Ways of worldmaking in Wikipedia: reality,legitimacy and collaborative knowledge making

Convergence on a reality

Since its founding in 2001 Wikipedia has grown to well over 3 million articles in English alone. It is lauded as one of the most successful collaborative projects on the internet (Benkler, 2006) and cited for breadth and comprehensiveness as well as speed of updating and fact-checking (Kittur and Kraut, 2008; Kittur et al., 2007). While detractors claim that its free-for-all process creates a “dictatorship of idiots” (Blakeley, 2007), many articles are comparable in quality to traditional encyclopedia entries (Giles, 2005). This level of quality reflects a commitment to cooperation, such as when one Wikipedia user urges others to “come to the talk page so the issue can be discussed with the community and hopefully a middle ground or common view can be worked out.”

To facilitate “a common view” users agree to cite only socially sanctioned sources with the extra convenience of relying extensively on mainstream journalism to elicit information from those sources. Conversely, users agree not to cite original research: defined as unpublished theories or data (Wikipedia, 2008b, 2008c). Thanks to these policies, disputes about elementary “hard facts” are neither the majority nor most interesting of talk page debates. Far more insight derives from disputes arising from the most fundamental of Wikipedia polices: “Neutral Point of View” (NPOV), operationally defined not as a perfect representation of reality but as a statement upon which collaborators can agree (Wikipedia, 2008a). This seemingly undemanding operational definition underscores, rather than resolves, the fundamental problem of social knowledge production, which, in the words of one perceptive Wikipedian, is that “the facts are often not ‘neutral.’”

Precisely because of this commitment to NPOV, but also because “the facts are often not ‘neutral’” (i.e. the descriptive and the evaluative are interdependent) Wikipedia users assert their own versions of reality with tenacity and defend them with ferocity. This is what makes talk pages a uniquely interesting laboratory for studying how conflicts among points of view are negotiated and fact and value are integrated into social knowledge. Goodman’s thinking is quite amenable to this research setting. He recognizes the benefits of useful convergences among “world-versions” and he offers this insight, which seems well attuned to the task of Wikipedia collaborators: “unity is to be sought not in an ambivalent or neutral something beneath these versions but in an overall organization embracing them” (1978: 5). It is not, then, some foundational really real version that authorizes convergence but rather an acceptable “overall organization.”

The concept of objectivity is important to note, since many of the phrases used to describe the processes of Wikipedia are borrowed from journalism, and NPOV may be likened to objectivity. Traditionally journalism is thought to strive for objectivity, which itself is a complicated phrase, which rather than representing complete neutral facticity, can be considered as a negotiated tool and “a strategic ritual protecting newsmen from the perils of their trade” (Tuchman, 1972: 660). To Tuchman (1972) objectivity in journalism is achieved by following established routines such as fact-checking, presenting opposing viewpoints, offering supporting evidence, using quotation marks and utilizing specific information sequencing. Goodman would agree that objectivity is also a process and is not something that is simply arrived at, especially when taking many different (and often divergent) sets of values into account, as on Wikipedia. Wikipedia authors strive to develop an NPOV article, even though the “objective facticities,” to use Berger and Luckmann’s phrase, may not be considered objectively neutral by all.

Another of Goodman’s insights attuned to the task of Wikipedians is that “worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking” (1978: 6). It is “the worlds already on hand” that converge through the worldmaking processes enumerated by Goodman. What follows are illustrations of the processes identified by Goodman as (a) composition and decomposition, (b) weighting, that is, assessing relevance, (c) supplementation and deletion, (d) deformation, that is, reshaping and reconfiguring.

We exploit the heuristic value of these concepts with four cases of Wikipedia article creation: two histories, “Iraq War” and “Afghanistan War,” and two biographies, “George W. Bush” and “Barack Obama.” As of July 2009, the talk pages attached to the Bush article contained over 800,000 words and those attached to the Iraq War article contained over 300,000 words. The Obama talk pages totaled over 120,000 words and the Afghan War over 70,000 words. We selected these articles because they evoked spirited debate and addressed pertinent topics in the public sphere. Controversial topics across a wide range of subject matter on Wikipedia are also similarly debated. Though these articles may not be representative of all processes on Wikipedia, we maintain that these actively edited articles provide insight into the cognitive and evaluative processes by which facts and values are integrated into a final knowledge product. All of these methods of worldmaking are widely present in the Wikipedia articles we examine. Each case study shows that, through the processes described by Goodman, the specific “worldmaking” actions taken by users determine the final shape of the information presented. The texts reviewed here are, then, a purposive sample intended to illustrate and develop our theoretical arguments rather than describe the content of Wikipedia overall. To convey the tone of talk page debates we quote from them extensively, retaining original spelling, punctuation and emphasis. Bracketed ellipses indicate edits within block quotes.

