While Jon talked this week about politics in Wikipedia, I thought I’d take a look at some of the politics of Wikipedia. Wikis, as “freely-editable” sources, partake of a form of “shared authority”, in this case, the authority of (according to their “About” page) 75,000 active users of all ages, cultural and social backgrounds. Because the editing and re-editing is continual, Wikipedia notes that the older articles tend to be more ocomprehensive and balanced. They attempt to achieve this balance by asking writers and editors to follow the “neutral point of view” guidelines, which state, in part, that each conflicting persprective eithin a given topic should be represented fairly, and none given precedence either through writer’s preference of general popularity. The theory of epistomology used is that, when all the different writers and editors have had their say in the writing and edititng of a piece, the development of a consensus serves to balance the entry.
The discussion pages on many entries, especially those that deal with contested issues such as the debate about teaching creationism in the schools, same-sex marriage, or the legal and ethical controversies surrounding the question of abortion, become a continuing analysis on whether the article adheres to this neutral point of view, and what may or should be added or removed to bring the entry closer to neutrality, or at least consensus.
The neural point of view is still a point of view, which Wikipedia recognizes. The idea that consensus equals neutrality, though, opens Wikipedia to the same types of criticism in terms of the political biases of its articles as is levelled at other media, such as tevelision or journalism. The arguments revolve around either the fact that only a few editors might monitor any one entry, so the “consensus” will reflect only the opinions of a few (a tyranny of the minority), or that some opinions are marginalized due to their being not very well-accepted or common (the tyranny of the majority).
In response to these issues, conservative author Andrew Schlafly started the Conservapedia wiki, Shlafly felt that Wikipedia promoted a liberal, anti-Christian and anti-American bias. He became concerned about bias in Wikipedia after the site’s editors repeatedly undid his edits on the article concerning the 2005 Kansas evolution hearings. Reading through the discussion page of that entry gives as example of what Schlafly would see as the tyranny of the minority– in this case, his argument seems to be with the editorial rubrics of other users, as opposed to issues with the NPOV itself. Schafly characterizes his treatment on the Wikipedia boards as, and developed Conservapedia to counter, a form of mobocracy– characterizing the other editors, and the wikipedia site itself, as a group of people unrestrained by any meaningful principles.
In my opinion, and recogizing that it may sound a bit sensationalist, Schlafly’s arguments and his development of Conservapedia can be seen as another entry in what has been called the “culture wars” in twentieth-century American studies. In many ways, it takes on the kind of “orthodox” (read as adhering to an external standard of ethical thought) versus “progressive” (read as adhering to an ethical standard that takes into account personal experience and subjectivism) tenor. The idea of “shared authority” lends itself to the progressive viewpoint, drawing as it does on elements of the New Social History of the 1960s; Schlafly’s reaction takes on elements of the “threat to common ethical standards” arguments that characterized the conservative reaction during the 1980s and 1990s.