The distributed social organization of zombies

On April 16, 2011, I delivered a presentation at The New School’s Critical Themes conference. I was one among three other presenters on the Not just another face in the cloud: Social networks and the new collectivity. It was a pleasure to visit New York and come into contact with so many great minds. It was also great to see Wendy Hui Kyong Chun do her talk on the Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or The Temporality of Networks. Surprisingly, during her talk she kept on talking about the undead quality of source code. Truly, zombies are everywhere.

Protocol Z Site

I have set up a page that has all of my presentation materials as well a recording of the talk. If you would like to make a comment about the the essay or my presentation please do so below.

Related Tweets

Zombies: so hot right now. #criticalthemes

@MillerTracyL

Anonymous as individuals acting as “points of data.” Is a point of data responsible for DoS attacks? #criticalthemes

@KwameTheTenth

‘zombies as rationale for war’ in social collectivity #criticalthemes

@zestohl

“the individual becomes data. where does the individual go in that?”- social collectivity #criticalthemes

@zestohl

Asaro: ” #Zombies want to eat us… and once we project ourselves online we become (ourselves) food” #CriticalThemes

@criticalthemes

“The Internet will eat your children,” or will our children eat the Internet? asks U of Ottawa student Steve Jankowski at #CriticalThemes

@criticalthemes

U. of Ottowa student Steve Jankowski presents “Protocol Z: the Distributed Social Organization of #Zombies” #CriticalThemes is scary cool!

@criticalthemes

From my point of view, I see value in not just asking “What is the Wikipedian Method”, but asking what is new about it. I think this is a valid question and a question that I would like to pursue with this study.

To know the new I must understand the old. There have been a number of options that I have looked at to achieve this goal.

1. I could compare Wikipedia’s current meta-articles to what they were 10 years ago. This would definitely show that change has occurred and the process that it has taken to get there. However, this seems too insular to me. I think a study of the new should try to address a broader time scale.
2. I could compare how Wikipedia’s meta articles differ from the governing practices between editors of 20th century (or older) encyclopedias. The source material in this case becomes an issue. Although I am sure there are notes, correspondences and other artifacts that would shed light on the editors’ procedures, I neither have the time nor the resources during my Masters to track down such archival material. This brings me to a third option.
3. What if I compare the serial products of both an old encyclopedia and Wikipedia, tracking the editorial changes that occur over time. I believe that this would grant the insight I need to analyze what has been significantly different and new about the Wikipedian Method. I think that even more than describing what is new, it will make explicit what has been reused, removed, improved upon as well as identifying long standing questions within the realm of encyclopedic projects.

To aid me in this direction I have revisited my literature. The research articles tend to fall into the following categories of questions:

• What is Wikipedia? (6 articles)
• How do we know that Wikipedia can be trusted and reliable? (9 articles)
• How can we exploit the Wikipedian product for other purposes? (10 articles)
• What are the activities or practices of Wikipedians? (18 articles)
• How can we improve Wikipedias policies or software? (23 articles)

Of the articles about activities, there is usually only a cursory nod to traditional encyclopedias. The credibility studies tend to compare Wikipedia to other current encyclopedias as sources of reliability. The exploitive articles look out to other similar online projects and the improvement articles only look in to Wikipedia itself. It is only in the descriptive articles of Wikipedia that there is any analysis of difference and similarity between the old and the new. I have summarized the articles in terms of the questions they pose:

• How has the “encyclopedic author” changed between Chambers’ Cyclopedia and Wikipedia? Kennedy, 2009
• Why is Wikipedia successful as a new pattern of collaborative peer-produced commons? Jesus, 2010
• What forms of genres are manifesting on Wikipedia? How are these genres changing on Wikipedia? Clark, 2009

Of the 66 articles I’ve read, these are the only three that specifically deal with the question of what’s happening on Wikipedia that makes it new or different from previous projects. I also can’t help but notice that these articles have just been published in the last two years. Perhaps this is indicating a change in the way that Wikipedia is being studied. This gives me confidence that my proposed research will be valuable to the field.

Given these considerations, I have come up with a working methodology which I have in part described on my blog. In summary, I will choose a relevant Wikipedia article that I can also find in the oldest encyclopedia that I have access to — the 1768-77 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I would follow the revisions of this single article through each edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. I would complete a content analysis that would identify differences between the editions as well as categorize those changes. Removing minor edits from the the next step of analysis, I would concentrate on the editorial changes where either language or information is added or removed from the article.

I believe that the observation of these changes will pin point key moments of adaptation in the lifespan of both encyclopedias. By comparing these moments of adaptation I will be able to identify which decisions were repeated in both or adopted by only one. If the results of this analysis points to the “newness” of the Wikipedian Method being a result of the integration of specific meta-articles, then I will have a strong case for investigating that aspect of Wikipedia.

In laying this methodology out, I realize that if I am to follow this course of investigation to the meta-articles, I may be biting off more than I can chew for the scope of a Masters thesis. However, as I foresee myself following the PhD route, this could be an excellent starting point.