Composition/decomposition as worldmaking

As acts of worldmaking, composition and decomposition entail “taking apart and putting together,” according to Goodman:

on the one hand, of dividing wholes into parts and partitioning kinds into sub-species, analyzing complexes into component features, drawing distinctions; on the other hand of composing wholes and kinds out of parts and members and subclasses, combining features into complexes and making connections. (1978: 7)

Thus we take composition and decomposition to encompass not only articulation (or disarticulation) of knowledge structures that constitute a world, but also the identification and categorization of structural elements in that world. The processes of composition and decomposition are illustrated by an excerpt from a 2010 debate on whether a particular event in Afghanistan has a distinct identity.

“Someone has created a page for the 2009 Attack on CIA base,” writes user Bejnar. “This does not seem to be an independent topic.” The event, in other words, does not have an identity independent of other on-going aspects of the war. A few days later Bejnar is again annoyed by the continuing attempt to create an article about the attack, “I see that someone has created a new article Forward Operating Base Chapman attack, merged in 2009 attack on CIA base and expanded it beyond all encyclopedic scope.” But to this complaint another user responds, “It’s a pretty significant attack on the CIA by the Taliban/AQ. It should probably have its own article, with a mention or a wikilink on this page.” An independent identity for the event, along with its evaluative categorization as a “significant attack,” is secured when yet another user adds, “And a damn good article at that!” Thus an actual event is composed for the Wikipedia version of the war. The categorization of this attack as “significant” captures, presumably, a set of hard facts, but that categorization also reflects a moral issue of importance to some users involved in this talk page debate: the on-going documentation of the true badness of the bad guys, “the Taliban/AQ,” and thus the legitimacy of the on-going war against them.

The moral dimension of categorization is also illustrated in the many talk page debates about word choice, for example the use of “invasion” and “massacre.” Here is a debate from 2006 about use of the adjective “heavy” with regard to civilian casualties in Iraq. The dispute begins when user Rmt2m removes “heavy” from the introductory “Infobox” arguing that it is “loaded.” User Mmx1 agrees, adding that civilian causalities in Iraq are few relative to other conflicts. “What’s Heavy?” writes Mmx1. “Compared to 0 or a car crash, [30,000 dead] is heavy. But the survivors of Iran-Iraq or Stalingrad might beg to differ.” User Borisknezevic then counters with the proposal that heavy means “more than necessary to achieve LEGITIMATE objectives.” Mmx1 replies, “Heavy introduces POV considerations of necessity and value.” Borisknezevic tries again to anchor his categorization of civilian casualties:

100,000 dead (civilian and military) is about one third of a percentage of the total Iraqi population. What’s one third of a percentage of the American population? Well, just over 1 million people. Now say that there’s a war and just over 1 million Americans die - you’d say that’s not “heavy”, huh?

What is at stake in the choice of a single adjective becomes clear as the exchange quickly becomes an extended argument about moral responsibility and justification of the war. “[W]hen you start a war, especially an unjust one for selfish reasons, you cannot wash your hands of the consequences,” Borisknezevic asserts. For this user, “heavy” seems not simply to be a quantitative modifier. Rather “heavy casualties” is a morally meaningful social category unto itself.

As an exercise in worldmaking via language, composition encompasses the twin authorial functions of observation and narration. Elaborating on this distinction, Mieke Bal (2006) specifies three types of agency in a narrative. In addition to the characters whose agency constitutes the story, the author exercises two forms of agency. The author-as-narrator puts the story into words and the author-as-observer, or “focalizer,” selects the actions and chooses the angle from which to present them (Bal, 2006). The focalizer controls point of view or, in the vocabulary of worldmaking, controls identification and categorization of the individuals, situations and events that will constitute the world. Focalization, in other words, authorizes what narrators are entitled to say and therefore is a point of conflict in many talk page debates.

