05 November 2007
Jayson McNulty (HBA English 4th Year)

   Rob Wipond, in his article, "Rise of the Internet Police State," envisions a potential future of all-inclusive surveillance, in which the internet becomes a powerful tool of state control, as opposed to the means of "a veritable democratic revolution" (Wipond 1).  The argument is simple and attractive. Companies such as Google are watching and recording our internet activity and even collecting our personal information. This information is being sold to interested parties or stored in databanks where it could be retrieved at any time. The logical outcome is paranoia. Surveillance technology can collect data on individuals and turn it against them, controlling dissenters and enforcing the status quo. With every action on the internet being recorded as such, people will be too afraid to take advantage of the internet as a communication medium. This nightmare scenario, however, is predicated on concepts of privacy, identity and the internet, which either do not reflect the reality of the internet or are being transformed in response to technology and postmodernism.

    Privacy is the central concept in the internet surveillance debate. The internet is seemingly blurring the distinction between private and public life, but this perspective depends on how much privacy, if any at all, is expected. There is arguably nothing public about viewing a web page in the isolation of your own home, for example, and yet this does not accurately reflect the nature of the internet. The internet is best understood as a public network, a virtual agora in which people can meet and exchange ideas and information. The assumption of privacy currently made by the general internet user is based on a misunderstanding of how the internet operates. A web page is hosted on a server, whether a corporate or personal server. Visiting a web page is akin to visiting a place of business or attending a social gathering, with potentially thousands of other internet users also visiting at the same time, as welcomed by the proprietor or host. There is, of course, one crucial difference. Other people are always present but not always visible, hence the misunderstanding. Privacy cannot and should not be assumed in a public network.

    With the understanding of the internet as a public network, there is nothing sinister about a company like Google recording internet activity and collecting personal information. According to Philippa Lawson, there is "'a huge market incentive for companies to violate the privacy of individuals. Our personal information is now a commodity in the marketplace'" (Cited in Wipond 1). The negative implications of Lawson's statement, however, are predicated on the erroneous assumption of privacy in a public forum. Google monitoring activity on its web sites is no different than a store clerk, or even security cameras, monitoring activity in a convenience store. The recording of internet behaviour and collection of personal information amounts to market research, a practice that occurs offline as much as online. Paranoia is simply unfounded as there is no direct or meaningful impact on an individual's life, outside of Amazon, for example, being able to recommend commercial products suited to an individual's taste, however questionable Amazon's predictive capabilities. There is one aspect which deserves more attention, however, and that is the use of personal information and potential misrepresentation.Jeffrey Rosen offers an argument against internet surveillance in his article, "The Eroded Self." He states that "privacy protects us from being misdefined and judged out of context" (Rosen 48). The argument is that privacy is necessary given the potential harm of being misrepresented to a wider, ignorant audience. Rosen explains, "Your public identity may be distorted by fragments of information that have little to do with how you define yourself" (49). The concept being debated here relates to personal identity and how it is defined, both online and offline. The fear of misrepresentation as articulated by Rosen assumes an essential and individualistic self. The fear is that there is a complete and knowable self that will appear only in part through some particular internet behaviour, and that that part will come to erroneously define the whole. This could be harmful to one's reputation, or simply be a harmless case of stereotyping. This notion of the self, however, is misapplied in the context of the internet, and is arguably being reshaped in a broader context through technology and postmodernism.A more accurate conception of identity, as it is formed in relation to the medium of the internet, is articulated in Sherry Turkle's book, "Life on the Screen." Turkle argues that identity is "multiple, fluid, and constituted in interaction with machine connections" (15). For example, in virtual spaces such as videogames, players can adopt, or create, a variety of roles or identities. Personal identity in such a context is best understood as an active process of creation or performance, and this can be applied to all forms of internet or computer behaviour. At any given time, in multiple windows on a computer desktop, a user can constitute multiple personas, such as a character of opposite gender in a videogame, a professional business partner in e-mail exchanges, or an anonymous heckler on an internet forum. These personas constitute neither the whole nor even a part of one's identity, as that presupposes a knowable whole, an unsatisfactory concept for a contemporary postmodern society. The fear of misrepresentation as articulated by Rosen assumes the possibility of an accurate representation of a static or linear identity. More accurately, identity is an active construction, something that is continually transformed through performance and in response to experience.