—René Descartes [1596–1660], mathematician that created Cartesian space

Since I first began my thesis I have been sure that I would be involving Deleuze as a philosophical framework to help guide my work. It wasn’t always apparent how I would achieve this. I suppose some things take some time. While I was reading Christan Bök’s ‘Pataphysics this past week I came across a passage that began to trailblaze a thought.

What Deleuze and Guattari might call the royal sciences of efficient productivity have historically repressed and exploited the nomad sciences of expedient adaptability ([1980] 1987, 362). A royal science is a standardized metaphysics: it is deployed by the state throughout a clathrate, Cartesian space, putting truth to work on behalf of solid, instrumental imperatives (law and order). A nomad science is a bastardized metaphysics: it is deployed against the state through an aggregate, Riemannian space, putting truth at risk on behalf of fluid, experimental operatives (trial and error).

BÖK 2001, 14

Here I find some intriguing concepts. That royal sciences puts truth to work while the nomadic sciences put truth at risk. Borrowing from conditional statements (as Bök does) royal science considers knowledge as is, or fixed, while the nomadic science considers it to be as else, or to be ambulatory.

After reading this passage I returned to Deleuze and Guattari’sA Thousand Plateaus. In the following sentences, the authors lay out two forms of knowledge, one that is approximate and one that is categorical. However, both come from respective sciences — the nomadic and the royal.

Nomadic

However refined or rigorous, “approximate knowledge” is still dependent upon sensitive and sensible evaluations that pose more problems than they solve: problematics is still its only mode.

I assume this means that the work of the nomadic sciences is to create or at least identify problems.

Royal

In contrast, what is proper to royal science, to its theorematic or axiomatic power, is to isolate all operations from the conditions of intuition, making them true intrinsic concepts, or “categories.”

It is this mention of “categories” that caught my eye. The history of encyclopedias of the seventeenth century include a substantial debate as to the right way to categorize the knowledge that they had collected.

1. the royal sciences empower categories
2. the nomadic sciences control flows

They go on to relate how these two sciences interact with one another:

What we have, rather, are two formally different conceptions of science, and, ontologically, a single field of interaction in which royal science continually appropriates the contents of vague or nomad science while nomad science continually cuts the contents of royal science loose.

Finally, there is an air of vision to this last quotation. That there may be a need to explore the moments of tension that occurs between these two sciences.

This opposition, or rather this tension-limit between the two kinds of science—nomad, war machine science and royal, State science—reappears at different moments, on different levels.

I assume that one such “moment” has reappeared in the organization and production of knowledge on Wikipedia and that it is ripe to be studied.

I love Arcade Fire. My love for them has lasted a long time. Strangely enough, I haven’t been overly-excited about their second and third albums — The Suburbs of course having won the Grammy’s this year). I still think they are missing the mark. I suppose it’s in part my young twenty-year old self’s fault for this. I still cling to the music when I first heard it; when their voices were fresh and the back of my ears were still wet.

So instead of falling into the jaded throes of musical apathy, here is The Suburbs and Neon Bible and retracked as a single album. I believe this rephrasing will kindle that heart-warming sound that I once heard.

Download Subtle Neon [56.3 MB]

Although the list below is the actual tracklisting the a single MP3 intentional cut out parts of certain songs. To get the full effect, you should download the file.

1. We used to wait
2. The suburbs
3. Antichrist television blues
4. Ready to start
5. Black wave
6. No cars go
7. The Sprawl (Flatland)
8. Cold wind
9. Intervention
10. Ocean of noise
11. The well and the lighthouse
12. My body is a cage
13. The Suburbs continued

What article will I use as my case study?

A methodology of choice

Criteria for choosing a representative Wikipedia Article

Criteria for choosing a comparable encyclopedia

Article candidates

Conclusion

Criteria for choosing a representative Wikipedia Article

[A0] Is the article English?

This is a necessary requirement for two reasons. The first is that the English version of Wikipedia is the largest language community on Wikipedia and thus, offers the most amount of interactions to study. The second reason is that English is the language that I am most familiar with.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/*

[A1] Is the article one of the most revised articles on Wikipedia?

This is a requirement to ensure that the data benefits from the most numerous amount of interactions that have come from the Wikipedia community. This will ensure that a variety of different situations will be captured by the data.

Source: http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/Pages_with_the_most_ revision
30 December 2010

[A2] Has it been around for 10 years (2001–2011)?

Wikipedia is still relatively new in terms of its encyclopedic brethen. This year marks its ten years of operation. In order to ensure that there has been a substantial amount of time to mark the numerous changes on Wikipedia, articles will only be chosen if they were created in 2001.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NAME-OF-ARTICLE&dir=prev&action=history

[A3] Is the article a main page article [ID0]?

Wikipedia has organized its content into several categories. These categories are called namespaces or IDs. Some of these namespaces are for Wikipedia specific issues (Wikipedia [ID4] or Wikipedia:Talk [ID5]), for Users [ID2] and their User:talk [ID3] pages to mention a few. The namespace that is necessary for this study is Main [ID0] and its complementary Talk [ID1].

[A4] Does the article exist in an “older” encyclopedia?

This is a crucial aspect of the study. The article chosen from Wikipedia must also have a representative article that was developed during the heyday of encyclopedias. The question then is which encyclopedia shall I choose to compare with?

