Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-05-24/Opinion

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• Thanks for posting, and thanks for the (movement wide) compliment. I also have my pet projects having to with clouds and have increasing gravitated to local mysteries, which sometimes take me years to solve. Happy editing, thanks for your work, and please keep on contributing! Jane (talk) 15:10, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
• Thank you. I do completely different kinds of work here and am involved in very different things, but my motivation is much like yours. I'm trying to put information out there in a way that is clear and helpful. I hope that contributes to making the world a little bit better.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  05:01, 25 May 2018 (UTC)
• Thanks reiterated. I joined Wikipedia about the same time as you, though I didn't become properly active until 2007. But I remember being slightly in awe of your work, and I sometimes wondered about the person behind the contributions. Thank you for enlightening me. You can be proud of the work you do here, and in the world outside. More strength to you. Brianboulton (talk) 19:55, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

• Surviving #ShoobieInvasionSummer2018 here. Nice to see another local on WP!TeeVeeed (talk) 16:50, 26 May 2018 (UTC)
• Articles like this are what I want to see more often, since I think it is important that the Signpost provides a space for Wikipedians to not only detail their contributions to the project, but also explain their perspectives on why those contributions matter to themselves and beyond the encyclopedic goal of the project. It is precisely narratives like this which are critical in both defending and defying the Wikipedia project and in understanding both.
  For the sake of brevity, especially given that the bytes would exceed that of your entire article and such walls of text are often ignored with prejudice, I have omitted my full rant responses to your two questions at the end. Nonetheless, they proved stimulating and engaged me enough to contemplate for hours not just the questions, and not just their assumptions, but the general role of Wikipedia itself in all this and the relevance of its second pillar in particular. If you are interested in those responses anyway and delight in subjecting yourself to such graphorrhea for some unfathomable and perhaps masochistic reason, please let me know. To summarize both responses:
  • I think that while knowledge and information may play a role, that role is optional in principle and the social dynamics involved—particularly the relations and exercise of power—predominate when it comes to influencing politicians to act, as I think is the case with anyone. Once the entire question and terms like "knowledge" and "information" are problematized, however, that opens up a discourse of power that can have damning conclusions for the Wikipedia project and its role in "the #Resistance."
  • In short: all of them. I think the scope of the question is too narrow, however, in part due to that answer. The systems and institutions of society, and indeed the social totality itself, can likewise be described as thriving on popular ignorance. Nonetheless, I think approaching this problem as one of ignorance and knowledge is fatally flawed because that ignorance produces and maintains relations of power; and that knowledge needs to be embodied in enaction to be useful, as exemplified by your activism. This, again, turns to matters of power and its practice.
  Thank you for your article, Hurricanehink, and for all the work you have done to improve coverage on Wikipedia. It is appreciated regardless of whether it is known. —Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 02:35, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

• The systems and institutions of society, and indeed the social totality itself, can likewise be described as thriving on popular ignorance. - now that's a justification for Wikipedia if I ever read one! How do we fix that, both from a society and a Wikipedia point of view? Societally - our ignorance is nostalgized and reappears as the Mandala effect, such a fake movie that people would know didn't exist if they just looked it up on Wikipedia. That also links up with the fact that Wikipedia is an incomplete encyclopedia. It would be nice if all new editors to the project were adding good content or copyediting existing content instead of doing vandalism - it would save an incredible amount of time for admins and regular users alike. Alas, our society values misinformation for the sake of... politics? Entertainment? Malice? ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 03:44, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

