Books on the sociocultural and political impacts of the Internet have typically focused on the advances online communication makes possible or the good things in modern culture that the Internet is pushing aside. Proponents of Internet culture highlight the failings in traditional systems of power and cultural production that online communities can overcome; critics emphasize the good things in those systems that the Internet is undermining. In Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes, Mathieu O'Neil instead explores the ways online communities recreate the failures of offline culture.
O'Neil, a researcher who works in Australia and earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from a French university, approaches online social systems from the perspective of critical theory. Other scholars have used critical theory to explore the Internet in terms of communication and knowledge production—in the case of Wikipedia, for example, "Wikipedia, Critical Social Theory, and the Possibility of Rational Discourse" argues that Wikipedia is a close approximation of Jürgen Habermas's ideal of rational discourse—but O'Neil focuses instead on the twin concepts of autonomy and authority.
The first half of Cyberchiefs develops a conceptual basis for understanding online authority. In the second half, O'Neil presents four case studies on individual "tribes" with very different authority structures: the anarcho-primitivism website primitivism.com, the political blog community dailykos.com, the free software community of debian.org, and our own free encyclopedia project wikipedia.org (specifically English Wikipedia).
The prevailing ideology of the Internet, O'Neil observes, is closely aligned to the philosophical and political outlook of the earlier hackers who built it:
Since utopian political solutions are no longer considered likely to occur offline, the Internet has come to embody the spirit of Utopia. In such a charmed universe everyone can have a say, from 'cyberlibertarians' who decry the influence of governments to 'cybercommunists' who believe that peer production will revolutionise both the market economy and traditional hierarchy. The primary tenet of the ideology of the Internet is that online networks are privileged sites for the flowering of freedom.[1]
The flowering of freedom is indeed an important part of the Internet's impact, but this emphasis on freedom obscures the ways that traditional forms of power, privilege and domination carry over to the online world. Early students of online sociology described the web as inherently anti-authoritarian (primarily because of its technical structure, an open network). O'Neil shows that concepts of authority and power developed by social theorists can apply to both the web in general and to specific online tribes—a term he uses to indicate that the social and political structures of online communities are largely independent of nation-states. Adapting Max Weber's tripartite classification of authority, O'Neil identifies three forms of authority that structure the social environment of online tribes:
In addition to these forms of potentially legitimate authority, O'Neil shows that vestiges of power, privilege and symbolic violence from the broader culture, what he terms archaic force, have a dramatic impact on the web's social landscape. For example, in principle blogging is a way for anyone—no matter how qualified or unqualified, powerful or marginal—to reach a wide audience and make him or herself heard. But in practice the "A-list" bloggers that do reach large audiences are overwhelmingly social elites; "they are not only white, male and middle-class," writes O'Neil, "they are also highly educated, placing them effectively higher on the social ladder than the 'elite' mainstream journalists whose power they are supposed to be contesting."[2]
This type of pattern—those with the training and free time afforded by social privilege rise to the top—is also apparent in free software communities and on Wikipedia and other seemingly egalitarian online knowledge projects. O'Neil sees at work here "the heart of social domination [which is] making the socially constructed appear natural."[3]
Archaic force also manifests itself in received netiquette conventions and patterns of online discourse that encourage symbolic violence. Flaming and trolling are the purest expressions of archaic force; the flaming and trolling of newcomers and others who do not conform to community norms is a way of asserting power. O'Neil writes that "In general women have a deep aversion towards the kinds of adversarial exchange that men thrive on", and argues that early netiquette specifically encouraged male styles of adversarial discussion, even flaming, about intellectual and ideological matters but discouraged discussion of personal matters.[4] (We see the legacy of such netiquette on Wikipedia, where aggressive discussion is acceptable but personalizing disputes is forbidden; whether O'Neil would consider this an archaic residue of sexism is unclear, but at least one scholar of wiki communities has argued that Wikipedia-like projects have an inherent gender bias.)
The four online communities explored in Cyberchiefs sit at different points on what O'Neil terms the space of online authority. Online primitivists—whose philosophy is fundamentally opposed to the internet and who have no interest in organizing a participatory online community—eschew both charismatic authority and sovereign authority online; primitivism.com acts as a venue for presenting the views of a small number of primitivist "anti-authorities" and extending offline debates among published primitivist thinkers through the fisking of rival essays.