Criteria for choosing a comparable encyclopedia

[B0] Is the encyclopedia written in English?

Because of A0, this is a requirement of the encyclopedia in order for it to be comparable.

[B1] Does the encyclopedia have multiple editions?

Since I am analyzing the changes that occur over time, it is necessary to have an encyclopedia that has had many editions.

[B2] Are there both editions that have been published before 1800 and are still being published today?

The longer the timescale the better. This obviously shortens the list of possible encyclopedia’s down by quite a bit.

[B3] Does the encyclopedia contain articles that are also in the Wikipedia shortlist at step A3?

Article candidates

[C0] What Encyclopedias are left at this point?

At this point the only encyclopedia that meets this requirement is the the Encyclopedia Britannica. It has an edition from 1778–71 that contains a number of articles that are also on Wikipedia. The Britiannica is also the only English encyclopedia from that time that has continued publications up to the current day. A second possibility would the The World Book Encyclopedia which began in 1917, which is nowhere near 1768.

[C1] What articles are both in the 1768–71 Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia that adhere to all of the criteria?

• Atheism
• Canada
• Cat (Feline*)
• Democracy
• Dominican_Republic (Dominica*)
• England
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• India
• Italy
• Japan
• London
• People’s_Republic_of_China (China*)
• Philippines
• Portugal
• Russia
• Scotland
• Spain
• Sweden
• Turkey (Turky*)
• United_States (America*)

*Asterik denotes EB 1771–68 article name

Narrowing the field of articles

[C3] Of the articles at step C1, what is the rank of each in terms of most wikipedia traffic (between 2008–2010)?

I have collected the number of visits to each of these pages between 2008–2010. A limitation to this data is that it does not take into consideration visits prior to 2008. This is because the data source that I am using did not start capturing article traffic until 2008. Despite this issue, the numbers reflect the current popularity of the articles.

With these numbers I have ranked each article from most popular (22) to least (1).

Source: http://stats.grok.se

• 22 United_States
• 21 India
• 20 Canada
• 19 Japan
• 18 Germany
• 17 France
• 16 England
• 15 Russia
• 14 London
• 13 Italy
• 12 Spain
• 11 Philippines
• 10 Turkey
• 9 Sweden
• 8 People’s_Republic_of_China
• 7 Greece
• 6 Scotland
• 5 Cat
• 4 Portugal
• 3 Dominican_Republic
• 2 Democracy
• 1 Atheism

[C4] Of the articles at step C1, what is the rank of each in terms of most wikipedia revisions?

• 22 United_States
• 21 India
• 20 Canada
• 19 London
• 18 Philippines
• 17 Japan
• 16 Germany
• 15 Russia
• 14 Scotland
• 13 England
• 12 Greece
• 11 Turkey
• 10 Italy
• 9 Cat
• 8 France
• 7 Atheism
• 6 Portugal
• 5 Democracy
• 4 Spain
• 3 People’s_Republic_of_China
• 2 Sweden
• 1 Dominican_Republic

[C5] Add together the two ranks of each article.

From these results I can choose an article that is representative, relevant, and important to both the Wikipedia community as well as the people that visit it.

• 44 United_States
• 42 India
• 40 Canada
• 36 Japan
• 34 Germany
• 33 London
• 30 Russia
• 29 Philippines
• 29 England
• 25 France
• 23 Italy
• 21 Turkey
• 20 Scotland
• 19 Greece
• 16 Spain
• 14 Cat
• 11 People’s_Republic_of_China
• 11 Sweden
• 10 Portugal
• 8 Atheism
• 7 Democracy
• 4 Dominican_Republic

If you want to view the data that I used to create this critera, you can download the CSV text file.

Supervisor

Dr Pierre Lévy

Committee

Dr Boulou E. de B’béri
Dr Phillipe Ross

University of Ottawa
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Abstract

The goal of the proposed research is to explore the challenges and the concessions that a community of practice makes in negotiating its identity within an institutional framework. In the present study the community of Wikipedia is analyzed as being socially constructed from a history of encyclopaedism. The importance of this lies in studying what utopian encyclopaedism takes for granted and how these naturalized assumptions come to manifest themselves in todays encyclopaedic projects. To do so, the study analyzes how an online community of practice constructs informal social control mechanisms. The construction of these social controls is further contextualized through an in-depth exploration of the cybernetic and typographic technologies that contribute to Wikipedia’s social construction.

By analyzing these interactions, the proposed research attempts to discover how a community negotiates the very fundamental aspects of identity and its goals in view of institutional pressures of encyclopaedism.

Introduction

The act of recording and transmitting knowledge from one person to the next has taken many different forms throughout human history. From the oral traditions of story-telling to codified writing systems, from the telegraph networks of the late nineteenth century to the wireless computer networks of the last decade, humanity has dedicated a significant amount of time and energy into communicating with itself. The act of passing knowledge of one person to larger populations is closely tied to the creation of increasingly robust communication technologies. In addition to technological developments, the resulting transmissions are subject to social processes: collective agreements of what knowledge is passed on and left unsaid (Lévy, 1994/1997; McLuhan, 1964; Wenger, 1999). Thus, the communication of knowledge is an enterprise that has had a long history of transformation.