What’s more, as in objectively styled journalism, Wikipedia narrators cannot also be the focalizing agent (at least explicitly so), but they can promote preferred candidates for the role of focalizing agent. Thus, again as in journalism, the points of view held by institutionally legitimate sources may ascend to the status of NPOV and thereby make an acceptable version of a world. However, yet again as in journalism, there is an alternative focalizing agent: popular opinion. Here, in a 2005 debate about whether the Iraq War had ended with the defeat of the Iraqi army, user St|eve summons that alternative agent:

The point of having an “Iraq War” article is to represent the current and ongoing war in Iraq, and to define the common term that everybody uses. While the 2003 invasion of Iraq was “mission accomplished,” the “war” (according to popular consensus and terminology) continues […] Only a particular view considers the occupation over, and there are some basic facts (extended immunity for soldiers, etc.) which contradict this and at the very least make the statement one of POV.

This post has asserted St|eve’s own composition of facts to be the “popular consensus” but, of course, St|eve would not be engaged in this debate if that composition was already established as common knowledge. The appeal to “everybody” as the focalizing agent is actually an attempt by this user to surreptitiously introduce some unspecified agent into the debate. Such appeals are often successful, however, allowing the interpretations of that unspecified agent (e.g. political partisans) to gain ground as common knowledge. Unlike sources in historical or journalistic texts that must be clearly identified to establish the legitimacy of their worldmaking agency, appeals to common knowledge must be quietly buried within the finished text (i.e. “naturalized”) so that their authority remains unquestioned.

In response to St|eve, JDR argues that “the common term that everybody uses” is “Iraq insurgency” or “Iraqi civil war” either of which is correct because Iraq’s national sovereignty has been restored. Thus JDR has countered with his own appeal to what everybody knows. In addition, just as St|eve has implicitly referenced a web of socially sanctioned facticity with the mention of extended immunity for soldiers, so JDR references Iraqi national sovereignty. To this, however, St|eve counters with the charge that Iraqi sovereignty does not have sufficient institutional legitimacy to count as fact:

No, that is entirely a United States-based view of the situation, as dictated from POV sources. It is not even remotely the reality […] Probing any deeper, we find a basic contradiction between the concepts of sovereignty and the existing state of a military occupation – which more closely resembles colonialism. As I said before, the extension of complete and total diplomatic immunity to foreign soldiers, as well as the existence and deference to legal codes established under the occupation, stand as facts in disagreement with the claim of “sovereignty.”

Perhaps as a ploy, St|eve has threatened to recompose the situation as colonialism but then, getting back to the real business at hand, reasserts the immunity argument. JDR’s response is to reassert the sovereignty argument by citing a focalizing agent from outside the United States: “It is a United Nations-based view of the situation, as gleaned from UN sources.” Unconvinced, St|eve replies:

The links you point to were simply news stories, reporting loosely on terms used in ceremonial decrees “Security Council unanimously endorses formation of interim Iraqi government,” “Security Council hails handover of authority to interim Iraqi Government,” both are non-binding and non-authoritative: the UN merely “endorse” and “hail” major “landmarks” in progress which were still completely under US control.

St|eve seems to have accepted the legitimacy of the UN as a focalizing agent but still rejects the argument that the UN, in fact, “sees” Iraq as sovereign.

Despite the Wikipedia mantra that the wise editor should seek verifiability rather than truth, the notion that the truth exists, independent of any focalizer, is difficult to relinquish, and JDR soon begins a long post with an appeal to reality itself:

The definition of sovereignty is controversial? To whom? Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party? The Islamists “militants” in Iraq? In reality, it is not controversial….do you seriously say the the multinational forces did not win the war against the Iraqi Army?)

Attempting to transcend point of view altogether, JDR has claimed that Iraqi sovereignty just is – “in reality” – thus appealing not merely to common knowledge but to unmediated commonsense as invoked with the exasperated rhetorical question, “do you seriously say…?” JDR also goes on to defend the appeal to the UN as the sanctioning agent for the claim. “These are not ‘ceremonial’ decrees,” JDR argues; “these are resolutions of the Security Council.” For good measure JDR attempts to marginalize alternative points of view: “BTW I just looked at the Google news search link on ‘Iraq sovereignty’ and it shows the issue is only an open question to ‘peace activists’ (those with an ‘anti-war’ and / or ‘anti-US’ POV) and the Sunnis.”

What is at stake here is whether the UN has the institutional legitimacy to determine an important moral fact: whether the United States remains at war with Iraq or has moved on to some other sort of engagement with that nation. Accordingly the debate illustrates some procedures for the composition of world-versions within the rules of Wikipedia. Specifically, the ways to see and identify the elements of social reality are through the eyes of: (1) socially sanctioned focalizing agents, (2) “everybody,” which is actually to cite vague focalizing agents who purvey what may pass as common knowledge and (3) unmediated commonsense which, as invoked here, is actually to cite no one at all. Along with these compositional procedures we must also recognize the decomposition of alternative world-versions – for example, those of “peace activists.”