The liberal American political blog Dailykos.com, like other blog communities and the blogosphere as a whole, is structured mainly by charismatic authority, with the hacker-charisma and index-charisma types both playing important roles. The initial popularity and broad political influence (i.e., index authority) of Daily Kos derived, in part, from founder Markos 'Kos' Moulitsas's talent for predicting election outcomes (a form of hacker-charisma), and in terms of community governance, what Kos says goes. In the rest of the Daily Kos community, the two forms of charismatic authority intertwined; members with trusted judgment and blogging ability are given access to the front page and select diaries (blog posts) of others to highlight, and the most popular posts are also linked automatically on the front page. However, autonomy is limited for those who would challenge the charismatic authority of Kos and his deputies, as O'Neil documents in the case of Hillary Clinton supporters during the 2008 Democratic primary; Kos and much of the community supported Barack Obama, and strident Clinton supporters were systematically marginalized and ostracized, without recourse to much in the way of codified rights or community laws to protect them.
The debian.org development community features strong elements of both popular sovereign authority and charisma authority. O'Neil considers Debian "by far the most revealing of what tribal distributed leadership would entail for the management of complex infrastructural systems", in part because "the stakes are much higher when participants can cause significant harm to the project."[5] Debian stands out among open source communities because of its well-developed governance system. Final authority rests with the development community itself, with leaders elected by the developers and major decisions decided by vote; strict merit-based gatekeeping limits entrance into the community to those with demonstrated software skills. The community structure is highly modular (paralleling the software itself), which allows a degree of autonomy for each developer even while the output of the project as a whole must be tightly coordinated. Although there are elements of index-charisma authority—long-term influence from early leaders—by-and-large, Debian is governed according to the collective will of its community, successful anarchy in action. Conflict in the Debian community often centers on the defense of honor, either against outside threats or intra-community insults; when there is a perceived affront to a developer's honor, communications can break down into flame wars, to the detriment of the community.
In the book's final case study, O'Neil examines how authority works on Wikipedia. Wikipedia governance relies primarily on charismatic authority—users deferred to because of their reputations, as talented contributors (hacker-charisma) and/or long-standing and dedicated active community members (index-charisma)—and popular sovereign authority—community-created rules and norms.
"Can people pull rank in a rankless universe", he asks?[6] The answer, of course, is yes; things like rollback rights, adminship, checkuser, and even—perhaps especially—edit count can serve as markers of authority in a social system based on constant surveillance of everyone's actions by everyone else. (In The Wikipedia Revolution, Andrew Lih compared Wikipedia to the benign street culture praised by urbanist Jane Jacobs: cities are safe when they are always under the watchful eye of residents. Others invoke a more sinister metaphor, likening Wikipedia to the Panopticon prison in which inmates never know whether they are being watched and so must behave as if they are.)
It is when surveillance breaks down that authority becomes a problem in the Wikipedia community. The Essjay controversy is the best known example of this; while claiming (falsely) to be a professor of theology, editor Essjay at times touted his supposed credentials in content disputes. But the most significant section focuses on what O'Neil terms "the Durova dust-up", the incident in which User:Durova briefly blocked User:!! as a sockpuppet based on an investigation that was not transparent to community surveillance (which led to Durova resigning her adminship). Here the dangers of both too much and too little surveillance were at work. O'Neil explains that "the incident resonated deeply with many editors, because it commingled authority and secrecy." The affront to the project's core value of openness and transparency was matched by "an equally powerful, and opposite, feeling: that some admins had been the victim of harassment and stalking because of their work for the project; that these experiences were frightening and painful; and that most of the victims were female."[7] [Clarification: O'Neil does not discuss specific instances of harassment, but refers in the preceding quote to the broader context of harassment as part of the spectrum of disruptive action, which efforts like "sock hunting" are employed to prevent.]
Charismatic and sovereign authority predominate, but archaic force is not altogether absent from Wikipedia. O'Neil singles out a Jimmy Wales quote from a 2006 New Yorker article (the one at the center of the Essjay controversy) to show how offline injustice and inequality is reinscribed in Wikipedia: "If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist", said Wales. (O'Neil offers a wider discussion of Wikipedia in his recent essay from Le Monde diplomatique, "Wikipedia: experts are us".)