    The implications of performative identity complicate Wipond's argument as it relates to the surveillance and control of individuals in society. Wipond argues that accurate information can be collected on individuals and potentially used against them as a form of control. Lawson feels we are approaching a situation containing "innumerable people with power over your life holding reams of information on you that you don't know about and can't control" (Wipond 1). This notion of control assumes that information collected from the internet has a direct correlation with a complete and knowable self, which can be defined and subsequently misrepresented. However, as conceptions of identity are transformed by technology and postmodernism, misrepresentation becomes a misnomer. The internet will more likely foster the concept of performative identity, in which identity is a fundamental misrepresentation, a stage performance without reference. In other words, there is only the performance of identity, or the virtual simulation of identity, and no individualistic or essential self that can be represented or referenced. When Google monitors internet behaviour, it records performances in a specific place and time. A compilation of such performances, linked to personal information, offers a profile of an individual who does not exist, for the profile itself can be nothing more than an artificial construction. Nobody is surprised when Amazon makes recommendations that hardly seem coherent to the individual user. The user Amazon thinks it knows does not refer to any real or knowable person. We find ourselves staring in virtual mirrors and rejecting our reflections.

   Rob Wipond's argument is ultimately based on a misconception of the nature of the internet as a communication medium. Wipond sees the potential of the internet as enabling "forces of state control" in its worst case or "democracy and liberty" in its best (Wipond 1). This perspective assumes a medium that can be stabilized, organized and controlled. Fascism and democracy alike assume a center of power. Andrew Sullivan, in his article, "Dot-communist Manifesto," argues that the internet is rather a virtual realization of Marxist communism. The internet is a manifestation of a collective spirit, and when we log on we are "medieval peasants entering their village commons," where property is "possessed simultaneously by everyone" (Sullivan 30). While this is a more accurate picture of the internet, it must be taken one step further. Following from the postmodern concept of performative identity, the internet, as Sherry Turkle would argue, is an exercise in postmodernity. The internet brings postmodernism "down to earth" (Turkle 17). It can be characterized, along with the performance of identity that occurs in its space, as fluid, nonlinear, and decentered (Turkle 17). The internet is not simply the realization of previously articulated social formations, but something radically new, something inherently postmodern. The implications transcend old ways of thinking.An internet police state, as Rob Wipond envisions, is impossible, or at least could never be sustained. The fear of surveillance and control is rooted in old ideas of privacy and identity that are being transformed in relation to the internet, and in a misunderstanding of the internet itself. As the medium becomes more widely acknowledged as a public forum, the questions of privacy will be revised. As the medium becomes more deeply understood, questions of identity and even reality will be revised. The internet is a radically new and postmodern phenomenon, a medium that is fluid, fractured, and constantly transforming. Above all, it is without a center. It cannot be so easily organized, policed and controlled. It is too unpredictable. Moreover, its users cannot be controlled. They, too, are fractured, nonlinear and unpredictable. They are performers in a virtual simulation. The internet is a revolution, but not of democracy or fascism or even an ideal communism. The internet is still young and without precedence. Its eventual maturity will be simply the next stage of its transformation as a medium that defies definition through an understanding of old systems of structure.

Works Cited

Rosen, Jeffrey. "The Eroded Self." The New York Times Magazine. 30 April 2000. 46-53,66-68, 129.

Sullivan, Andrew. "Dot-communist Manifesto." The New York Times Magazine. 11 June 2000.30-32.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Toronto: Simon &Schuster, 1995.

Wipond, Rob. "Rise of the Internet Police State." Adbusters: The Magazine. 31 Oct. 2007.

http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Rise_of_the_Internet_Police_State.htm.