Weighting as worldmaking

Weight is assigned to features of a world by establishing their relevance to the purposes to be served in that world. “Some relevant kinds of the one world, rather than being absent from the other, are present as irrelevant kinds,” Goodman writes, “some differences among worlds are not so much in entities comprised as in emphasis or accent” (1978: 11). The emphasis to be placed on any of the myriad details – that is, the uncontested “hard” facts – that could conceivably compose a world sparks much debate. In a 2008 discussion of the Obama biography, for example, user PaulLowrance urges mention of Colin Powell’s support for Obama’s presidential bid. When user Scjessey objects that this fact is “completely beyond the scope of biography” and that an endorsement page already exists, PaulLowrance requests a link from the biography to the endorsement page to signal relevance. Scjessey responds, “Since the election is only one component of Obama’s life, it seems that a direct link would probably be undue weight.” As others side with Scjessey’s position, PaulLowrance tries to justify the inclusion of information about Powell as weightier than some previously included information: “IMO that’s far more important than the following text that is presently in the wiki, ‘Obama plays basketball, a sport he participated in as a member of his high school’s varsity team.’”

PaulLowrance’s subsequent charge that his antagonists’ refusal to add the link reflects bias against Obama is not supported by the overall discussion but in many other instances the struggle over weighting is political. “I thought it would be interesting to add the fact that Obama attended the Million Man March,” writes user TheGoodLocust. “Can someone please explain how such information was considered ‘vandalism?’ I do not understand why it is not allowed in this place that loves free thought and information.” While the boundary between political motivation and defensible judgments of relevance is porous, it seems clear that TheGoodLocust was up to mischief, when earlier this user tried to insert that Obama had graduated from Harvard Magna Cum Laude but graduated from Columbia “without honors.” When TheGoodLocust is finally called to account it is on the basis of weight not bias. “Million Man March? Really?” writes GoodDamon. “Of all the notable rallies and meetings and gatherings and other-ings Obama has attended, that one is the one trumps all the others…when all others have gone into sub-articles devoted to the nitpicky details? Really?” The overall tone of this discuss thread suggests that issue at hand is best characterized as less about the viability of the Obama candidacy than about its legitimacy – that is to say, less about whether he could be a serious candidate than about whether he ought to be.

Debates and decisions about relevance always reflect the interdependence of fact and value. “The decision that a picture of the world is true…and answers the relevant questions,” as Hilary Putnam argued, “rests on and reveals our total system of value commitments” (1987: 201, emphasis added). No fact is inherently relevant; it can only be relevant to an interest or purpose. Relevance or importance, is always to or for something else as illustrated by a discussion about the causes (casus belli) of the Iraq War. The users are not arguing about whether the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction was a reason for the war but rather whether that should be treated as the “real” (or at least primary) reason as opposed to just one of many reasons advanced by at various times by US officials (e.g. deposing a vicious dictator). Throughout the debate, the moral facts to be established determine the relevance of the hard facts called upon to establish them.

We pick up the debate in mid 2006 with user Zer0faults arguing for the relevance of the considerations cited in the congressional resolution in support of military action. “I just hope,” Zer0faults writes with regard to the article’s opening, “we can remove the assertations that WMD’s were in fact the sole reason for the US invasion, considering that HJ Res 114 covers many many reasons.” However, this user’s primary rival in the debate, Mr. Tibbs, wants to focus on weapons of mass destruction as the primary cause. His response to Zer0faults points toward the moral fact that he wants to establish:

So basically what you want to do is remove all mention of the cassus belli of the Iraq War and try to create the false impression that this military action was as inevitable as the sunrise. No. Just because things didn’t turn out the way the Bush administration wanted doesn’t give you license to rewrite history.

Zer0faults’ response points toward his preferred web of moral facticity in which the legitimacy of the war does not turn on the presence or absence of WMDs:

See just because the president told you XYZ doesnt mean its the actual justification, a resolution was passed in the House and Senate that laid out the reasons for going to war with Iraq, you can read it and see that there is over 10 reasons for why the US did in fact invade Iraq. If you would prefer I can edit the article to reflect all the reasons, however stating one reason, then stating its wrong, is pretty POV.

Zer0faults has advanced a legalistic position supposing it to offer a decisively relevant fact (i.e. HJ Res 114). For this user, presidential statements are not enough, whereas a congressional resolution is real. Zer0faults then sets out to recompose the opening of the article to summarize HJ Res 114.