Due to the invention of the Internet (1969) and subsequently the World Wide Web (1991), users of the Internet (1.571 billion in 2008 according to Wolframtextbar Alpha (2010)), have unprecedented access to recorded information. From this wealth of information comes the responsibility of internet users to critically filter and aggregate the information that they receive. On the other hand, it presents an opportunity to create accessible, readable, and knowable information for others to use. This practice of distilling a variety of knowledge sources into a system of summaries is not exclusive to the Internet. In fact, it represents the latest manifestation of encyclopaedic knowledge.

A long history of encyclopaedic knowledge has been recorded in Egypt as early as 2000 BC, Greece circa 300 BC, China circa 600 AD, and Iraq circa 900 AD (Featherstone, 2006). The European encyclopaedic tradition has roots in ancient Greece as well as the clerical treatises of the first half of the second millennium. However, it is during the seventeenth century that “encyclopaedism” emerged. Richard Yeo (2007) defines encyclopaedism as a tradition that emphasizes “the importance of categories of knowledge, relations between subjects, and the authority and credibility of the selections and summaries produced by a community of experts” (p.62). If one believes the claim that the Internet offers a “a new utopian vision of encyclopedism, of complete knowledge that is universally accessible” (Doody, 2009, p.18), it is important to understand the process that this new encyclopaedism produces knowledge. Furthermore, it is important to analyze what “utopian” encyclopaedism takes for granted and how these naturalized assumptions come to manifest themselves in today’s encyclopaedic projects.

Wikipedia is arguably the most popular encyclopaedic work on the internet today and has entered its tenth year of of existence. It is a website devoted to the collection of knowledge through the participation and collaboration of its users who contribute and maintain website content through wiki software. Wikipedia is the chosen object of study for two primary reasons. First, its mandate is to become the most comprehensive encyclopedia available. As stated by the creator of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, “[o]ur goal with Wikipedia is to create a free encyclopedia; indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, both in terms of breadth and in terms of depth. We also want Wikipedia to be a reliable resource” (Wikipedia, 2009a). The Wikipedia home page receives roughly five million views a day (Henrik, 2009). Currently, there are 11,019,332 registered Wikipedia contributors and of those, 300,000 are editing one of its 14,000,000 articles once a month (Wikipedia, 2009b). The sheer volume of traffic, participation, and collaborations that occur is evidence of Wikipedia’s relevance as a contemporary site of shared encyclopaedic knowledge.

Beyond statistics, Wikipedia is a vibrant and rich community of participants who argue, negotiate, and concede in order to create a source of up-to-date and relevant information that serves visitors every day. The challenges for Wikipedia are the same as other encyclopaedic projects; the community must confront with issues of validity, bias, style, and error. These interactions lead to the second reason for studying Wikipedia, which is to explore it as a site of tension between self-organization of a community and institutional fact construction. As the content of Wikipedia is generated by the users, so to are the formal and informal mechanisms that socially control the practices of the participants. By analyzing these interactions, the proposed research will examine how a community negotiates the very fundamental aspects of identity and its goals in view of institutional pressures of encyclopaedism.

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h3>Research Questions

There are two key questions that the proposed research will address:

1. How does an online community of practice construct informal social control mechanisms?
2. What do these mechanisms reveal about encyclopaedic knowledge on Wikipedia?

The following section reviews the domain of knowledge required to approach the proposed research questions. First, the contributions of Gilles Deleuze in philosophy is described. Second, a review of the various concepts, formats, and debates that surround encyclopaedic knowledge is undertaken. Third, the review concentrates on the concept of knowledge and its importance to communities of practice. Fourth, the subsection entitled Social constructivism explores how the theory can be defined and used in research. Fifth, a discussion of technology and the writers that discuss its positive and negative aspect is undertaken. Finally, the review briefly describes previous research conducted on Wikipedia.

Philosophy

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) is a French philosopher who has been influential through his prolific writings on philosophy, his conceptual hermeneutics, and his arguments against the ubiquitous use of the tree-root as a metaphor for knowledge. Epistemologically, Deleuze’s concepts draw from his intensive investigations of the theories of Foucault (1986), Nietzsche (1962/2006), Spinoza (1968/1988b), Bergson (1968/1988a), Leibniz (1988/1991), Hume (1953/2001) and finally Kant (1963/1984). His own philosophical work has been influential in describing reality through two interrelated aspects, the actual and the virtual (see Chapter 5, 2007). Deleuze also advocates for understanding the value of heuristic tools such as the concepts of becoming, trajectories, and nomadology. Like most theorists he has his dissenters. However, the concept of the rhizome (see Chapter 1, 1987) is one of his most influential concepts adopted by both scientists and artists alike. It describes a laterally organized structure that has much in common with the social, cultural, and technological networks that we see today and opposes the tree-root system of knowledge that stems from the systems of knowledge developed during the seventeenth century in Europe. Such knowledge systems have been prevalent in encyclopedias since that time. By considering that Wikipedia is based on network technology but also follows the tradition of encyclopedias, Deleuze’s exploration of the tensions between the rhizome and the tree-root provides a base for understanding what processes of knowledge production are competing and compromising.