Reservoir Dogs: A Postmodern Perspective
March 26, 2009
Justin O'Brien (HBABED History IS 3rd year)

   One of the most prominent philosophical questions in contemporary society is whether or not films, even popular Hollywood blockbusters, are capable of being or doing philosophy. According to Thomas Wartenberg, if films are capable of illustrating “philosophical ideas in interesting and illuminating ways,” then such works of cinema can and should be perceived as philosophy-in-action.[1] Wartenberg discusses the silent film Modern Times to demonstrate that, by illustrating a philosophical idea, films are not only capable of arousing deep thought within an individual, but they may also interpret and update a philosophical text in the same way that contemporary philosophers respond to the work of their predecessors.[2] Employing Wartenberg’s theory of what it means for film to do philosophy, I shall now proceed to scrutinize Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in order to determine how much, if at all, this particular motion picture enacts and extends upon the concepts of postmodernism as well as nihilism.

Simplistically defined as a historical movement that has succeeded the era of modernism, postmodernism is actually an intricate and multifaceted philosophy which is essentially impossible to identify within a single sentence. Taking this into account, it is my intention to divide the notion of postmodernism into three distinct aspects of interpretation, namely late capitalism, the combining of genres and the critique of knowledge claims, in order to examine how closely Reservoir Dogs corresponds to each one.

First, postmodernism is intimately connected with late capitalism, an economic structure in which consumerism has overrun virtually every facet of human life. In particular, John Berger maintains that after being exposed to the substantial amount of advertising that the media employs, the average individual is manipulated into purchasing a plethora of material products in order to become “an object of envy for others…which will then justify her loving herself.”[3] In my opinion, Reservoir Dogs does a considerably good job of illustrating a world consumed by late capitalism as well as demonstrating the influential effect advertising can have on our everyday lives. As Mark Conrad notes in his article, “Reservoir Dogs: Redemption in a Postmodern World,” Tarantino’s film begins with its main characters discussing the significance of popular songs such as ‘Like a Virgin,’ and ‘True Blue,’ apparently more concerned with aspects of consumer culture than with the intricate details of their impending bank heist.[4] Furthermore, pictorial as well as verbal references to popular culture such as the Silver Surfer comic book and the Get Christie Love! TV show are interspersed throughout the film to subtlety display how much influence and control the media truly possesses in contemporary society.[5] It is also important to note that the protagonists of Reservoir Dogs themselves, as gangsters, are primarily motivated by a desire to acquire a large amount of diamonds, unquestionably allowing them to purchase a variety of products which, as consumer culture dictates, will give their life meaning. Overall then, while individuals such as Mr. White, as well as the undercover officer, Mr. Orange, seem to revel in their roles as gangsters, it is clear that they, like the masses of society, are entangled in a never-ending cycle of consumerism which Reservoir Dogs appears to have successfully illustrated as a philosophical film.

    A second feature of postmodernism lies in its ability to break down boundaries and combine genres.[6] Though he himself denies it, the director of Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino, is widely considered to be a neo-noir filmmaker who engages in aspects of postmodernism.[7] Taking this into account, the majority of his movies can be said to blend specific categories of film together in order to create something entirely unique and innovative. Indeed, one of Tarantino’s more recent works, Kill Bill, manages to successfully incorporate a variety of film genres, such as anime and westerns, into one nonlinear story.[8] When looking at Reservoir Dogs in terms of its cinematic structure, it is clear that this particular film possesses a similar combination of recognizable film genres. For instance, due to its substantial focus on the fall of several criminal figures, one can easily make the deduction that Reservoir Dogs is a crime or gangster film. Yet to some extent, Tarantino also appears to utilize the formula of a western movie, breaking down the boundaries between genres and combining two somewhat similar but ultimately contradictory types of film. In particular, rather than having a morally-upright protagonist fight to uphold law and order, as one would expect to find within a traditional western, Reservoir Dogs features a variety of immoral gangsters ironically attempting to restore order in their group by uncovering the man who had betrayed them to the police. On a similar note, it is worth mentioning that Reservoir Dogs, like any conventional western or gangster film, contains a considerable amount of action and violence, yet it also can be said to employ a number light-hearted and comedic moments, further illustrating the film’s ability to stretch across multiple genres. A final method which Tarantino employs in order to break down the boundaries of film is to subtlety reference the cinematic history and techniques of the past. For example, by naming the jewelry store in Reservoir Dogs after the star of a 1964 French film, Tarantino is cleverly able to reference the French new wave directors whose work he considers to be highly influential to his own.[9] In culmination, through referencing various aspects of filmmaking as well as combining and altering traditional genres, Tarantino has ensured that Reservoir Dogs unquestionably shines as a work of postmodern film.