Mr. Tibbs objects. “The reason for the 2003 Invasion of Iraq was WMD,” he asserts. “You know it, I know it, just stop trying to rewrite history because there turned out to not be any WMD.” User Tmorton166 intervenes with an attempt at compromise. WMDs should be emphasized, this user writes, “because it was the reason sold to the public,” but other reasons must also be mentioned to avoid “making the reader feel that the Iraq war was unjustified.” In seeking a compromise Tmorton166 clearly articulates the issue of moral justification and responsibility that stands behind this debate about relevance. Other users do so as well. “This adminstration has changed their reason and characterization every time it turned out to be patently false,” one writes. “But the casus belli is the main officially stated reason at the time of attempted manufactering of consent, as it was characterized and interpreted then.”

The debate becomes entangled in a disagreement about the precise meaning of casus belli but it still turns on the relevance of statements by the president and other officials. User Publicus suggests the criteria of an “officially stated reason” to distinguish relevant discourse:

The Bush doctrine clearly states that it is in the national security interests of the US to pre-emptively attack those who could pose a threat to the US or its interests. Now, the democracy/human rights argument was discussed prior to the invasion, however that discussion does not make it part of the casus belli–what does qualify as casus belli are those statements, speechs, presentations-given by Bush administration officials on those specific points mentioned in their own National Security guidelines.

This intervention fails but after further exchanges another user emerges with the decisive piece of information: a university study. “If it seems that there have been quite a few rationales for going to war in Iraq, that’s because there have been quite a few – 27, in fact, all floated between Sept. 12, 2001, and Oct. 11, 2002,” user Gzuckier writes of the study findings. Of these, five were prominent throughout the period: the war on terror, prevention of weapons proliferation, lack of adequate inspection, removal of the Hussein regime, and the archetypal moral fact that Hussein was an evil dictator. “It looks on the surface to be pretty thoroughly researched,” one of Zer0faults’ opponents acknowledges and Zer0faults agrees. “I like this,” writes Zer0faults, “also if it can be merged into the intro or used to replace the current POV slanted one.” As a testament to institutional authority, the sense of facticity conveyed by academic research yields convergence on the selection of causal factors. With reasons for war properly weighted, its cause is now determined and its legitimacy enhanced.

Deletion and supplementation as worldmaking

Sometimes features of a possible world, in Goodman’s phrase, “cannot be fitted into the architecture of the world we are building” (1978: 14). At other times, additional features are required to complete the design. And, shifting metaphors, he adds, “[T]he making of one world out of another usually involves some extensive weeding out and filling – actual excision of some old and supply of some new material.” Central to the ethos of Wikipedia is its openness to input – that is, supplementation. In this spirit, user Existential Thinker, in the midst of the debate about whether the war had ended with the defeat of the Iraqi army, tries to move away from both the UN perspective and commonsense by calling for alternative focalizers: “it would be valuable to hear from someone from Iraq, preferably a citizen of Iraq and a U.S. soldier.” In response to what might be termed this public deliberation approach to NPOV, user SWATJester retorts:

I served in Iraq for a year, including in participating in the initial invasion. I tried editing this page for 3 months. I got sick of the rampant ignorance, the mindless euro-centric US hating, the Bush/Cheney/ Rumsfeld bashing etc. Just look at the self-righteous comments on this talk page: Anon’s babbling about “Oh it was about the oil of course” like they’re a famous political scientist, or an expert in national defense studies.

Confronted with this stance, the attempt to write an NPOV article may become an exercise in deletion or supplementation so as to balance conflicting claims rather than to meld them into a unified account. When user Manic Hispanic notes that Obama’s bio, unlike Bush’s, lacks a criticism section, and writes that “not everyone loves him,” user Ubiq replies that “what little criticism he does get, is for petty stuff that has little to do with things he’s actually done.” This exchange sets off a search for supplementary material critical of Obama. One user offers this: “Time magazine had an article this week about his lack of support in the black community, who (Time says) prefer Senator Clinton. This might be worth mentioning.” Balance, much as journalists would understand it, thus emerges as a motive for supplementation.

Another user disputes the need for this sort of supplementation in the absence of a stronger reason than balance. “People simply not liking or loving Obama does not warrant a controversy or criticism section or sub-article,” writes Edward Lalone. “There must be sufficient credible, verifiable and neutral sources that cover such controversies or criticisms before they can be included.” For this user, artificial balance is unnecessary but Manic Hispanic maintains their stance, saying, “There should be a criticisms section for Obama period.” Discussion then turns to the idea that the article should balance positive with the negative because other sources fail to do so. User Haemo concludes with the argument that balance ought not be sought just because some users “feel he gets a ‘free ride’ or something in the media.”