Historical factors and offline injustices—sexism, economic inequality, political geography—can clearly tilt the scales in online tribes. There are (at least so far) no online Utopias. The question for Wikipedia is, how deep is the shadow of history? How set in stone is Wikipedia's community culture, crafted as it has been by the earliest members with their peculiar outlooks and inclinations? Through the mechanism of preferential attachment in article creation and expansion and the propagation of charismatic authority, will Wikipedia always retain the mark of the early community's interests and prejudices?
O'Neil's particular analysis of Wikipedia includes some worthwhile points (and some errors and misinterpretations), but the case study only breaks the surface of the authority issue. The concepts of archaic force and the three modes of online authority are useful concepts for thinking about the community; Wikipedia authority is heterogeneous, sometimes with charismatic authority most important, sometimes with sovereign authority, and in our worst moments with archaic force deciding things.
License update, Google Translate, GLAM conference, Paid editing
15 June 2009
Licensing vote results announced, resolution passed
25 May 2009
Licensing vote begins
13 April 2009
Community weighs license update
30 March 2009
License update, Commons cartoons, films milestone, and more
16 March 2009
News and notes: Elections, licensing update, and more
8 February 2009
GFDL 1.3 released, will allow Wikimedia migration to Creative Commons license
17 November 2008
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License update, Google Translate, GLAM conference, Paid editing |
Erik Möller has proposed final site terms of use "to be implemented on all Wikimedia projects that currently use GFDL as their primary content license, as well as the relevant multimedia templates." [1] The draft of these terms can be found on Meta, including a proposed footer for all projects, text to go under the edit box, and a page outlining site-wide terms of use, which includes instructions for reusers. Discussion of the terms is occurring on the Meta talk page.
In his message to Foundation-l, Möller proposed updating the site-wide variables for the terms on June 15, and adding a terms of use page to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki for all projects to refer to. Although acknowledging that this is not nearly enough time for translations to be done, Möller stated that there is a "fixed deadline" of beginning the licensing change of June 15.
On the English Wikipedia, the changes were implemented at 00:34 and 00:39 on 16 June 2009.
On June 9th, the Google Translator Toolkit was released. It allows translators to improve Google's machine translations. Documents can be uploaded for translation, and then worked on in a Google Docs-like interface. There is built-in support for translating Wikipedia articles; one of the uploading options is to simply type in a Wikipedia URL and choose which language you wish to translate it to. According to the Wikimedia Foundation's blog post, "Volunteers at Effat University in Saudi Arabia have been working with Google to translate over 100,000 words from the English Wikipedia into Arabic to help build the Toolkit and pave the way for further translations of Wikipedia content."
Wikimedia Australia is planning a conference called "Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia: Finding the common ground" for August 6 and 7 in Canberra. The conference has a wiki page at http://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/GLAM. The event is aimed at stakeholders from Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums in Australia and New Zealand. The lead organizer of the event is Liam Wyatt, VP of Wikimedia Australia.
More information and background to the event can be found in Brianna Laugher's blog post and Liam Wyatt's message to Foundation-l.
At the beginning of last week, it was revealed that User:Nichalp, a longtime editor with bureaucrat, oversight and administrator status, had been accepting money from various companies and persons to create articles about them according to their wishes, using a sockpuppet (User:Zithan). A survey by User:Ha!, posted on June 12, connected more than 10 different job ads on Elance.com (a US website allowing freelancers to bid for tasks submitted by companies) with Zithan's edits. The public job history for nicholas a on Elance lists 16 different accepted projects, all Wikipedia-related, from October 2008 to June 2009, with disclosed payments for one article ranging from $110 to $600, adding up to total earnings of $2,525, and several very satisfied customer reviews.
