Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View": Settling Conflict through Ambiguity (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
The purpose of this study is to scrutinize how neutrality is constructed in Wikipedia corporate entries. Neutrality is a complex concept widely discussed in Internet studies. Here we focus on Wikipedia, where Neutral Point of View (NPOV) is one of the core content policies. The full editing histories of the Wikipedia entries of 14 Finnish corporations were analyzed utilizing the concept of discursive struggle by Laclau and Mouffe. We identified the particular expressions (i.e. key signifiers) that caused NPOV-claims or discussions of neutrality, in order to find out what the Wikipedia community understands as neutrality, and how this in general affects the editing of corporate entries. Our findings demonstrate that the ideal of neutrality is discursively contested by two-directed attempts: firstly, promotional language, and secondly by incorporating corporate critique to the entry. As the corporate representations in the entries fluctuate over time, the ambiguity of neutrality becomes visible.
2016
This paper takes aim at the ideological bias and culturally reproductive nature of the Neutral Point of View-policy (The NPOV-policy) as a set of values to the largest free source of information in the world, Wikipedia i.e. I found that some articles are written in a manipulative sense as pieces of propaganda or even intentionally skewing the truth and that the edit-wars that happen followingly are not only concerned with factual corrections and avoiding vandalism but is as much a war on world views. Before producing a series of controversial Wikipedia entries, I hypothesised that the NPOV-policy would be the catalyser and 'legal' basis for any eventual complications in this regard. After laying out relevant historical and organizational contexts, I decribe how I employ ethnography, evolving around my own contributions to a Wikipedia article, specifically the unpopular truth about Le Corbusier’s antisemitic world views. These are done as means of exploration into the perceptions of majority and minority-viewpoints, which are to be proportionally represented, as prescribed in the NPOV-policy - thus the NPOV-policy in action. This action is argued to produce bias and is potentially favouring and disfavouring certain other content.
Your Day in 'Wiki-Court': ADR, Fairness, and Justice in Wikipedia's Global Community
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014
Wikipedia has quickly become the largest volume of collected knowledge on the planet, but it is also one of the busiest centers for dispute resolution in the world. From small groups of individuals negotiating article changes on "talk pages", to the involvement of hundreds of people in the formation of the community consensuses needed to implement new policies, to the use of binding arbitration to create final conflict resolutions, the Wikipedia community has developed a complex network of norms and rules that funnel all disagreements and intractable differences through a series of progressively more involved dispute resolution processes. I provide an overview and analysis of the dispute resolution processes used by the community and will look to the successes and limitation of these processes. A number of flaws will be identified including the ability for vocal minorities to dominate the Wikipedia community consensus. A systemic bias will be identified in the behavioural landscape of the community and, finally, it will become apparent that there is room for growth in the website's inclusiveness, primarily through addressing the logistical realities of a potential user's access to the time, materials, and knowledge needed to become a contributing member of the Wikipedia community.
Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2020
Wikipedia has become increasingly prominent in online search results, serving as an initial path for the public to access “facts,” and lending plausibility to its autobiographical claim to be “the sum of all human knowledge.” However, this self-conception elides Wikipedia’s role as the world’s largest online site of encyclopedic knowledge production. A repository for established facts, Wikipedia is also a social space in which the facts themselves are decided. As a community, Wikipedia is guided by the five pillars—principles that inform and undergird the prevailing epistemic and social norms and practices for Wikipedia participation and contributions. We contend these pillars lend structural support to and help entrench Wikipedia’s gender gap as well as its lack of diversity in both participation and content. In upholding these pillars, Wikipedians may unknowingly undermine otherwise reasonable calls for inclusivity, subsequently reproducing systemic biases. We propose an alternati...
Lost in Translation: Contexts, Computing, Disputing on Wikipedia
Wikipedia is an open collaboration, global, multilingual project. Its guidelines and policies direct the collaboration process into a vision of objective and neutral encyclopedic knowledge. However, coherence of that knowledge, and the outcomes of the collaborative process on the same topic, can sometimes vary dramatically across different languages. Our goal was to explore what these differences are, and to see how they are contextualized in a case of a contested and conflictive topic. The empirical focus was on the Republic of Kosovo, a recently formed country in Southeast Europe still seeking full international recognition. The study explores the social, cultural and political tensions through following the contextualization of this topic in three different Wikipedia communities: Serbian, Croatian and English. A constructivist (Charmaz, 1998) and substantive grounded theory of the process was created by following a two-step coding process. Three coders were active in different st...
Why Do I Have Authority to Edit the Page? The Politics of User Agency and Participation on Wikipedia
Wikipedia @ 20, 2020
Wikipedia's first twenty years: how what began as an experiment in collaboration became the world's most popular reference work. We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident—a wiki attached to a nascent online encyclopedia—has become the world's most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of “free access to the sum of all human knowledge” when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia's first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal. The contributors consider Wikipedia's history, the richness of the connections...
Academic research into Wikipedia
Digithum, 2012
This issue looks in depth at the multiplicity of the social and cultural impacts of Wikipedia. The articles analyse issues including its development and the consequences for the commercial sector and the public image of large corporations (in the article by Marcia W. DiStaso and Marcus Messner) or its role in the diffusion of culture and architectural heritage (in the article by Emilio José Rodriguez et al.). The article by Antoni Oliver and Salvador Climent details the use of Wikipedia as a structured knowledge corpus, in the framework of the state of the art in natural language processing research. In turn, the article by David Gómez proposes the concept of wikimediasphere and shows how Wikipedia actually forms part of a very dense ecosystem of projects that, though they share common elements, act with a high level of autonomy as nodes on a wider network. Lastly, the article by Nathaniel Tkacz analyses the practical and epistemological implications of one of the basic pillars of Wikipedia's core content policy - the Neutral Point of View - and its relation to a specific concept of truth.
Wikipedia and the Utopia of Openness: How Wikipedia Becomes Less Open to Improve its Quality
Wikipedia has become an enormous source of information in the last decade. Because of its ubiquitous presence on the internet and the speed of which it is updated, it has become more than a reference. It becomes 'a first rough draft of history'. In this study the changing politics of openness are analyzed. By looking at both small articles, as well as one extremely popular, the role of openness and transparency within Wikipedia is discussed. In this study I point out that in order to improve the quality of Wikipedia, it is sometimes necessary to limit the amount of openness, which is not a problem as long as the process remains completely transparent. At the same time, more transparency is needed to improve the smaller articles, which are often created by a single person.
The Wikipedia Myth: A critical history of the internet encyclopedia
From Diderot's Encyclopedia to Richard Stallman's GNUPedia, Wikipedia joins a rich history of encyclopedias. The text is an attempt to present and analyze the myth of the internet’s self-proclaimed encyclopedia as told through the text and hypertext of the Wikipedia article for Wikipedia itself. As a so-called encyclopedic article, Wikipedia is the textual culmination of the real and imagined history of the Wikipedia site. Through the article, and more importantly, what is left out of it (as told in the “repressed” history of previous versions, footnote references and interlinked articles) I attempt to glean Wikipedia’s myth, both in terms of its actual history and in terms of the ideological values informing the story of its form. As a Wikipedia page, it reveals Wikipedia’s self-bias, the story it tells of itself and the manner it is regulated; as a myth it reveals a clean version of the dirty digital history of competing narratives and ideologies regarding one of the internet's most ambitious (and indeed, ideological) projects.