The attempt to balance the Obama article vis-a-vis the Bush article through supplementation is noteworthy because it is less common than deletion. Research on editing practices at Wikinews, a sibling site that covers breaking news stories, indicates that users do in fact operationalize NPOV in terms of journalistic balance among the contending sides of controversies (Thorsen, 2008). Moreover, while information is sometimes added or reorganized in articles, users most often seek balance by removing contentious material. Reliance on balance is reasonable given the mission of Wikinews, like other news media, is to provide the first draft of history. If, however, the mission is to present subsequent drafts by reworking news into encyclopedic articles, then resorting to journalistic balance is problematic if expectations for unified, coherent and non-contradictory accounts of reality are to be satisfied.

On occasion, users contemplate this problem. In a discussion of the Bush biography during the 2004 presidential campaign, user Eloquence asserts the principle that “generally, it’s a bad idea to remove POVs to make an article more NPOV.” This user sees deletion as making convergence more, rather than less, difficult: “It’s a sure recipe for edit wars as you can’t really expect a Bush critic to be knowledgeable about the other side of the story. That side should be written by people familiar with it.” For this user deletion, jeopardizes the virtues of collaboration. “In a perfect world everyone would look at an issue from all sides,” Eloquence writes, “but in reality the different POVs are usually contributed by the people who hold them.”

The implication is that balance must be tolerated if deletion, and consequently loss of information, is to be avoided. “It is unreasonable to expect an article that one can say doesn’t express any points of view,” writes user REI. “I think that the best we can hope for is to try to achieve balance.” In response, user Cecropia reaffirms the importance of striving for NPOV rather than settling for balance, but also despairs of achieving it:

Absolutely we should strive for it in these articles, but I don’t see it as happening. I think we’re mistaking “balance” for “NPOV”. An article with 100 obscure pro-Bush tidbits and 100 obscure anti-Bush tidbits may be “balanced”, but it is not “NPOV”. The only way we could reach NPOV before election day would be to hire a single trusted editor.

Cecropia later acknowledges that an article composed by a single editor, which “used to be called journalism,” is decidedly not the Wikipedia Way. This user also comes to accept balance as necessary because of a perceived imbalance both within the Bush article and between that and the Kerry article. “Bush critics want this to be an anti-Bush polemic,” Cecropia writes. “Kerry’s article is a virtual campaign committee biography.” For user Mintguy, however, considerations of relevance trump those of balance. “The Iraq war and the issues surrounding it,” Mintguy writes, “are central to understanding criticism the Bush recieves from foreign leaders.”

As suggested by the example from the Obama biography, supplementation is far more difficult than deletion because it requires agreement on additional material that would actually achieve balance. Another example concerns the documentation of the true badness of the bad guys in the Afghan War. User Kevinp2 writes: “The section Human Rights Abuses is entirely one sided and presents only allegations of human rights abuses by US and coalition forces without a single report of human rights abuses by the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, both of whom were notorious for brutal murders, massacres and oppression.” Kevinp2 adds, “If this section is not balanced, it should be removed. Otherwise, like many other articles in Wikipedia, it turns into a forum for US-bashing.” Another user, Mmcknight4, raises the possibility of adding rather than deleting material but maintains that balance should be achieved by reference to specific and documented war crimes on both sides.

User MidwestMax reworks the problematic section but Mmcknight4 disputes the relevance of the material added for the sake of balance. “What should be offered in balance are alleged cases of identical sorts against the other side,” Mmcknight4 argues. “Anytime a fighter from the other side indiscriminately kills some individual or group of innocents in the name of the fight, it seems that offense should be included or the tally should reflect it.” MidwestMax expresses frustration at Mmcknight4’s implicit demand that if precisely the right sort of balancing material (documentation of specific Taliban war crimes) cannot be located then the material on the alleged crimes by US and coalition forces must be dropped. But Mmcknight4 is also frustrated:

I mean, c’mon. We love to detail the abuses at the hands of America because they operate under the veneer of democratic probity…If tomorrow a trio of American soldiers invades a farmers house and kills him and his wife and rapes the daughter that is front page news which people will readily document herein. An insurgent fighter does the same thing and no one seems tempted to change the article to reflect it.