Encyclopaedic knowledge

Encyclopaedic knowledge has a long history with its own contradicting schools of thought, intentions, products, and personalities. To begin, the concept of encyclopedia comes from the Greek word enkyklios paideia which has been interpreted as “instruction in the circle of subjects considered the basis of a liberal education” (Yeo, 2007, p.48), “basic subjects” (Jackson, 1977, p.351), or “the usual everyday education received by all” (Ibid). Part of the Greek conception of enkyklios paideia describes it as part of “an oral and scribal culture” (Yeo, p.58), which is not a commonly known encyclopaedic tradition. There are of course other encyclopaedic traditions such as the Egyptian (Jackson, 1977, p.342), the Chinese (Featherstone, 2006, p.6), and the Arabic (ibid.). In Europe, encyclopedias came in the form of summa which were compendiums of the categories of clerical knowledge (Durbin, 1996, p.126) and treatises during the time of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century.

The typographic (or modern) encyclopedia relied upon the technology of moveable type, invented by Gutenberg in 1440 to move from a clerical and scholarly audience to one that was more public. The oldest surviving and complete encyclopedia, Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis (79 AD), was transcribed from manuscript to mass publication in 1469 (Gudger, 1924, p.272). However, as much as Pliny’s work was influential in the development of typographic encyclopedias, it was not until the classification scheme and philosophical principles developed by Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna (1620), that modern encyclopaedism emerged (Withers, 1996, p.277). Immanuel Kant carried on with Bacon’s scheme by advocating for a system for organizing encyclopaedic knowledge (Ferris, 2003, p.1258). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries encyclopedias in Europe underwent a radical change. Beyond being typographic, European encyclopedias were commercial ventures, nationalistic, written in the vernacular, and moved away from the clerical practice of treatises (Yeo, 2007, p.50). The major publications of this era were Chambers’ Cyclopedia (1728), Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedie (1751–72), and the Encyclopedia Britannica (Yeo 1991; Withers, 1996; Loveland, 2006; Durbin, 1996; Sullivan, 1990). There was serious debate within these three works and their contemporaries about how to systematically organize encyclopaedic knowledge. Some opted for a system that the Greeks employed to facilitate training while others strived for a universal knowledge system based on philosophical classification (Yeo, 2007, p.49). Due to technological and economic pressures, most encyclopedias adopted alphabetical order as the means for organizing content (p.50). Other technical apparatus that were used and defended were cross-references, annotated biographies, and headings that grouped several articles together (Sullivan, 1990, p.337).

Through the previously cited authors, we can begin to define the institutional aspects of modern encyclopaedism and set it apart from the tradition of encyclopaedic knowledge. Encyclopaedsim thus can be understood as “a grand scale reference work with retrieval devices” (Doody, 2009, p.18), “a pattern of relatively short articles by different writers” (Durbin, 1996, p.128), who summarize “other people’s scholarship for mass audiences” (Durbin quoting Sader, 1996, p.128), and “a device which systematically organizes knowledge of a known, or knowable world” (Featherstone, 2006, p.5). Such a definition of encyclopaedism presents a conceptual foundation to study contemporary instances of encyclopaedic knowledge.

Communities and knowledge

In 1999, teacher and knowledge management expert Etienne Wenger wrote Communities of Practice, a model that puts knowledge at the center of communities that are built around a common enterprise. Wenger states that there are two kinds of knowledge: the first being of knowledge that “is a matter of competence with respect to valued enterprises” and the second being knowing, which is “a matter of participating in the pursuit of such enterprises” (1999, p.4). Here, knowledge is determined by its use within a social environment. This knowledge becomes part of a social practice that is enacted through the “negotiation of meaning, participation, and reification” (p.49). He states that if a society’s practices create meaningful experiences, the meaning of those practices establishes a “social cohesion” (p.14). By understanding knowledge within this social context, a community of practice is connected through its “enterprise” of sharing information, participation, and negotiations of meaning.

Ikujiro Nonaka (2000) addresses the concept of knowledge in his book Enabling Knowledge Creation. He states that knowledge is “justified true belief” which “depend[s] on a unique viewpoint, personal sensibility, and individual experience” (p.6). By extending the terminology of Michael Polanyi from Personal Knowledge, (1958/2003), Nonaka describes knowledge as both social and individual, as well as tacit and explicit. For him, these four aspects of knowledge are actualized in what he names the knowledge creation spiral (p.180) For Nonaka, knowledge is “a construction of reality rather than something that is true in any abstract or universal way” (p.6). Thus, from understanding knowledge through Nonaka and Wenger, knowledge is a value that is essential to the practices of a community. These conceptions come from a theory of reality called social constructivism.

