Representation and the problem of bibliographic imagination on Wikipedia
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2021-0153 |
| Published date | 21 December 2021 |
| Date | 21 December 2021 |
| Pages | 1075-1091 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Brendan Luyt |
Representation and the problem of
bibliographic imagination
on Wikipedia
Brendan Luyt
Division of Information Studies,
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Abstract
Purpose –The astonishing thing about Wikipedia is that despite the way it is produced, the product is as
good as it is and not far worse. But this is no reason for complacency.As others have documented, Wikipedia
has representational blind spots, produced by the nature of its editorial community and their discursive
conventions. This article wishes to look at the potential effect of sources on certain of these blind spots.
Design/methodology/approach –The author used an extended example, the Wikipedia article on the
Philippine–American War, to illustrate the unfortunateeffects that accompany a lack of attention to the kind of
sources used to produce narratives for the online encyclopaedia. The Philippine–American War article was
chosen because of its importance to American history. The war brought to the fore a debate over the future of
the USA and the legitimacy of a republic acquiringoverseas colonies. It remains controversial today, making it
essential that its representation on Wikipedia is soundly constructed.
Findings –Inattention to sources (a lack of bibliographical imagination) produces representational anomalies.
Certain sources are privileged when they should not be and others are ignored or considered as sub-standard.
Overall, the epistemological boundaries of the article in terms of what the editorial community considers
reliable and what the community of scholars producing knowledge about the war think as reliable do not
overlap to the extent that they should. The resulting narrative is therefore less rich than it otherwise could be.
Originality/value –While there exists a growing literature on the representational blind spots of Wikipedia
(gender, class, geographical region and so on), the focus has been on the composition of the demographics of the
editorial community. But equally important to the problem of representation are the sources used by that
community. Much literature has been writtenthat seeks to portray the social world of the marginalized, but it is
not used on Wikipedia, despite it easily meeting the criteria for reliability set by the Wikipedia community. This
is a tragic oversight that makes Wikipedia’s aim to be a repository for the knowledge of the world, a laudable
goal to strive for, even if in reality unobtainable, even harder to achieve than ever.
Keywords Philippines, Asia, Wikipedia, Representation, Epistemology, Bibliographic imagination,
Philippine-American war
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
It is a commonplace now to note that Wikipedia, established in 2001, has turned the world of
encyclopaedias upside down. Statistics on its remarkable early growth, its status as the sole
non-commercial organization listed amongst the most highly visited websites and its links
with that other giant of the internet, Google, have firmly put Wikipedia on the map of the
world’s (or most of the world –China and a few other countries continue to ban the site)
information infrastructure.
Wikipedia attained its current preeminence through two unique affordances. The first is
that by basing itself on the wiki model developed by Ward Cunningham in 1995, it allowed for
collaborative online editing with what appeared, at first, to be low barriers to entry and with
no central mediating authority. Its second important affordance was its preservation of even
the smallest change to article text, enhancing in this way its usability by making it possible to
reassure beginning editors that it was impossible to destroy the article they were contributing
to. It also provided evidence about how the article had been modified and by whom, which in
turn would allow for (hopefully) reasoned debate over these changes.
Bibliographic
imagination on
Wikipedia
1075
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 9 August 2021
Revised 19 November 2021
Accepted 25 November 2021
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 78 No. 5, 2022
pp. 1075-1091
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-08-2021-0153
Given these affordances, Wikipedia grew tremendously over its first decade or so of
existence. It also became the focus of attempts to understand its operation from a social point
of view as well as to what extent it refigured in a positive or negative way the epistemology of
knowledge dissemination in the digital age. While Wikipedia was lambasted by some over its
quality as an information source (McHenry, 2004;Carr, 2005;Gorman, 2007), others praised
the opportunities it gave for the opening up of the knowledge construction process to a wider
range of people and in a richer fashion than had been possible before.
Tkacz, for example, explicitly noted that Wikipedia was a technology that could “open up
or make visible political processes [of knowledge production] that have in the past best been
described by the metaphor of the black box”(Tkacz, 2007, p. 5). “If the edit function revealed
‘knowledge as dynamic,’the history function adds ‘this is what knowledge used to look like’”
generating a visibility to knowledge not available in older reference technologies (Tkacz,
2007, p. 9).
For Hartelius, “the site challenges traditional ‘monologic’expertise’so that it embeds
within its process of article creation, “a contentious struggle over authority”(Hartelius, 2010,
pp. 506–507). Dialogue is at the heart of Wikipedia editing, a dialogue that can never be
complete due to the mechanics of the site. Furthermore, on Wikipedia truth “arises from
multiple interactions between utterances within the discourse community”with the “ongoing
dialogue [becoming] a performative argument explicating the kinds of things about which an
expert can offer accurate information”(Hartelius, 2010, p. 514).
Damien Smith Pfister too argued that Wikipedia represents a challenge to “traditional
models of expertise,”specifically by enabling multiperspectivalism. This concept, which he
borrowed from Herbert Gans, originally referred to a kind of journalism “that draws in the
opinions of the many in an attempt to better encompass available opinions”(Pfister, 2011,
p. 227). He locates this work in Wikipedia not “necessarily in the main entry but in the edit
history and talk pages [...]”(Pfister, 2011, p. 227). But equally important to Pfister’s account
is the disruption of information routines and their replacement with “the ability to contribute
to Wikipedia”not necessarily through “subject matter expertise [...] but in the ability to
generate new ways of thinking about information”in a persuasive manner (Pfister, 2011,
p. 225).
And finally, Sean Hansen and his collaborators argued that Wikipedia allows for rational
discourse between its editors, which they define as “discursive action through which progress
toward emancipation from unwarranted societal control”can take place (Hansen, 2009, p. 38).
According to the authors, Wikipedia achieves this by approximating an ideal speech
situation in which all participants can put forth or question a proposal without coercion. They
point to the Wikipedia article on the controversial topic of the Armenian genocide as evidence
that this does in fact occur.
Despite its potential for positive change in the way people approach the labour of
knowledge production and dissemination in Wikipedia, we should be cautious about
accepting such changes as automatic or even long-lasting. The history of other encyclopaedic
forms, as Joseph Reagle reminds us, has seen both conservative and progressive visions
behind their creation (Reagle, 2010). Much depends on social context and social change within
the community. In the case of Wikipedia, there has been an increase in bureaucracy with a
consequent flowering of a jargon all its own as well as a plethora of rules to be followed.
Wikipedia is now said to be a much less friendly place than before and perhaps less
progressive as well.
We can trace the roots of this problem back to the early days when the encyclopaedia came
under attack by educators for its supposed inaccuracy. John Willinsky has pointed out that
these attacks were perhaps not the best position for the outside community to take, it being
rather “shortsighted to view a massive social phenomenon of this scale”solely on these terms.
Rather, because “so many people are working together out of an interest in helping other
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