On June 13, the ArbCom published a decision (adopted 8-0 with one abstention) stating:
In response to community concerns about Nichalp (talk · contribs) using an undisclosed account (Zithan (talk · contribs)) for paid editing, and because of Nichalp's failure to reply to the Arbitration Committee's email enquiry about these concerns, Nichalp's bureaucrat, administrator and oversight status, and his access to the associated mailing lists (<functionaries-en@lists.wikimedia.org> and <oversight-l@lists.wikimedia.org>), are temporarily removed and User:Zithan is indefinitely blocked.
Nichalp had described himself on his user page as a 26-year-old from Bombay, India, with 26,000 edits, 17 featured articles and 31 barnstars since joining Wikipedia in 2004, and "entitled to display [a] Platinum Editor Star". He marked the account inactive in January 2009, but Zithan has edited as late as June 1, and the profile for "nicholas a" on Elance.com currently shows June 12 as the last sign-in date.
The discovery prompted the creation of a Request for comment on June 9, about how to handle paid editing in general (see also this week's Discussion report). The RfC generated a considerable amount of discussion. As of June 15, 56 users have submitted a statement, among them Jimbo Wales, who wrote:
It is not ok with me that anyone ever set up a service selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, administrator, bureaucrat, etc. I will personally block any cases that I am shown. There are of course some possibly interesting alternatives, not particularly relevant here, but the idea that we should ever accept paid advocates directly editing Wikipedia is not ever going to be ok. Consider this to be policy as of right now.
In 2006, a company, MyWikiBiz, attempted to set up such a service; see the coverage in the Signpost's October 9, 2006 edition.
As mentioned in a previous issue, Wikipedia articles have begun appearing in Google News results. The Washington Post discussed the various opinions on the issue. Search expert Michael Gray described the idea as "incredibly horrible." Zachary M. Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab supported the idea as potentially being a major step forward in journalism.
As of 14 June, it appears that Google News has rolled out Wikipedia links for all users. The links were initially only shown to a limited number of Google News users. The World News section has included prominent links to a number of Wikipedia articles.
In "Like Boiling a Frog", David Runciman reviews Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution for the London Review of Books and takes a broad look at Wikipedia. The title of the essay comes from a line in the collaboratively written final chapter of Lih's book, which deals with Wikipedia's future and the gradual but significant changes that are going on in the project. Runciman first complains of about the cliché, and says about the group-edited style of Wikipedia itself (here he is writing specifically of the set of Objectivism articles):
All of it reads as though it has been worked over far too much, and like any form of writing that is overcooked it alienates the reader by appearing to be closed off in its own private world of obsession and anxiety.
However, Runciman concludes: "There is no other way I could have found out about boiling frogs – truly, for all its flaws, Wikipedia is a wonderful thing."
In "Traces of Gunman’s Online Life Begin to Vanish" (The New York Times News Blog, June 10, 2009), Noam Cohen reports on the web presence of James von Brunn, the suspect in the June 10 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting.
Brunn appears to have a Wikipedia account, although one with very few edits. After creating the account in December 2007, User:James von Brunn edited the article about Cordell Hull (US secretary of state during the Roosevelt administration) to add the claim that his wife was an "Orthodox Jew" (which, as Cohen notes, was removed by another user). In May 2009 he published a short biography of himself on his user page, mentioning his anti-semitic views and his previous imprisonment for his 1981 attempt "to place the Federal Resrve Board of Governors [sic] under legal, non-violent citizens arrest". His request for advice on how to convert this text into a Wikipedia article was answered by a suggestion to read Wikipedia:Your first article, Wikipedia:Conflict of interest and Wikipedia:Notability. He also seemed to ask about how to add a letter from the late White Nationalist Revilo P. Oliver to the article about US holocaust denier Willis Carto. The account was blocked indefinitely on June 10, and the userpage was deleted for a short time. Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh stated: "The editors have identified that the statements on his user page constituted a violation of policy of hate speech and moved quickly to protect and remove the information". Walsh also noted that the same biographical information had appeared on other websites, too. The complete deletion of the user page has since been reversed; as of now the only deleted revisions are vandalism and commentary added after von Brunn was linked to the shooting. A notice was placed on the page explaining that "The text on this page violated Wikipedia's policies on user pages and it has been blanked".