    A third aspect of postmodernism is that it thoroughly critiques the idea that there is such a thing as abstract Truth. While philosophy is traditionally dominated by a series of binaries, such as good and evil, in order to make sense of the world, postmodernism adamantly opposes such essentialist ways of thinking and adopts “a radical relativism about knowledge.”[10] Coupled with this abandonment of transcendent Truth is the notion that grand narratives, stories which attempt to explain the foundations of history, cannot be trusted as they are guided by power structures “that service the needs of some people above others.”[11] In my opinion, this rejection of overarching Truth is one of the most important aspects of postmodernism, as well as the factor featured most prominently in Reservoir Dogs. At first glance, one may not believe that the film truly embraces a postmodern perspective, as it contains a considerable amount of binary oppositions which result in racism, homophobia and sexism. Yet upon closer inspection, it is clear that such themes are not meant to regurgitate the dominant ideology of society, but to demonstrate how mankind has abandoned such stereotypical notions in a postmodern world and that dichotomies are not as constant as we once believed them to be. Such instability is further employed in the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs, where the majority of gangsters present their own understanding of well-known songs. While this conversation may not be considered significant when taken at face value, it is nevertheless useful in symbolizing the postmodern principle that there are no definitive facts, but merely a variety of interpretations. Later on in the movie, each gangster is being assigned an alias based on a particular color. From this, another aspect of postmodernism, namely its rejection of grand narratives, becomes readily apparent. In particular, I believe that by adopting colorful codenames rather than what Joe Cabot refers to as their Christian names, the gangsters symbolically reject Christianity, a grand narrative in which “people find salvation…from sin…when they accept Jesus as their Lord and savior and admit their guilt,” as well as the idea that they can or want to be redeemed from their lives as gangsters.[12] On a related note, Mr. Pink’s refusal to tip waitresses at the beginning of the film can be perceived as another instance in which Tarantino condemns the notion of grand narratives. To be more specific, by acknowledging how people feel the need to tip waitresses rather than individuals working at McDonald’s, Mr. Pink is able to produce a thought-provoking and contemporary argument as to why one should not follow an overarching ideal, namely because they are unfairly controlled by power structures which assist a particular group of individuals at the cost of several others.[13] Overall, by successfully illustrating and expanding upon three aspects of postmodernism, namely late capitalism, the combining of genres and the critique of knowledge claims, Reservoir Dogs can be said to do philosophy in precisely the way Thomas Wartenberg maintained.

