Knowledge or unreality?

• Dariusz Jemielniak, Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia (Stanford University Press 2014).
• Charles Seife, Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It's True? (Viking/Penguin 2014).

In Common Knowledge: An Ethnography of Wikipedia, Dariusz Jemielniak—User:Pundit on the English and Polish Wikipedias and a steward—discusses Wikipedia from the standpoint of an experienced editor and administrator who is also a university professor specializing in management and organizations. In Virtual Reality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It's True?, journalism professor and author Charles Seife presents a more broadly themed work reminding us to question the reliability of information found throughout the Internet; he cites Wikipedia as a prime example of a website whose contents contain enough misinformation to warrant caution before relying on the information on the site.

Jemielniak's book is an academic discussion of Wikipedia; he does not aim to present either a "how-to" guide for editors and readers or a complete history of the project. He states that his "book is a result of long-term, reflexive participative ethnographic research" performed as a "native anthropologist." (p. 193) (The word "ethnographic" in this context refers not to ethnicity in the quasi-racial sense, but to the study of a subgroup of the population—here, the subgroup that actively edits Wikipedia.) By this, Jemielniak means that he has spent several years as a Wikipedian, has introspected about his experiences throughout that time through the lens of his academic background, and has now written up his findings and conclusions. I don't think he means that he became active in Wikipedia for the purpose of doing research about it, although it seems quite possible that he started thinking about combining his editing hobby and his professional interests fairly early in his wiki-career.

I cannot pretend to evaluate Common Knowledge as a work of anthropology or of organizational management science. As a general reader and a Wikipedian, I found the book interesting as a compilation of incidents in Wikipedia's history, some of which I was already familiar with and some of which were new to me, and as a reminder of some issues the project faces as it moves forward. Non-academic readers may find the book lacking in a unifying theme, beyond that Wikipedia plays an important role in the world today that warrants academic study of its culture and communities. Jemielniak recently stated (on a Wikipediocracy thread) that "I wrote this book for academic research purposes, I absolutely have no hope of high sales (and honestly, I'll be surprised if it goes beyond 500 copies)." The book has been praised by Jimmy Wales, Clay Shirky, Jonathan Zittrain, and Zygmunt Bauman and it deserves to sell well over 500 copies, but it won't make be making the wiki-best-seller list either.

The eight chapters of Common Knowledge discuss basic rules governing Wikipedia, different roles contributors take on within the project, dispute resolution processes, and the nature of project leadership. The topics are illustrated with examples of disputes or controversies drawn primarily from English Wikipedia history (though controversies about actions by Jimbo Wales on Wikimedia Commons and Wikiversity are also mentioned). The incidents Jemielniak discusses are presented in detail and accurately, but some of them are ten years old and don't necessarily reflect the project's practices or realities today. For example, Jemielniak reviews the bitter and protracted disagreement on En-WP regarding when the historical German-language name "Danzig" should be used for the city now located in Poland and known as Gdańsk. Perhaps aided by his own geographical and historical background, he does an excellent job of presenting the history of the dispute, surveying the arguments for the different points of view, and explaining why the dispute-resolution process ultimately reached the result it did. He does not, however, discuss whether the Wikipedia of 2014 would address the same issue, if it were arising anew, in the same fashion that the much younger Wikipedia of 2003-2004 did.

Jemielniak also doesn't spend much time discussing how lessons learned from Wikipedia dispute-resolution experiences can be used to minimize future disputes or to improve future decision-making. I find this unfortunate, but I can't call it a fault of the book, both because ethnography is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and more importantly because the failure to take stock of dispute-resolution successes and failures has struck me for years as a project-wide myopia. In the 13½ years of English Wikipedia there have been, in round numbers, a billion edit-wars, yet no one knows whether most edit-wars get resolved by civil discussion reaching a consensus on the optimal wording, or by one side's giving up and wandering away (or sometimes by everyone's ultimately losing interest and wandering away). Similarly, the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee has decided several hundred cases since 2004, and community discussions on noticeboards have resolved thousands more content and conduct disputes, yet no one ever seems to have gone back and conducted any systematic review of which approaches to dispute-resolution worked better than others. That's a different book that ought to be written, although it too risks selling fewer than 500 copies.

Speaking of ArbCom (which I'm prone to do since I've served on ours since 2008), Jemielniak mentions the Arbitration Committees of both the Polish Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia. He opens the book with an account of a Polish Wikipedia arbitration case that resulted in his being blocked from Po-WP for one day. He claims that in retrospect he accepts the ruling against him, but his account of the dispute makes that ruling sound terribly unfair—a cynical gesture of evenhandedness, but meted out to editors who didn't deserve to be treated evenhandedly. (But of course those of us who can't read Polish will never hear the other side of the story.)

The book's mentions of En-WP ArbCom are sound, but dated. He discusses the historical origin of the Committee as an extension of the original authority of Jimmy Wales, and cites a handful of Committee decisions, the most recent of which is an unusual case-motion from 2009. He does not spend much time on the current role of the Committee. That's actually a very defensible omission, because at least on English Wikipedia (I can't speak for other projects), while ArbCom has other responsibilities (some of which most of us don't particularly want), the importance of the Arbitration Committee as an arbitration committee has radically declined in the past few years. (I've discussed this decline here.) So Jemielniak's not spending nearly as much space discussing arbitration as one might expect in a book about Wikipedia hierarchies, leadership, and dispute resolution turns out to be a reasonable decision, but one that is not explained.

Although the academic style of Common Knowledge (and the price of the book) will deter some readers, Wikipedians who want a taste of Jemielniak's thinking about the project can find it in a recent article he contributed to Slate, "The Unbearable Bureaucracy of Wikipedia". In this article, aimed at a general rather than an academic audience, Jemielniak posits that Wikipedia's "increasingly legalistic atmosphere is making it impossible to attract and keep the new editors the site needs." It's a thoughtful article that identifies a significant issue, and its more direct approach accompanied by concrete suggestions make this article more accessible than Common Knowledge for non-specialist readers. All of us who want Wikipedia to thrive, which requires that the project welcome newcomers and facilitate their becoming regular editors, can hope for more such wisdom from this Pundit.

By contrast to Jemielniak's academic treatment specific to Wikipedia, Charles Seife—the author of Zero, Alpha and Omega, and Proofiness—has written a more broadly themed book about the unreliability of information found throughout the Internet. "Just because the Internet told you," the subtitle asks, "how do you know it's true?" Now at one level, the fact that the Internet contains a fair amount of misinformation is not breaking news; "Someone is wrong on the internet" became a meme and then a cliché for a reason. Lots of us think we're sophisticated enough to avoid falling into the kinds of traps that Seife warns us about—but the warnings in Seife's book are important and timely nevertheless.

Wikipedia is just one of the many online sources of bad information that Seife discusses, but for obvious reasons it's the one I'll focus on here. Seife catalogs a dozen instances in which deliberate misinformation was introduced into Wikipedia. Such misinformation is inserted into Wikipedia, perhaps every day, by a miscellaneous array of pranksters, hoaxers, vandals, defamers, and in a few instances by Wikipedia critics conducting so-called "breaching experiments" to see how long a falsehood placed in Wikipedia stays in Wikipedia. (Such experiments are not permitted; see also Wikipedia:Do not create hoaxes.) Some of Seife's examples will be well-known to "Signpost" readers, such as the Colbert-inspired tripling of elephants and the Bicholim Conflict; others were new to me, such as AC Omonia Nicosia and the Edward Owens hoax.