In May 2009, Chemistry, Atom, Periodic table, and Carbon each received over 100,000 page views. Our chemistry articles have a wide appeal, including students, scientists, material engineers, and just plain curious folk. WikiProject Chemistry covers nearly 4000 articles and nearly 150 participants. Here to tell us more about the project are Physchim62 and Walkerma.
1. WikiProject Chemistry has several daughter projects covering such aspects as chemical elements and chemicals. What sorts of articles does WikiProject Chemistry provide unique coverage of?
2. Excluding articles covered by WP:ELEMENTS and WP:CHEMICALS, WikiProject Chemistry has only three Featured Articles: Aldol reaction, Atom, and Diamond, none of which were brought to FA status by the project's members. While featured articles are not the perfect measure of a project's success, what factors do you attribute to the lack of effort put forth by the project members towards building them?
3. Indeed, it seems that there are always little cracks that need to be filled. What can you tell us about the old Gold Book pilot test?
4. What gaps in coverage exist that could be filled by such contributors?
5. As for contributors with no expertise in such areas, how can they help to improve chemistry articles?
6. Finally, do you think any chemistry-related articles would benefit from the implementation of flagged or sighted revisions?
The following is a brief overview of discussions taking place on the English Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
This is a list of current bot requests for approval, with brief descriptions of the proposed tasks. See this week's technology report for information on recently-approved bots.
The following requests for adminship are currently open:
Two editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Colds7ream (nom) and Enigmaman (nom).
This section is now being written in the Technology Report, and contains an expanded description of the bots that have been approved. This week's article.
Five articles were promoted to featured status this week: 1941 Florida hurricane (nom), Tropical Storm Marco (2008) (nom), Subtropical Storm Andrea (2007) (nom), Wilfrid (nom) and The Hardy Boys (nom).
Twelve lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of Emperors of the Han Dynasty (nom), List of Grade I listed buildings in Sedgemoor (nom), List of U.S. state and territory mottos (nom), List of Medal of Honor recipients (Veracruz) (nom), Duffy discography (nom), Roberto Clemente Award (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Snow Patrol (nom), List of PWG World Tag Team Champions (nom), 2008 IIHF World Championship rosters (nom), List of United States Military Academy alumni (athletic figures) (nom), List of State University of New York units (nom) and List of Washington Metro stations (nom).
Six topics were promoted to featured status this week: Lights and Sounds (nom), 2008–09 Michigan Wolverines men's basketball team (nom), Tucker class destroyers (nom), Paul London and Brian Kendrick (nom), Grade I listed buildings in Runcorn (nom) and Han Dynasty (nom).
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page this week as Today's featured article: New York State Route 311, Ōkami, Cherry Springs State Park, 2008 Brazilian Grand Prix, British Empire, Sei Whale, Michael Tritter and William D. Boyce.
Five articles were delisted this week: New Radicals (nom), Omnipotence paradox (nom), Eldfell (nom), Yesterday (song) (nom), Equal Protection Clause (nom),
No lists were delisted this week.
One topic was delisted this week: Wilco discography (nom).
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page this week as picture of the day: Japanese calligraphy, Coachella Valley, Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, Tasmanian Native-hen, European beewolf, Aqueduct of Segovia and Saddam Hussein.
No featured sounds were promoted this week.
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Seven pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Please note that some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.8 (f08e6b3), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.
The version of MediaWiki running on Wikimedia servers has been updated from r48811 to r51904 (r51864 for extensions). The last code update prior to this was on March 25. This means that many previously mentioned bug fixes and new features will now be available. If you notice any new bugs, you can ask about them on the Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) or the tech IRC channels, and they can be reported via the bug tracker. The update caused a number of user scripts (including Twinkle) to break; this was quickly noticed and fixed for those better maintained but errors may linger in older scripts.
7 bots or bot tasks were approved for operation this week. These included:
LaraBot (task request), for warning editors who create unreferenced biographies of living people;
Erik9bot (task request), for performing a range of categorisations and maintenance edits on articles about chemical elements and their isotopes.
Also approved were MastiBot (task request), RedBot (task request), AHbot (task request), WikiStatsBOT (task request) and Egmontbot (task request). This week's discussion report contains information on bot requests and related discussions.
{{PAGENAME}} when categorising templates.
The Arbitration Committee opened one case and closed three this week, leaving five open.