    Upon learning that “we can no longer really claim to know anything objectively about the world,” the average individual may be compelled to adopt the pessimistic position of nihilism, which readily asserts that all values and beliefs are ultimately irrelevant.[14] While Friedrich Nietzsche perceived the death of abstract Truth, or God, as a blessing in which one is free to love their fate, other individuals require such objectivity in order to make sense of their world and will possess “no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy” without it.[15] Here it can be argued that, in the same way Modern Times updates Karl Marx’s theory of alienation by depicting a modern assembly line, Reservoir Dogs can do philosophy by examining the notion of nihilism from a perspective previously unexplored in any philosophical text, namely that of the gangster.[16] Specifically, the majority of the gangsters within Reservoir Dogs adopt a Nietzschean outlook of loving their fate as they revel in their role as gangsters, while at the same time, reacting to the futility of life by causing a considerable amount of chaos and destruction. One of the film’s main characters, Mr. Blonde, is a prominent example of such acceptance and disorder as he finds great pleasure in nearly burning a bound police officer alive shortly after cutting off his ear. Reservoir Dogs can also be said to embrace a nihilistic perspective simply because it fails to provide an alternative type of meaning for existence. As previously mentioned, by removing their Christian names, the gangsters have relinquished their belief in a higher power, abandoning an objective meaning to life which certain individuals utterly depend upon in order to make sense of the world. Furthermore, due to the rampant amount of popular advertising that Reservoir Dogs employs, it would appear as though the gangsters are too engaged within the recurrent day-dreams of consumer culture to form their own subjective meaning for existence, habitually initiating a number of thefts in order to purchase a variety of products which will supposedly give their lives meaning.[17] In culmination, Reservoir Dogs is an engaging piece of cinema which, in my opinion, effectively enacts as well as expands upon the philosophical ideas of postmodernism and nihilism.

Bibliography

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Great Britain: The British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972.   Conrad, Mark, ed. The Philosophy of Neo-Noir. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky,      2007.  

Hughes-Warrington, Marnie. Fifty Key Thinkers on History. New York: Routledge, 2008.  

Pratt, Alan. “Nihilism: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.” The Internet Encyclopedia of      Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/n/nihilism.htm (accessed March 20th, 2009).  

Wartenberg, Thomas. “Beyond Mere Illustrations: How Films Can Be Philosophy.” Journal of      Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (2006): 19-32.

     [1] Thomas Wartenberg, “Beyond Mere Illustrations: How Films Can Be Philosophy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (2006): 27.

     [2] Ibid., 30.

     [3] John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Great Britain: The British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972), 134.

     [4] Mark Conrad, ed., The Philosophy of Neo-Noir (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 102.

     [5] Ibid., 108.

     [6] Ibid., 107.

     [7] Conrad, The Philosophy of Neo-Noir, 114.

     [8] Ibid., 108.

     [9] Conrad, The Philosophy of Neo-Noir, 108.

     [10] Ibid., 110.

     [11] Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers on History (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 197.

     [12] Conrad, The Philosophy of Neo-Noir, 102.

     [13] Ibid., 112.

     [14] Ibid., 110.

     [15] Alan Pratt, “Nihilism: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/n/nihilism.htm (accessed March 20th, 2009).

     [16] Wartenberg, “Beyond Mere Illustrations,” 28.

     [17] Berger, Ways of Seeing, 146.

\___             Wikipedia and Cyberculture                      ___/

A platform for the social consensus, or a platform for social folly?
December 2007
Jamie Radul (BA General Program 1^st Year)

            In the nineteen-thirties H.G.Wells wrote a book of essays called “World Brain,” where he called for an educational knowledge network in the form of a “Permanent World Encyclopedia," whereby "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica.”  The essay "The Brain Organization of the Modern World" lays out Wells' vision for "a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared."[1] Today these words seem like premonitions to our digital era, and had H.G.Wells lived to see the age of the internet, he might have been the man to begin the mass collaborative project towards his 'world en-cyclopedia'.   But by the time the internet came around full swing, H.G. Wells was dead.  And Jimmy Wales, internet 'web portal' pornographer / founder of free online encyclopedia, Nupedia[2], was very much alive!    Yes he was, and in 2001 he launched a second, free online encyclopedia that was different from Nupedia in that it was to build its articles through the consensus of a very open-ended, almost anarchistic, mass collaboration.  Wikipedia was from its inception an encyclopedia that 'anyone can edit', and one of its first policies was to 'ignore all the rules'.

            But the goal in creating Wikipedia was not to subvert the hegemony of an elitist group of professional scholars, or to give the authority on human knowledge to the public at large.  Wikipedia was designed to generate content as 'feed' for Nupedia's rigorous seven-step peer-review process, whereby volunteer 'subject experts' would 'approve' final versions of articles with the goal of producing an encyclopedia that was free to the world and of similar quality to professional encyclopedias like the Britannica.