MidwestMax acknowledges that “the Taliban’s human rights violations are almost too numerous to document” but does not want to relinquish the material on US forces. “Unlike the United States the Taliban is not a Democratic nation that has signed the Geneva Convention with an excellent past human rights record,” MidwestMax writes. “I think it is worth documenting the U.S. abuses precisely because they are anomalous for the United States.” Democratic probity, even if a veneer, does matter to this user. What then constitutes balance in an instance such as this? Mmcknight4 responds that it has not been achieved: “Im just trying to avoid an apples and oranges kind of deal where we say ‘American troops did x, y, and z and the Taliban is brutal and oppressive.’” In this case, in the search for balance, generalities do not balance specifics.

Deformation as worldmaking

Some alterations of worlds-in-progress, according to Goodman, may entail “reshapings or deformations that, depending on point of view, may be considered either corrections or distortions” (1978: 16). Any editing of a Wikipedia article could elicit both claims of correction and protests of distortion from other editors but here we focus on comparison and analogy as strategies for deforming and reforming. Comparison and analogy may highlight useful parallels but may also suppress specificity and difference. Individuals may also engage other worldmaking processes such as establishing categories and weighing relevance, and in this way mark another major intersection of fact and value.

An example of a contested comparison occurs when user ScWizard deletes a passage in the Obama biography that observes the candidate’s speaking skills have been compared to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ronald Reagan, after another user remarks that the comparisons had been “over the top.” In Goodman’s terms, comparisons had deformed the representation of Obama by locating him a category of oratorical skill – and perhaps also a category of world historical leadership – in which he does not belong. “Out of the many many articles that call Obama an exceptional orator, picking the ones that make comparisons to King and Regan is picking and choosing sources,” writes ScWizard, recognizing that any such comparison is simultaneously a value judgment and truth claim that must be sourced. To this, user Scjessey replies that the sources were legitimate and therefore the comparisons do constitute facts that define Obama. “Many sources have compared Obama’s oratory to King and Reagan specifically,” Scjessey argues, “and these were chosen as representative of that.” However, another user, Wikidemon, carries the day with the conclusion, “The sources were probably being POV and so reflecting them here weakly introduces some POV.” The comparisons remain deleted.

Our analysis of worldmaking in Wikipedia concludes by taking seriously a familiar jest among Wikipedians – Godwin’s Law – which states that as any online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. The point of the barb with regard to Wikipedia would be that the comparison threatens to deform talk page discussions if not the articles themselves. An instance occurs in a 2002 discussion of the Bush biography after user Jazz77 argues that assessments of his environmental and civil liberty policies, even if balanced between positive and negative, should be deleted. Another user, Soulpatch, protests:

I would argue that you can’t separate the moral implications of policies of a politically significant figure from the article about them as people–are we supposed to separate discussion of the holocaust from an article on Hitler? For the most part, it is the existence of the Presidents qua President that distinguishes them, and is by far the most important part of what makes them historically significant and thus warranting an encyclopedia article.

The reference to Hitler may be truly “over the top” but it does not deform the talk page discourse. Rather it has helped Soulpatch not only to articulate a potential fact that he terms “Bush’s civil liberties violations” but also to confront, even if implicitly, the concept itself of moral facticity. Moral facts, Soulpatch has argued, are central to the meaning of historical figures and must be confronted directly rather than bracketed by relegating them to a subsidiary article.

Soulpatch goes on to argue that the moral facts under discussion deserve a place in the article because they transcend political partisanship. However, Jazz77 objects, “The average person does not have these criticisms of Bush, only *some* partisan Democrats.” Unsurprisingly Jazz77’s appeal to common knowledge – what the “the average person” thinks – does not sway Soulpatch, who responds:

You claim that only a few Americans criticize Bush over this (as if the legitimacy of human rights is determined by how many people care about it), and since you seem to be such an expert on how many people care about this issue, maybe you should tell us just how many “few” is. .0005%? 20%? 45%? Really, you are truly clueless if you think that only a few people care about this issue.

Soulpatch’s position – “as if the legitimacy of human rights is determined by how many people care about it” – is that neither the average person nor a percentage of the public, even if sizable, has the moral authority to adjudicate the question. Later Soulpatch again invokes Hitler to press the point that moral facts – which transcend any attempts at quantification of public opinion – are at stake here:

I can imagine a Wikipedia article on Hitler in 1935, and someone points out the human rights violations by Hitler against his people, and good old Jazz77 complaining that such information is merely “partisan crap”. It is no more a “political slant” to point out Bush’s civil liberties violations than it is to point out Hitler’s. What you call “political slant” I call telling the truth…

To deflect the point, if not to actually subvert or deform the debate, Jazz77 then retorts, “Well, you mentioned Hitler first. I win.” Soulpatch, who regards “Bush’s civil liberties violations” as fact rather than mere opinion, ignores the jab.