Social constructivism

Social constructivists theorize that reality is constructed through social processes. John Searle (1995) writes that the social construction of reality is structured by specific institutional facts. Facts for Searle are taken for granted: “They just are what they are” (p.5). Searle explores what effects these assumptions have at the institutional level. In order to do so, he establishes a fundamental difference between facts that are epistemologically objective (intrinsic) and those that are logical but subjective (observer-related). He uses the example of the moon and the way that we understand it to describe the difference between the two kinds of facts. He says that the fact that the moon causes the tides is intrinsic. The tides will occur whether there is anyone to notice it or not. However, a factual statement such as “[t]he moon is beautiful tonight” depends completely on an observer being present (p.12). Thus, intrinsic features, “exist independently of all mental states” while observer-related features “are ontologically subjective” insofar as they fit logically into an ontology belonging to a specific institution (p.10). In the case of the moon being beautiful, it fits into the ontology of beauty. Berger and Luckmann (2002), like Searle, define social construction through the institutionalization which “occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors” (p.42). The authors state that in order to study these actions, one must understand the history of processes that have been built over time.

The second means through which Searle defines social constructivism is his constitutive formula: “X counts as Y in C” (p.2), which explains that a society constructs an idea in specific terms in a specific context. Hacking (1999) elaborates on this formula by offering a series of statements that are typical of social constructivist research. Hacking reuses Searle’s X to signify that X is a taken for granted practice or topic, an “inevitable idea” in society and needs to be questioned. The following four statements describe the typical perspectives that a social constructivist study takes:

• (0) In the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted; X appears to be inevitable.
• (1) X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable. [...]
• (2) X is quite bad as it is.
• (3) We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed (Statement (0), p.12; Statements (1)–(3), p.6).

Although not all four statements need to be followed, (0) is a precondition for a constructionist study and (1) presents a historical analysis of X. Hacking states: “Anything worth calling a construction was or is constructed in quite definite stages, where the later stages are built upon, or out of, the product of earlier stages. Anything worth calling a construction has a history” (p.50). However, he argues that one must push beyond a mere historical analysis of an idea. To do so, Hacking organizes social constructivism into five grades: historical, ironic, reformist, unmasking, rebellious, and revolutionary. Hacking defines these grades in terms of how much the study attempts to problematize X (p.20). The ironic grade shows that X is bad but we must live with it anyway. In the reformist view, X can be modified to be less bad. The unmasking grade merely removes the institutional assumptions that surround X. The rebellious grade views X as really bad while the revolutionary attempts to prove that X should not even exist. These five grades offer a variety of directions of critical inquiry into the social construction of reality.

Technology

One theme within social studies is to look at how technology affects and is affected by society. Marshall McLuhan (1964) defines technology as “an extension [...] of our physical bodies” (p.54). In terms of spreading knowledge, McLuhan speaks of electric technology becoming the extension of our nervous system. Thus, the tools that we use not only make us stronger and faster, but also potentially smarter. Norbert Wiener (1954), who founded the field of cybernetics, expresses that computers are not limited by the capabilities of their electronic organization, but also include the potential abilities of the person who interacts with the computer; it is a symbiotic output. This potential is also explored in Pierre Lévy’s Collective Intelligence (1997). He states that through the ongoing transformations of technology working in tandem with economic changes, “communities [...] abandon rigid and hierarchical methods of organization and develop the capacity for initiative and active cooperation among their members” (p.32). Thus, in consideration of McLuhan, Wiener, and Lévy, electronic technology is looked upon not only as a vehicle for increasing the human capacity for information but also as an agent of cultural, social, and political change.

Despite these optimistic claims, these authors also claim that technology can have a negative effect on the perception of reality. Wiener states that technology creates “new restrictions” (1954, p.46) and McLuhan often chastises the “cold” media for their unidirectional attitude toward the audience. Martin Heidegger (1977) writes that technology has an ordering effect on objects in terms of their potential technological use. If an object (or person) did not fit into the order, it (or they) would be considered useless. Thus, people would be “unfree and chained to technology” (p.287). This point of view has reemerged with contemporary writers such as Neil Postman (1993), and most recently Jaron Lanier (2010). Lanier argues that internet communitarinism, especially in Wikipedia, which is comprised of “intellectual mobs” (p.142), value the knowledge of the collective and creates a situation that eliminates the “individual voice” (p.147). Not as apocalyptic as Lanier but still critical, Alexander Galloway (2006) disagrees with the perception of the internet as inherently good due to its participatory nature and network structure. He describes that decentralized networks have become the hegemonic structure of the current era. The difference between the present and the modern era is that instead of power, decentralized networks are imposing control, which he describes as protocol.

There is yet a third view of technology established by Bijker (1989), Benkler (2006), Lessig (2005), and Castells (2001). These authors state that technology is fundamentally a social construction and it reflects our behaviours, intentions, and beliefs. Bijker states that, “both science and technology are socially constructed cultures and bring to bear whatever cultural resources are appropriate for the purposes at hand” (p.21). Benkler argues that the structure of the market has an incredibly influential force that directs the kinds of social relations people have. However, he states that “it is the human interaction with information, knowledge, and culture and with production and consumption” that “are the consequence of a feedback effect between social practices, economic organization, technological affordances, and formal constraints on behaviour through law and similar institutional forms” (p.26). Lessig takes a legal perspective of internet practices, specifically through the history, conflicts, and failings of copyright law. He questions how and in what ways the legal concept of property should be attached to creative works. In doing so, he acknowledges the ability to change the way that technology works for us through the legal policies that are attached to a technology. Castells states that, “the Internet transforms the way in which we communicate, our lives are deeply affected by this new communication technology. On the other hand, by doing many things with the Internet, we transform the Internet itself. A new socio-technical pattern emerges from this interaction” (p.5). Thus, the domain of technology is populated with thoughts of transformations both social and political, physical and virtual, good and bad.