            While the initial community contributing to Wikipedia consisted largely of the group of '(mostly) highly experienced professionals' from Nupedia, with Wikipedia being a depository for rough drafts of articles, the active participation of the general public was encouraged as a means to generate content.  It is with this narrow goal of content generation that one of the first official policies, “ignore all the rules,” came into place in the first months of Wikipedia.  Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, explains the intention of the rule in his memoirs of the period:

If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the wiki, then ignore them entirely and go about your business ... The reason was that I thought we needed experience with how wikis should work, and even more importantly at that point we needed participants more than we needed rules.[3]

What Sanger did not realize until later was that with the initial rule of “ignore all the rules” he was laying the foundation of a tradition that was later to be interpreted by many as the essence of the Wikipedia project:

This provisional "hands off" management policy had the effect of creating a difficult-to-change tradition, the tradition of making the project extremely tolerant of disruptive (uncooperative, "trolling") behavior. ... I always took Wikipedia's anarchy to be provisional and purely for purposes of determining what the best rules, and the nature of its authority, should be.  What I, and other Wikipedians, failed to realize is that our initial anarchy would be taken by the next wave of contributors as the very essence of the project.[4]  

           As Wikipedia grew in popularity, the project began to fall away from its initial foundation of 'subject expert' content generators from Nupedia into the hands of the public, the 'cult of the amateur'[5], and Sanger began his push for an official policy of respect of and deference to expertise.  His hope was to establish an authority that could enforce the 'neutral point of view' policy that is Wikipedia's central doctrine, and make Wikipedia a more reliable resource by developing an intolerance for 'trolls'.    

            With the anarchistic tradition of the 'ignore all the rules' policy already established and seeming to work well (at least generating a lot of content), Wales choosing to exercise his authority to ban individuals in only the worst cases of 'trolling', and the expectation that the editing community would largely regulate itself, Sanger's push for a policy of deference to expertise failed.  This failure, argues Sanger, has led to a situation that is too tolerant of abuse, and compromises the quality of Wikipedia with pages that are either hijacked or caught in endless dispute.  With the resolution of disputes over content left entirely up to the contributor community at large, administrators (taking sides with no authority over each other and little authority to turn to otherwise), Wikipedia in many places has become a battlefield.  This trend was already in place by the end of 2001, when the first pangs of major publicity brought a major wave of new editors.  Sanger, chief organizer of Wikipedia from 2001 through 2002, reflects:   

Attempts to delete or radically edit [problematic] contributions were often met by reposting the earlier, problem version: the ability to do that is a necessary feature of collaboration. Persistent trolls could, thus, be a serious problem, particularly if they were able to draw a sympathetic audience. And there was often an audience of sympathizers: contributors who philosophically were opposed to nearly any exercise of authority, but who were not trolls themselves.[6]

            Among those contributors who were opposed to the exercise of authority could be counted founder Jimmy Wales himself, who "was the only person with the authority to ban users who were not engaging in simple vandalism"[7] until the beginning of 2004, when his duties were relegated to an Arbitration Committee of highly trusted editors.  But the Arbitration Committee is still considered to be only a last resort, and while administrators to Wikipedia have long had the power to block simple vandals, disputes over content do not qualify as vandalism, and editors are left to themselves to resolve their issues with only an unenforced set of guidelines[8] (that basically say 'be nice, don't fight').

