Censorship Within the Wiki-Nation

“Wikipedia is like a cult”, a friend told me the other day over coffee.  ”In order for your edits to stay up, you have to be a member of their elite.”  I’d just explained to my friend the now-infamous story of how my Emac 2321 class got the entire UTD campus banned from making Wikipedia edits.  Our professor had given the class an assignment: edit Wikipedia.  Any edits were okay, he didn’t care if we vandalized the site, we just had to edit it and write about our experience in our blogs.  A few students posted deliberately incorrect information to see how long it would take to get their edits taken down.  Not only did Wikipedia editors take their information down, they traced the edits to students’ blogs, and from there were led to our class wiki.  On this wiki was a list of student blogs, email addresses, and such.  Pretty soon, all Wikipedia entries by students, including the ones that contained viable information, were taken down, and several students reported receiving nasty, hateful emails from strangers who didn’t like our class project.  Although our professor emailed Wikipedia administrators and argued with them on our behalf, as far as I know, one still cannot edit Wikipedia from a UTD campus computer.

We’d been learning in class about how the internet has been breaking down geographic barriers by creating large communities of people with common interests; the size of some of these communities, such as Facebook, is larger than the population of some small countries.  And, although the internet appears to be anarchic in nature, some of the larger online communities have developed a bureaucracy of sorts that run things, minding the herds and, in some instances, censor what is being said.

On Wikipedia, the editorial elite is becoming more and more defined.  According to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, most of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a group of about 1000 people.   “A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence,” Wales told the New York Times. “But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community.”  Researcher Ed Chi of the Palo Alto Research Center tells NewScientist that there is “growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content”.  Chi and his colleagues found that editors who make a single edit a month have their content erased 25 percent of the time, compared to 10 percent in 2003.  Revert rates for editors who make more frequent edits is much lower, starting at 5 percent in 2003 and currently hovering at 15 percent.

Those who view Wikipedia, on the other hand, number in the millions.  What is viewed by these millions is determined by a small number of people.  However, there are no checks and balances, no system of fair governance set up, just a few simple rules about how you should tell the truth in your edits and be respectful.  When students are receiving hate emails over Wikipedia vandalism, it is clear that the power held by the wiki-elite is being abused.  But where is the outrage akin to that which emerges in geographic nations where censorship is committed by the ruling elite?  The answer tells us something about the strength of those geographic boundaries in contrast to those of online communities.

According to the Palo Alto study, Wikipedia’s growth peaked in 2006, and has been declining steadily since.  Have we written everything there is to write about things?  Possibly – it isn’t likely that people will find out new information about stuff in the past, like Elvis or the ’62 World Series, that hasn’t already been written about.  The chapter is closed.  Because of this, the vibrant community of contributors will slowly dwindle.

In this respect, Wikipedia isn’t really like a nation at all.  In countries like China and Iran, citizens are slowly beginning to break through intellectual barriers established by their governments, one blog at a time; in a geographic community, citizens can’t just abandon their location and create another space to inhabit once the first has become oppressive.  The Internet is a fantastic tool, but it’s just that: a tool, not a place.  Users are much more fickle when it comes to their online communities; although they may be fervently attached initially, it’s so easy to leave that community that, once leaders mess things up, that community is done for.

Advertisement