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Thus far and no farther?
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Wikipedia's protected pages are closed to all editing and semi-protected pages are open only to registered users. What does this bode for cyber democracy?
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PHOTO: BHAGYA PRAKASH K.
SUCCESS STORY Almost everyone with a Net connection refers to Wikipedia.
It must be hard being Jimmy Wales. After all, Wikipedia, the hugely successful online encyclopaedia he founded just can't seem to please its critics. For many months now, the website has been savagely attacked for lacking accuracy and reliability, with more than a handful of entries sporting incorrect, sometimes even malicious misinformation. The most famous case involved an entry on retired journalist John Seigenthaler, which at one point claimed he was suspected of being involved in the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy. Wales, and the thousand or so volunteers who help administer the site, responded in just the manner one would expect. They went about setting formal rules in place. These included formal bans on vandals defacing particular sites, along with protecting or semi-protecting pages that have been vandalised or are in the middle of an edit war. While a protected page is closed to all editing, semi-protected pages are open to users who have registered with the site for at least four days. The objective, explains Wales, is to go beyond the issue of just vandalism and look at increasing the reliability of the website. "Vandalism is a minor issue. Most vandalism is corrected within moments. A bigger issue is thinking seriously about editorial quality over time. We seek to be better than Britannica." Predictably, this has opened another can of worms.
As anyone who follows popular blog circles or is a fan of Wikipedia has seen, all and sundry have now gathered online to bemoan what they call the end of one of the most interesting experiments in online democracy. Says Shuddhabrata Sengupta of the Sarai programme of the Centre for Study of Developing Society, the institution of formal rules on the editing process will take away from the democratic and open-ended process that Wikipedia is. "This move will make it no different from any run-of-the-mill canonical encyclopaedia," he says.
Despite the very vocal criticism (even reputed newspapers such as The New York Times have criticised Wikipedia), many users and commentators feel Wikipedia is moving in the right direction. Lawrence Liang, a researcher with Alternative Law Forum, explains for instance that this move has to be looked at in the larger context of authority of knowledge. "We need to be able to rely on the content and know that it is trustworthy. Wikipedia has moved from a hobbyist encyclopaedia to one of the first sources of references on the Net." Says Shuddhabrata: "I think the interesting thing that Wikipedia encouraged in its community was the active exercise of a critical and sceptical attitude towards any received form of knowledge." This, he says, acted as a check against the excesses of subjectivity.
At the heart of the debate is the larger issue of democracy on the Internet. Decisions such as Wikipedia's semi-protected pages, they feel, go against the spirit of the Internet as the last medium for a truly free exchange of information. Using the Internet, they contend, involves a certain degree of autonomy from the state, private corporations and strong interest groups, unlike traditional media.
While Wales and his team say that this is the same ideal behind the processes they have instituted, others feel that no such explanation is needed. Nishant Shah, a Ph.D. student of cyber culture at the Centre for Study of Culture and Society, says since users do not pay and no economic transaction takes place, consumers cannot make such demands. As for democracy, the issues between democracy as a mode of administration and as an ideology are being mixed up. As a mode of administration, it is reflected in the transparency of the process. But it does not hold as an ideology since Wikipedia has always had a central power controlling its functioning. The Internet, on the whole, isn't democratic either, he adds. "The Internet has always been niche and discriminatory. The notion of a free and neutral space has been propagated by those with vested interests."
And so the debate stretches on. Meanwhile, if media reports on a flame war on the Wikipedia website resulting from Enron founder Kenneth Lay's death (whether it was natural or not) are anything to go by, we might still be a long way from a reliable democratic experiment on the order of Wikipedia. But whether it will be reliability or democracy that flies out of the window or if the unlikely pair can be properly yoked together is anybody's guess.
RAKESH MEHAR
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