Note:
this blog post isn't as complete as I'd like. I think this is an idea
worth developing into a longer paper, but I wanted to get my ideas
down and see where they took me. Additionally, I'd really like to
hear what thoughts whoever's reading this have; so long as 91% of my
readers aren't males, wisdom of the crowds dictates that I'll write a
better article with help rather than without help.
A
final note: I aim to write this article in an analytic rather than
literary style. I'm not sure that I'll be happy with that stylistic
choice, but it's a worthwhile endeavor. I apologize if it doesn't
hold your interest.
“Proverb
for Paranoids #3: If
they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry
about answers.”
-Thomas
Pynchon
Wikipedia
has grown increasingly reputable over the past decade. Studies like
the one done by Nature
comparing the wiki's reliability to the Encyclopedia Britannica
suggest that Wikipedia is as or more reliable than its paperbound
moribund counterpart. The epistemological implications of these
studies are vast; if the digital collectivism of Wikipedia is capable
of eliminating the perception of a gap between the layman masses and
the ivory-tower'd experts what head academia by crafting a repository
of knowledge which is both shaped by democratic consensus and is as
reliable testimonywise as materials published by experts, then this
'consensus' can supplant (or, at the very least, support) these
one-way sources of testimony and provide us, the curious reader, with
a democratic testimony upon which we can build our knowledge (and, by
extension, our reality – a premise that I hope you all will accept
until I have the opportunity, a bit further down, to prove it
myself.)
Here's
my argument: through the editorial practices of 'consensus' and
'neutral point of view,' Wikipedia offers itself implicitly up as a
neutral mirror of reality. Given the authority of the sixth
most-visited website in the world (and certainly the most-accessed
encyclopedia), I claim that Wikipedia is a large part of the
knowledge that we, as digital citizens, possess. Further,
non-proximate knowledge (i.e. knowledge received through testimony
rather than through direct experience) is considered justification
for knowledge by much of even the philosophical community. In a
paper, I'll prove that, but for now I'm going to ask you all to take
my word for it. As a result of these premises, a reader of Wikipedia
is receiving two things – one, a quanta of admittedly questionable
(but probably true!) knowledge, and two, a quanta of information
about what the Neutral Point of View Consensus on a subject is. These
two units of information are easily and often confused, and therein
lies the problem. Having established the way that Wikipedia's
Consensus, NPOV, and reliability shape knowledge which shapes
reality, I aim to problematize the issue by raising the question of
Wikipedia's gender gap. 91% of all editors on Wikipedia are male.
This problem doesn't necessarily bump into the first quanta –
knowledge that comes from a male editor is no more or less likely to
be true than knowledge that comes from a female editor – but hugely
snarls the second quanta. The focus of Wikipedia's discourse – the
depth of coverage and the questions asked, if nothing else – are
shaped by this overwhelmingly male userbase, even though there is no
commiserate gap in Wikipedia users (54% of adult males who use the
internet, as of 2011). As a result, the knowledge – and, thus, the
reality – that Wikipedia imparts to its legions of users is
necessarily not representative of the demographic parity between men
and women in reality.
…
alright, I'm going to continue to update this as the day progresses
but I really wanted to post something, so here's what I have so far.
It's more of an abstract than anything else, but I'm also going to
post some of the quotes I aim to use, along with some links. It'll be
more serious soon, I promise! I just have a lot of other work to do.
The
article which gave me the idea in the first place – a great source
for the factual gender gap in Wikipedia:
“Wikipistemology”,
by Falls- a non-critical look at the epistemic virtues of Wikipedia.
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