• Apologies for the delay; I have been distracted by other matters. I was also unsure about whether to post this, both due to the content and due to the length. Hopefully, this reply is sufficient even if excessive. Lastly, as a preface to these remarks, I should clarify that I agree that Wikipedia can be a great positive influence when it comes to addressing the kind of "nostalgized" ignorance you are describing. However, when this discussion is extended to the social impact of Wikipedia more generally—particularly regarding its coverage of philosophy, history, politics, economics, and so on—I think it becomes far less clear. It is the latter that I am addressing below.
  It can be a "justification for Wikipedia", but I think that assumes Wikipedia does not contribute to the maintenance of that popular ignorance. If Wikipedia is ultimately the "summarizer of the status quo" (as I claimed in my full responses), then it nonetheless maintains and reinforces that status quo, which is the same status quo that produces and thrives on that popular ignorance. In that sense, Wikipedia can—and arguably does—act as both the opponent and organizer of popular ignorance.
  Consequently, I think that Wikipedia's capacity to address popular ignorance is necessarily defined and confined by its project as the summarizer of the status quo. Moreover, that popular ignorance almost certainly is promoted on Wikipedia, especially due to it being the encyclopedia anyone can edit. If that popular ignorance is crucial to the preservation of the status quo, and Wikipedia is the summarizer of that status quo, then Wikipedia is likely also assisting the preservation of that popular ignorance generally beyond whatever it does to counter it particularly, even when its role is as countering general ignorance and accidentally preserving particular ones. I wonder what an agnotologic analysis of Wikipedia would look like.
  On "fix[ing]" popular ignorance, that of course entirely depends on how that is defined. When it comes to popular ignorance totally and especially systemically, I suspect that is a project necessarily beyond that of Wikipedia—at least, as presently and historically understood—because its own policies and principles preclude that. Although Wikipedia was founded with a commitment to rather radical ideas, such as free knowledge and free education; the core policies upon which all of Wikipedia was predicated were (and are) neutrality, verifiability, and unoriginality, the last two of which are arguably derivatives of the neutrality principle. It is the latter, and not any of those former, which has been exempt from compromise; and as far as I am aware, neutrality is one of only two (non-legal) policies which cannot be ignored—or can be, but will be enforced anyway—because there is no acceptable use case in which its ignorance would help with "improving or maintaining Wikipedia" without also catastrophically compromising the integrity of the project itself. Every other rule, policy, and guideline has exceptions and edge cases, but not the neutrality principle. The other is the policy on consensus, though I would consider it to likewise be a derivative of the neutrality principle and even it has exceptions. (The legal policies are non-negotiable for legal reasons, but they are not founding principles.) In every case, what unites all these policies and principles is their support for the same status quo that thrives on popular ignorance.
  This leads back to power. In my opinion, how to "fix" the problem of popular ignorance socially and societally—indeed, and whether it is a problem or fixable at all—is a philosophical and political question. A quick demonstration of this would be to problematize words like "ignorance" and "misinformation". According to whom? Who benefits? What is being assumed? Which people and groups are being classed as such? Which are privileged and which are marginalized? Moreover, given Wikipedia's role as described above, is opposition to the status quo and the popular ignorance on which it thrives reconciliable with support for the Wikipedia project?
  When it comes to addressing these problems, at least in the domains wherein such problems are integral to the systems and institutions in which we live, I am not confident in Wikipedia's constitutional capacity to facilitate that. That would require Wikipedia to support something other than the status quo and doing so would violate its founding principle of neutrality. Wikipedia may have a role to play, but the exact nature of that role—and whose side it is on—is unclear, at least to me. —Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 05:59, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

• To your questions - I think that many Wikipedia editors have stories about how they have evidence that their Wikipedia editing was a contributing factor to some social change. Sometimes the cause of the change is informing the people in decision-making roles; more often the cause of the change is informing the people who watch the changemakers. There are a lot of organizations which operate in uninformed environments and leverage their information over people with less insight. Again, Wikipedia corrects that imbalance and is a communication channel to increase anyone's opportunity to make informed decisions if they have to time to learn. Even we try to reduce that amount of time to make it easier. Blue Rasberry (talk) 02:35, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
• Thank you for taking the time to write this and for your work elsewhere in the movement. Ckoerner (talk) 16:34, 31 May 2018 (UTC)