Abstract
The book entitled Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality by McDowell and Vetter is intended to address an important gap in media communication and information technology by exploring the complex disconnect between formalized policy and the unspoken norms behind common knowledge-making processes. It is presented in five chapters and begins with the controversies tagging the popularity of the English Wikipedia (the 13th most visited website globally, which has more than six million articles and nine billion page views per month). Chapter 1 introduces the authors’ arguments behind the representation of Wikipedia as common knowledge. In the review, the authors explain the five pillars of the actual practice of how Wikipedia collects all branches of knowledge and distributes them to everyone for free. The first pillar tells the readers about the lofty goal of Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia that provides objective information and reality to its readers (Menking and Rosenberg, 2021). The second pillar states that ‘Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view’ to remove ‘editors’ personal opinion and interpretation (pp. 3–5). The next pillar highlights one of the foremost features to be criticized but rarely well understood by the readers. They are Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) and Libre and Open-Source Software (FLOSS), where anyone has licence to compose, copy, edit and distribute all information freely under the attribute of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) copyright. The fourth pillar states, ‘please don’t bite newcomers’ (p. 10), indicating that all editors should treat each other with respect and courtesy. The last pillar says that ‘Wikipedia has no firm rules’ (pp. 11–12).
Chapter 2 discusses what counts as reliable and verifiable information. It also addresses Gofman’s critiques of the crowd-sourced and errors revision models of Wikipedia information construction. These critiques came up because Gofman failed to understand the multitude of guidelines and policies Wikipedia has in place to protect against misinformation and errors. Therefore, McDowell and Vetter introduce the ‘Neutral Point of View’ and ‘Verifiability’ policies to guard against the insertion of subjective opinions and to battle problematic information in Wikipedia. Agencies of editors, bots, administrators and readers interact to produce verifiable information. Meanwhile, the agencies’ abilities to identify the quality of a secondary source’s content and create tertiary article content are used as the basis for the construction of reliability and remove biased information. Interestingly, the reliability of the information in Wikipedia is enacted through the use of auto-confirmation, editors and automated bots.
Chapter 3 discusses the bias issues of notability and exclusionary practices, and how they impact the inclusion of information. The notability and exclusionary issues are shown in the controversies of Donna Strickland and Clarice Phelps, female scientists who were awarded the Nobel Prize, but faced multiple deletion and restoration reviews from Wikipedia. The fact that Pokemon and Family Guy have their own pages in Wikipedia can be seen as instances of cultural hegemony (Menking and Rosenberg, 2021; Tripodi, 2021). In this chapter, the authors argue that the notability issue is a double-edged sword as exclusionary protection of knowledge and gatekeeper roles. As an exclusionary rule, the notability pillar helps the invisible Wikipedia editors to exclude any information on topics beyond coverage. In a gatekeeper role, it limits the representation of identities, histories and marginalized biographies. Regarding the egalitarian policy of ‘anyone can edit’, the authors recommend that Wikipedia’s editors nominate article deletion as the last option after careful investigation. The above cases offer important lessons for editors, readers and Wikipedia communities to enhance readers’ cognitive maturity and awareness to minimize cultural hegemony issues in Wikipedia. The heavy-duty mission to minimize cultural hegemony issues and the lofty mission to disseminate seem very challenging, but we have to continue educating the Wikipedia communities to uphold equality of knowledge (Gnambs, 2021). The last part of this chapter also examines the limited accessibility issue that restricts editorial capacity for decision-making and to achieve Wikipedia’s grand mission.
Chapter 4 explores how community engagement determines who can contribute and exclude information. Drawing from Foucault’s rules of societies and communities, we take the core relationship between community power and production policy in Wikipedia because the rules of social communities are governed by prohibited objects, rituals and privileges. This part also elaborates how the three types of prohibition interrelate and impact Wikipedia communities and engagement (Chomsky and Foucault, 2015; Foucault, 2013).
Finally, Chapter 5 elaborates Wikipedia’s commitment to improving the issue of representation of community engagement and content equities in its strategic plans. One of Wikipedia’s strategic plans is spelt out into the Universal Code of Conduct which provides universal policies to combat misleading information and to respect its editors’ diversity through community engagement.
This book helps readers round the globe to understand how knowledge is freely disseminated, and enhances readers’ information literacy skills, especially in terms of becoming more critical readers and evaluators across digital platforms. It attempts to convince readers of the positive and negative sides of online community roles in the construction of Wikipedia. However, some crucial points should be considered. The book’s authors do not provide insightful arguments about whether an online community is a community and how their participation (strong and weak community members) constructs reliable knowledge (Bruckman, 2022). This part needs further philosophical, theoretical and practical explanations to provide more acceptable arguments for the readers. It might be well explained using social capital theory and category theory using a real online community example to illuminate the role of strong and weak ties in contributing to community knowledge construction. A strong tie of the community might be shown when a community member helps repair a car engine problem because they understand the working of a car engine. A weak tie of the community might be shown when a community member or new acquaintance provides the contact details of a mechanic who can repair the car engine. These simple examples can be applied to explain how unsystematic online communities contribute to constructing Wikipedia. In addition, the issue of anonymous user accounts and reliability information needs more elaboration regarding how socio-technical agents enhance the users’ accountability. An example of users’ accountability is best shown in the role of anonymous journal reviewers, where their identity is anonymous and accountable in reviewing the paper to achieve high academic standards for a journal. This example might be applicable for Wikipedia administrators to maintain reliability of its information. Despite these shortcomings, this book is a recommended resource, particularly to researchers, editors, readers, academicians and anyone interested in digital information, literacy and common knowledge representation on the internet.
