On 5/5/06, Cheney Shill halliburton_shill@yahoo.com wrote:
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a socially defined collection of original research.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia which subverts the usual definition of an encyclopedia and expands far beyonds the bounds of typical encyclopedias because of its social model, one based on collective authorship. You can't get around the social interaction, it is what makes the entire thing work. I should think such is fairly obvious.
"In particular, to elaborate on the last comment above, if you are able to prove something that nobody currently believes, Wikipedia is not the place to premiere such a proof." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Undue_weight In other words, there is even less need for social interaction. No need to petition funding for a laboratory to test a hypothesis. No questions about which researcher should have his name placed first next to a theory.
I think you misunderstand what I mean by social interaction. I do not mean funding or interactions with "society" (a slippery term), I mean something roughly like "practices by which human beings interact with one another to establish knowledge." The social practices cannot be avoided. Especially since we do not do original research (though even establishing what "original research" is a social practice here as well, one based on collaboration, discussion, and compromise!). But even in the scientific laboratory, facts do not just spring out of the air, nor do they cling onto the pages of journals by themselves, nor do they maintain themselves under the sheer weight of their own conviction.
We need to accept the social nature of Wikipedia's claims to truth (even if we do not want to bother trying to accept the social nature of truth itself), and understand that 1. it does not devalue Wikipedia's claims to truth, and 2. it is not something which can be avoided anyway. The value of accepting such a thing is not that we throw our hands up and say "Well, that's just how it is and we've got to accept it, whatever it is!" of course, but it directs our lines of inquiry away from things such as "How does one know whether something is Original Research or not?" and instead re-frames the question into something like, "What policies and social mechanisms will produce the sorts of content we want, in the end, given our system of knowledge production?" And again, by "social" I mean only that which refers to the interactions and mediations between users themselves, and that's all.
You could view the scientific method as a social system meant to produce a certain type of knowledge, for example. It (ideally) organizes researchers in a way which attempts to develop reliable and hopefully incremental knowledge, to fact-check and self-police itself, to standardize vocabularies and agreed-upon sets of beliefs, and so forth. Calling something a social system does not devalue it in the slightest; it is a system for organizing human interactions.
I apologize if this all sounds terribly academic or pedantic but I do have a point in all of this -- I think too many of these discussions are based on some sort of abstract way of trying to define things like "Undue weight" or "Neutral Point of View" or "Original Research" as if these were just natural categories sitting out there in the world. I think considering them to be guidelines by which a social process will produce certain types of knowledge, at the deliberate exclusion of others, will help better focus exactly what sorts of policies we should have and also help us avoid dreaming of a day when there will be no ambiguity or disagreements between users on these issues. Rather than viewing ambiguity and disagreement as things which should be eliminated, I think they should be viewed as necessary elements of a larger system, things which can probably be channeled or transformed or mediated to certain degree by policies but something which will, and must, always be a part of a relatively communitarian system as Wikipedia uses.
(Even relatively authoritarian systems of knowledge production, with top-down hierarchy and clear guidelines worked under by people of a similar mindset, have their internal conflicts. But their lack of transparency just keeps it out of sight, something we can't do under our system.)
It seems the policies and problems of the foundation in general (i.e., which projects and enhancements to fund, which gets a new server, which gets a new lawyer, etc.) are being confused with those of the encylopedia itself. Yet another area in need of clarification, not ambiguity.~~~~Pro-Lick
I don't quite see that particular slippage going on, myself...
FF