Jazz77 does grasp that moral facticity is what is at stake in the dispute. “It’s NOT a fact that Bush has made an ‘attack’ on civil liberties. That is an opinion that the majority of the country disagrees with,” Jazz77 writes, continuing to dispute the reality of an attack based on lack of public support for its facticity. “We shouldn’t list that kind of crap here as if it’s encyclopedia worthy.” In turn, Soulpatch again denounces the legitimacy of “the majority” as the focalizing agent. “It is no more a partisan criticism to point out Bush’s actions in the civil liberties arena than it is to identify any other leader’s human rights record,” Soulpatch continues. “This encyclopedia is full of information about the human rights records of world leaders.” Even so, these debaters are, to some extent, talking past each other. For Jazz77, the references to Hitler are a joke, for Soulpatch they are a touchstone of moral facticity.

After many such posts, the content related to President Bush’s stance on civil liberties remained in the main article. By 2004, however, much material about Bush administration policies had been “forked” – that is, decomposed – into separate articles such as “Criticism of George W. Bush” so that sections of the main biographical article could finally achieve relative stability.

Conclusion

Berger and Luckmann’s perspective on the social construction of reality maintains that the legitimacy of social institutions is not a matter of mere propaganda, but rather the on-going generation of social knowledge. “Knowledge about society,” they write, “is thus a realization in the double sense of the word in the sense of apprehending the objectivated social reality, and in the sense of ongoingly producing this reality” (1966: 66). Legitimacy is not a distant abstraction but rather an everyday interaction of the sort that includes the creation of Wikipedia entries and talk pages. This perspective resonates with Billig’s (1995) notion of banal nationalism; but even if banal, the talk page debates examined here are at the cutting edge of social legitimation, since they reveal the on-going process of both apprehending and producing the realities of the nation, the presidency and their actions in the world.

With Goodman’s conception of worldmaking as a heuristic, we have investigated how collaborators interweave evaluation and description to converge upon an acceptable account of contemporary social reality, given Wikipedia’s collaborative process that, presumably, harnesses “the wisdom of crowds” (Surowiecki, 2004). Identifying and categorizing phenomena, specifying relevance, structuring sequences, drawing comparisons, deleting distortions are all cognitive and normative exercises that give usefulness and meaning to hard facts. Thus, our cases illustrate the centrality of moral facticity to the representation of human affairs. Moreover, the close alliance between the concepts of worldmaking and media framing – also an exercise in moral facticity – suggests an enhanced theoretical vocabulary for frame analysis, both in the journalism world and beyond. The composition processes found here – identification of basic elements for worldmaking, evaluative categorization of those elements and their articulation into schematic structures – all point toward a clearer specification of frame functionality. And the idea of deformation points toward a conception of frame politics as a contest not only of frames and counter-frames but also frame deformation and reformation, which, for instance, accounts for the resilience of the frontier myth in American political discourse (e.g. West and Carey, 2006).

Our cases also demonstrate how the process of legitimation confronts dissension in the process of generating social knowledge claims that can be generally accepted. Because our cases are exercises in public collaboration on questions of moral facticity, they are also exercises in the management of conflict. Indeed, what we initially characterized as a process in which convergence is achieved might better be understood as a process in which reconciliation is sought. The term “convergence” belies the contingency of social knowledge claims, and the myriad possible outcomes. Because the debates on such issues as the relevance of facts and the language used to express them could turn out differently than they do, “reconciliation” rather than “convergence” seems the superior term. To say, however, that social knowledge claims could turn out differently is certainly not to say that they could turn out in any, or every possible way. Social knowledge engages facts, after all, but the test conditions include not only direct observation of phenomena but also continuing discussions about how to grasp those phenomena.

Wikipedia throws open the process of constructing knowledge claims, providing insight into the process in other knowledge-making situations. As these four case studies demonstrate, Wikipedia editors utilize Goodman’s worldmaking techniques to integrate fact and value into a collaborative knowledge product. Wikipedia’s process encompasses the iterative incorporation of new information and the revision of existing text that moves toward, even if not always achieving, the completion of stable articles. The outcome of such discussions can “claim objective validity,” in Putnam’s terms (2002: 45) when those discussions are characterized by “reflective examination.” It is not inappropriate, we argue, to characterize our cases in this way.