[Wikipedia-l] Re: A challenge to the integrity of wikipedia

[Joseph Reagle]

On Thursday 13 January 2005 01:11, Tim Starling wrote:
> Stirling Newberry wrote:
> > http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002710.html#2710

This is a bit more abstract, but I was recently exploring some concepts with 
respect to Wikipedia and intelligent design as well.

http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/culture/epistemological-authority
2005 Jan 06 | Epistomological Authority

   Two recent discussions have prompted me to return to question of
   epistemological authority. In the case of the online collaborative
   Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, a founding participant, lamented the
   inability of the community to accept and retain contributions from
   "experts." Also, creationists have re-factored their doctrine into a
   pseudoscientific "theory" of intelligent design and advocate that it
   be taught alongside, or instead, of evolution. I believe both of
   these cases share the conditions that there is such a thing as
   expertise, but that all views are potentially ideologically biased.
   Can the community at large distinguish authoritative arguments, or
   must we be cynical and believe that all arguments are biased but
   some are only more eruditely presented? (In fact, I've realized that
   the bulk of continental social "theory" is about identifying such
   biases: Boudieu's doxa and symbolic violence, Hall's naturalization,
   Gramsci's hegemony, Marcuse's and Adorno's technological veil,
   Weber's symbolic violence, Foucault's episteme, Barthes'
   exnomination ('unnaming') etc.).

   In An Introduction to Reflexive Sociology Pierre Bourdieu (1992)
   discusses a couple of his conceptual contributions which may be of
   use in understanding these debates. A field is a cultural domain in
   which participants have a stake in and compete with each other for
   the accumulation of some sort of capital (i.e., social capital).

     Like any social universe, the academic world is the site of a
     struggle over the truth of the academic world and of the social
     world in general. Very rapidly, we may say that the social world
     is the site of continual struggles to define what the social
     world is; but the academic world is a peculiarity today that its
     verdicts and pronouncements are among the most powerful socially.
     In academia, people fight constantly over the question of who, in
     this universe, is socially mandated, authorized, to tell the
     truth of the social world (1992:70).

   One of Bourdieu's preferences is that fields be true to themselves
   and operate autonomously and in a "scientific" manner.

     A scientific field is a universe in which researchers are
     autonomous and where, to confront one another, they have to drop
     all nonscientific weapons -- beginning with the weapons of
     academic authority. In a genuine scientific field, one can freely
     enter free discussions and violently oppose any contradictor with
     the arms of science because your position does not depend on him
     or because you can get another position elsewhere. (1992:177)

   My own understanding is that scientific does not equal academic:
   academic authority is based on a hierarchical application of
   judgment to those who allegedly know less; while closely associated
   with the academic, scientific assessments should be discernible to
   those who know the same or even less. Above, Bourdieu introduces the
   notion of "scientific arms": legitimate means of dispute. In
   Jonathan Sarfati's response to the creationist book Teaching About
   Evolution, he notes that the creationists claim that the National
   Academy of Sciences "resorts to arbitrary, self-serving 'rules' to
   determine what qualifies as 'science' and what doesn't." Of course,
   and presently in America we have the confounding situation that a
   great majority of the members of the National Academy of Sciences
   accept evolution, but a frightening proportion of Americans don't.

     A field is all the more scientific the more it is capable of
     channeling, of converting unavowable motives into scientifically
     proper behavior. In a loosely structured field characterized by a
     low level of autonomy, illegitmate motives produce illegitimate
     strategies and, furthermore, strategies that are scientifically
     worthless. In an autonomous field such as the mathematical field
     today, by contrast, a top mathematician who once to triumph over
     his opponents is compelled by the force of the field to produce
     mathematics to do so, on pain of excluding himself from the
     field. Being aware of this, we must work to constitute a
     Scientific City in which the most unavowable intentions have to
     sublimate themselves into scientific expression. This vision is
     not utopian at all, and I could propose a number of very concrete
     measures designed to make it come true. For instance, where we
     have won a national referee or evaluator, we can institute an
     international panel of three foreign judges (of course, we must
     then control for the effects of international networks of mutual
     knowledge and alliances). When a research center or a journal
     enjoys a situation of monopoly, worked to create a rival one. We
     can raise the level of scientific censorship by a series of
     actions designed to upgrade the level of training, the minimal
     amount of specific competency required to enter the field, etc.