Review of previous research

Interactions between information, production, culture, and consumption as described by the previous authors can be seen to exist on Wikipedia. The research studies, PhD dissertations, and masters theses that deal with Wikipedia and Wikipedia-related topics can be placed into several categories. The main body of research centres around understanding the social mechanisms and infrastructures that determine the activities and behaviours of participants. Such mechanisms include citation policies (Beschastnikh, 2008), group coordination (Viégas, 2007a) and talk pages (Aniket, 2007) used to achieve consensus and to resolve conflicts. One oft-cited paper displays how visualization software can bring insights into the cooperative and consensus-making interactions of this community (Viégas, 2004). Other procedures under study are the Featured Article (Viégas, 2007b) the role of administrators (Forte, 2008), unofficial infrastructures of knowledge production (Geiger, 2009), and contributor developed ontologies (Hepp, 2008). A second area of study is the development of software to extend Wikipedia’s usability. Such studies include investigating potential XML uses (Gu, 2007), linking through semantic relatedness (Gabrilovich, 2007; Vö̈lkel, 2006; Coursey, 2009; Bunescu, 2007), mining the intelligence of the Wikipedia crowd (Rahurkar, 2008), and searching for “experts” (Demartini, 2007). Other studies attempt to understand contributors motivations for volunteering (Johnson, 2007), their actions and behaviours (Peddibhotla, 2006), the development of an ownership mentality over articles (Thom-Santelli, 2010), task-routing (Cosley, 2006), and understanding the experience of becoming a Wikipedian (Bryant, 2005). The quality of Wikipedia articles was proven to be high if there was a large heterogenous group of editors (Carillo, 2006; Wilkinson, 2008) or low if there was a significant amount of free-riding (Rahman, 2006). Trustworthiness of articles (Moturu, 2009; Zeng, 2006), community sustainability (Ma, 2006; Bateman, 2008; Lin, 2006), and historical background (Kennedy, 2009; Reagle, 2008), were other research topics. In addition to the preceding studies of social mechanisms, Wikipedia has been analyzed in terms of its use of technology. For instance, the impact of Web 2.0 technology and design on ethics (Santos, 2009), content (Arola, 2006), value exchange (Gehl, 2010) and value of trade-off between costs and utilitarian benefits (Hu, 2009) have all been studied.

The proposed research will use the literature reviewed in this section to explore the questions: How does an online community of practice construct informal social control mechanisms and what do these mechanisms reveal about the encyclopaedic knowledge of Wikipedia?

Methodology

The previous section reviewed the philosopher Deleuze, encyclopaedic knowledge, communities and knowledge, social constructivism, technology, and previous research on Wikipedia. In consideration of previous research, the proposed study utilizes findings that are relevant and propose new directions of study. A number of the studies listed explore the effect social infrastructures have on the the general activities and behaviours of participants. The proposed research follows this line of inquiry by studying and analyzing the specific interactions of informal social controls in conversations about meta-articles on Wikipedia. Thus, in consideration of the literature review, it will be appropriate to consider Wikipedians as a community of practice that produces encyclopaedic knowledge. Such a consideration permits social constructivism as an appropriate theoretical framework. In doing so, the research defines the “inevitable idea” as encyclopaedism and that its history resides in the processes of codifying encyclopaedic knowledge. Understanding this history and the rise of encyclopaedism contextualizes the construction of Wikipedia as an encyclopaedic project. In addition to encyclopaedism, describing the technologies that Wikipedia employs gives insight into the social relationships that are mediated by those technologies. To make a valid attempt to answer the research questions, analyzing the recorded interactions of the participants of Wikipedia is a logical direction for inquiry. Thus, Conversation Analysis would be the chosen method for exploring how an online community constructs informal social controls. Depending on the results of the Conversation Analysis, the proposed research will choose from Ian Hacking’s five grades to determine whether encyclopaedism should be problematized and if so, to what degree. As a final nod to the review, Deleuze may be instrumental in understanding the second question due to his concept of the rhizome and his philosophical works that deal with the writings of Leibniz Kant, and Foucault, as they have been discussed as forming influential philosophical conceptions of encyclopaedic thought.

Conversation Analysis

Goodwin (1990) defines Conversation Analysis (CA) as seeking, “to describe the underlying social organization … through which orderly and intelligible social interaction is made possible”(p.283). In following other studies that are based on computer-mediated communication (CMC), CA is one of the predominant methods in analyzing interactions between participants (Have, 2006; Stommel, 2008; Kalman, 2006; Simpson, 2005; Riva, 1997). Beyond CA being used to categorize speech and non-verbal language of audio and video transcripts, it also describes the interaction between participants. It does so through a variety of conversational mechanisms: adjacency pairs, arguments, and opening and closing comments (Botan, 2000, p.582). By studying these particular mechanisms, researchers can infer how social organization can emerges through conversation. It must be mentioned that conversations are not the only policing features of Wikipedia. For instance, there are a fundamental set of rules that are extremely difficult to alter, and guidelines, policies, and essays that inform the users on how Wikipedia works. Wikipedia also conforms to legal considerations such as copyright and libel. There are semi-hierarchical roles, such as administrators and arbitrators who control and negotiate disputes. Finally, technical features such as a watchlist which allow users to follow updates on specified articles, and bots handling machine-readable editing. In view of each of these features, the conversations on Discussion pages offer a unique site of action that is not necessarily policed by top-down enforcement. Since it is largely left up to the individual users to cooperate to produce articles, the discussions that they have illustrate the abilities of a community of practice to operate through talk. For these reasons CA for CMC are an appropriate method to use.

