y gerentes no se les puede fincar responsabilidades ante nadie excepto ante sus accionistas que les emplean."

-- Bakan, Joel. (2004). The Corporation. The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power : La corporación (empresa). La búsqueda patológica de ganancias y poder. London: Constable & Robinson, p. 151


		
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