            Simple, immature vandalism remains a problem. For example, stinky-stinky poo cock penis.  But the much more complex issues that arise from differences of opinion regarding the relevancy of content, reliability of sources, and 'neutral point of view' lay at the heart of the problem of building consensus.  While it might be said that this is as much an issue among expert scholars working towards a contribution to a professional encyclopedia as it is on Wikipedia, this effect is drastically increased when the contributors are from all walks of life, there's more of them, and the article has no final version.  The result is that articles are prone to multiple instances of the same dispute where a contributor is forced to defend their content against the same opinions over and over again.  The result, argues Sanger, is that experts who would otherwise be willing to contribute to the free encyclopedia become fed up with having to 'suffer fools gladly', and are driven away from the project.  This can lead to the situation where, as many have said, the loudest and most persistent voices, although not necessarily the most neutral (or intelligent/informed), will win an argument and dominate an article with its biased views.  Thus a controversial page is either caught in an 'edit war' that can persist indefinitely, or it becomes dominated by its editor(s) and expresses only certain views.

            The goal for a world encyclopedia would be for it to achieve the 'summation of all human knowledge', as is the stated intention of Wikipedia.[9]Obviously, opinions are an inevitable part of human knowledge, and 'neutral point of view' entails recognizing bias and having opinions on a subject not eradicated from articles, but expressed factually as opinions, but it is this which has proven to be one of the most persistent problems in the Wikipedia model, given that articles are generally contributed to by authors who both have a passion for their subject and believe they are telling the truth.  Perhaps with smaller more limited groups of people, consensus is possible to achieve.  However, once Wikipedia grew beyond a certain threshold, with too many people bringing their biases into the content, rephrasing or otherwise subjectively 'correcting' an article, the situation, says Sanger, grew out of control:

After about nine months or so, there were so many contributors, and especially brand new contributors, that nothing like a consensus could be reached, for the simple reason that ... [there would] always be somebody who insisted on expressing disagreement.[10]

Despite the creation of the Arbitration Committee, the 'three revert rule' and the guidelines for dispute resolution, the situation was no better in November, 2004, when Jason Scott, an experienced editor who has written several essays criticizing Wikipedia from an insider's point of view, lamented:

It is not hard, browsing over historical edits to majorly contended Wikipedia articles, to see the slow erosion of facts and ideas according to people trying to implement their own idea of neutrality or meaning on top of it. Even if the person who originally wrote a section was well-informed, any huckleberry can wander along and scrawl crayon on it. This does not eventually lead to an improved final entry.[11] 

T hat there is no final entry for any article thus becomes a curse when faced with the recurring biases that the constant influx of opinion brings to a controversial issue in an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.  In this situation, as Scott complains, so-called 'neutral point of view', while good in theory, in practice just becomes “yet another hammer for wonks and whackjobs to beat each other”[12] with.  So while factual statements of opinions as opinions might sound promising as a way to a more neutral and unbiased article, it has often proven a difficult task given the passion people have for their beliefs, their tendency to think that they are telling a neutral truth, and their freedom to interpret and discredit another author's paragraph as biased or irrelevant.

            With the seventh anniversary of Wikipedia fast approaching, it is no surprise that many editors within the community have had the time and experience to come to similar conclusions.  Multiple groups from the Wikipedia community have expressed their frustration by branching off to form their own encyclopedias or websites[13] in order to raise awareness of the perceived censorship on the site, save previous states of certain articles, criticize administrative actions[14], even protest the perceived liberal bias of its content and its troublesome policy for a 'neutral point of view'.

            Wikipedia's reputation has only gotten worse with the spreading news of the Essjay controversy in January, 2007, when one of the site's most visible 'academics', a salaried employee of Wikia who enjoyed one of the highest seats within the Wikipedia Administration[15], was exposed to be not the university professor with a Ph.D. that his profile biography claimed him to be, but a 24 year old college dropout with no credentials at all.  While Wales initially expressed his support for Essjay using a persona, claiming "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it,"[16] he would eventually ask Essjay to resign from 'positions of trust' (ie. the Arbitration Committee) when it was further revealed that he had used his false credentials to win arguments.  Of the situation, Wales commented “It's always inappropriate to try to win an argument by flashing your credentials, and even more so if those credentials are inaccurate,” and later proposed that "contributors to [Wikipedia] who claim certain credentials will soon have to prove they really have them,"[17] as was originally done for the Nupedia project.