Observer bias

Observer bias is an issue with any study of social interactions. In the case of the proposed research, the researcher(s) will not have contributed to Wikipedia articles at all. However, due to the ubiquity of the service, it is unrealistic to require that the researcher(s) not have used Wikipedia at all. A limited amount of interaction with Wikipedia (reading articles) will be considered acceptable. The main concern is that the researcher(s) not interact with the internal negotiations and practices of the community.

Conducting Conversation Analysis

Choose text(s): The traditional two options when choosing texts to analyze are between transcripts and outputs of communications. Since Wikipedia is a collection of messages produced by participants, the natural text of their communications analyzed. Specifically, the unit of analysis is the individual post by a participant to the Discussion page. Due to the wiki software, any article can be viewed in a number of ways. It can be viewed in consideration of its current state, its source code, and its history, as well as the discussion that has been generated about the page. In order to capture a comprehensive understanding of how actions and talk occur, the History and Article pages used as subsidiary references to the analysis of the Discussion pages. Finally, as part of the analysis, the relations and interactions between conversations and actors mapped visually.

Create a database: The database of texts will be a representative sample of sufficient size and content. Considering the scope for the proposed research, a census would be unrealistic given that there are more than 3,393,942 articles available (Wikipedia, 2010). Thus, by using a purposive non-probability sampling that targets a specific type of Wikipedia articles, meta-articles, the research focuses on the fundamental issues of institutional negotiation. This sampling style will complement the nature of the content by setting a specific criteria that returns data that comes from wiki pages that are frequently used and referenced by the users as sources of information about the community and its practices.

Criteria for creating a database

Criteria for choosing ten articles

1. The most abundant articles created belong to the English version of Wikipedia. Thus a representative sample would be composed of English articles. To do so, all sample URLs will have the following address: http://en.Wikipedia.org/*
2. To ensure that the article is a meta-article, an article that discusses the practices of the community, all URLs will have the following address: url{http://en.Wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:*.
3. To ensure that each article has had time to establish relevance, it must have been in existence for at least five years, and as such the date of creation must be before December 31, 2005. The date of creation of an article can be accessed by viewing the revision history of an article, starting with the earliest edit. http://en.Wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=name_of_article &dir=prev&action=history
4. To ensure that the pages are relevant to the users of Wikipedia and visitors at large, only the most visited and edited articles will be collected in the database. The more the article is edited, the greater the likelihood that there is a substantial amount of talk surrounding the article. Including the number of visits also establishes that these pages are more likely to be valuable to both the actual contributors and causal readers. To derive this cross tabulation, the research will use the following sites: most edited articles, with their most recent 90 day page view history, a page view history of the past two years, and the most watched pages.

Through these four steps a database will be created of the ten most visited and edited English articles pertaining to practices of the Wikipedia community that have been in existence for at least five years. Creating a database through these criteria does have certain limitations. The first is that it only includes English articles. The second is that the criteria for article lifespan is out of necessity as opposed to by choice. Similar future studies could study the same effects in different languages and will benefit from the increase of available article lifespans to choose from.

Establishing the units to be appropriately identified and coded: The six traditional units to use are semantic, physical, syntactical, referential, propositional, and thematic. Since the sampling unit of analysis is at the level of an individual post and relies on examining the underlying assumptions of that post, a propositional unit of analysis best captures the necessary content.

Coding into nominal categories: After unitizing, the next step is using nominal research procedures to develop categories by which the units can be classified. Each of these categories must be mutually exclusive and exhaustive (Botan, 200, p.584). Possible categories are openings, closings, turn-taking, adjency pairs, and backchannels. After these main categories are established, more specific categories may be needed in order to define the data in greater detail.

Selecting observers to code the units: In an ideal research study, multiple coders would be used to ensure that the coding of the units into categories is objective. Depending on the amount of data that is collected and the time available, only a single coder may be available to complete the study. If this occurs, it is an obvious limitation to the proposed thesis.

Analyzing the data: After the aforementioned steps have occurred, the rich data source will be used to describe the communication between participants, draw inferences about their relations, and ultimately, relate the data back to the theoretical framework of social construction.

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• atopia = the place without
• eutopia = the place of wellness
• extopia = the place of being out
• isotopia = the place of equality
• intopia = the place within
• idotopia = the place of shapes
• otopia = the place of conflict
• outopia /ovotopia = the place of beginning
• unitopia = the place of unity
• metatopia = the place above
• mimtopia = the place of repetition
• taxtopia = the place of order
• dystopia = the place of illness
• thanatopia = the place of death
• sophotopia = the place of wisdom

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