     In short, they must create conditions such that the worst, the
     meanest, and the most mediocre participant is compelled to behave
     in accordance with the norms of scientificity in currency at the
     time (1992:177).

   Interestingly, Bourdieu is advocating censoring "nonscientific"
   claims. Which, while not very democratic, can be meritocratic --
   though I think his proposals for committees implausible. Yet, while
   Bourdieu is sympathetic to the autonomous operation of a field he
   does not want to focus on a particular methodology or bureaucracy,
   but the almost anarchistic competition under an already agreed to
   metaphysical system.

     There is in history what we may call, after Elias, a process of
     scientific civilization, whose historical conditions are given
     with the constitution of relatively autonomous fields within
     which all moves are not allowed, in which there are immanent
     regularities, implicit principles and explicit rules of inclusion
     and exclusion, and admission rights which are being continually
     raised. Scientific reason realizes itself when it becomes
     inscribed not in the ethical norms of a practical reason or in
     the technical rules of scientific methodology, but in the
     apparently anarchical social mechanisms of competition between
     strategies armed with instruments of action and of thought
     capable of regulating their own uses, and in the durable
     dispositions that the functioning of this field produces and
     presupposes. (1992:180)

   But, in the case of the creation/evolution debates, what is at stake
   is the metaphysical system of judging what is and is not science; in
   Wikipedia, what is and is not good, neutral, and authoritative
   content? Creationists object to natural science as a baised
   metaphysical system, or even a religion, like their own supernatural
   literalism. It is at this point, that I find their position simply
   incoherent and can no longer sympathetically engage in the debate.
   The divine, supernatural, and the ineffable may exist and be
   revealed to some, but these are not legitimate discourses in a
   public sphere in which others do not have access to the inspired
   source. The alternative that I can understand is as Robert Pennock
   (2001:84) wrote in Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics,
   "The methodological naturalist does not make a commitment directly
   to a picture of what exists in the world, but rather to a set of
   methods as a reliable way to find out about the world -- typically
   the methods of the natural sciences, and perhaps extensions that are
   continuous with them -- and indirectly to what those methods
   discover."

   As I discussed in Scandal and The Politics of Science and Vice
   Versa, "We can never know everything. We haven't the capacity nor
   time to give informed consideration to every important issue. So we
   rely upon labels and personalities to set the default values of our
   opinion." A claim of authority is a claim of being worthy of being
   deferred to. In the case of Wikipedia, if people are to accept it as
   an Encyclopedia, it seemingly must prove itself as an authority
   being worthy of being deferred to. Such proxies are often determined
   by the judgments of peers, judgement of superiors, method,
   majorities, personal experience, and results. And the difficulty
   with both the Wikipedia and debate on evolution is that the best
   method, results, is not immediately apparent. If we stop teaching
   evolution now, the effects would be long-term and confounded with
   many other social variables. And how does one "objectively" judge
   the quality of Wikipedia?

   Two of the key differences between Wikipedia and open source
   software development are that with questions of protocol and code
   one can easily make authoritative claims based on the results, and
   consequently such communities tend to be meritocratic. As I wrote in
   Why the Internet is Good, "With the cacophony of ideas, proposals,
   and debates, and a lack of a central authority to cleave the good
   from the bad, how does one sort it all out? It sorts itself out. ...
   The success of any policy is based simply on its adoption by the
   community." Encyclopedia making is not so fortunate, and Wikipedia
   strives to be more open, accepting anonymous contributions even,
   than most all open source projects. Nor can we simply rely upon the
   naked authority of expertise and academia: expertise should be
   supported, but to be accepted the results of expertise must also be
   widely perceptible to the larger public.