            While the proposal to check credentials might sound promising, it seems rather disappointing in a system where having credentials is not supposed to matter.  As noted in the famous New Yorker article that featured the interview with Essjay, Wales “most radical” contribution to the world was to invent “a system that does not favor the Ph.D. over the well-read fifteen-year-old.” In the article, Wales comments: “To me, the key thing is getting it right ... I don’t care if they’re a high-school kid or a Harvard professor.”[18]

            It is precisely this mentality that is responsible for counterproductive bickering, argue people like Sanger and Scott, and the resulting frustration has led many to abandon their efforts to contribute to a certain article, or Wikipedia altogether. Once again, the result is articles being dominated not by truth or quality but by the loudest, most persistent voices.  It is not consensus, it is hegemony.

            This was precisely the case argued in an email discussion from 2006. After Wales claimed that he couldn't “imagine how [Wikipedia] could possibly be any more transparent, and that “there is no such thing as a 'final edit', his correspondent, Robert Cox, replied:  

There is something close to a “final edit” on Wikipedia; that is when a handful of individuals take “ownership” of a Wikipedia entry and aggressively revert any attempts to edit “their” page. [...] It’s a neat trick — they demand that I propose changes on the discussion page, ignore me, then when I go ahead and make those changes they revert them, all the while complaining to an admin that I should be banned from editing because I won’t “discuss” changes. The real issues is that these people WANT the page to be massively non-NPOV [neutral point of view] and resent any efforts to alter their “pet project.[19]

As illuminated in Cox's comments, the problems of content dispute, revert wars and page domination remain despite efforts to minimalize them, such as the official guidelines to dispute resolution, the establishment of the Arbitration Committee in 2004, and the 'three revert rule', “whereby those users who reverse the effect of others' contributions to one article more than three times in a 24 hour period may be blocked.” 

            The point is not to eradicate these problems, although that would be nice, but to minimize them without alienating valuable editors.  The general encouragement is “not to feed the trolls,” and thus attempt to resolve differences by means of 'wikilove'.  The idea is that a kind and courteous manner, for the most part, leads to the reaching of consensus on articles.  This is something that Mr. Wales is sure to understand well from his experience, as reflected in his response to the troubled Cox.

Just listen to the wikilove: 

Just make some good faith edits, and write in a non-hostile manner on the talk page that you have an interest in trying to make the article high quality and neutral. Reach out with love and kindness to your opponents and see what happens.  I will watch and not interfere.[20] 

              Just like wikilove, many other successful efforts to resolve disputes in the past have been created and documented in the official policy for dispute resolution:[21]

1) Focus on content

2) If urgent, contact administration

3) Stay cool

4) Discuss with the other party

5) Consider a Truce

6) Turn to others

7) Last resort: Arbitration

It is to be noted that step number six, "turn to others," contains the most options, and presents a formidable gauntlet of noticeboards, third party requests, both unofficial and official requests for mediation, and even links to essays that editors have developed in order to resolve their disputes.  The community has by and large established a peer-review system to solve disputes between individuals, and for the more major conflicts between groups, they can now turn to the authority of the Arbitration Committee, a small group of about 30 contributors who have a lot of experience within the community (at least 1000 edits) and are voted into power by the community.[22]

            There are other measures that have developed to advance the Wikipedia model.  First of all, anybody who contributes for a few months becomes an 'administrator' and is given the tools to block a vandal's I.P. Address and temporarily protect pages from editing while they solve their disputes.  To further combat the issue of vandalism and spam, an experimental policy has been put in place for the Wikipedia Germany site, whereby all edits made by users whose accounts are less than four days old require the approval of a 'trusted editor' with at least some experience[23].  Other decisive actions include the establishment of an 'oversight' function[24], whereby particularly sensitive information such as phone numbers can be permanently deleted from the database from which they would be otherwise retrievable, as the entire history of Wikipedia edits is documented.

            That the entire history of Wikipedia edits is documented has also allowed for beneficial software to be developed by volunteers to forward the Wikipedia cause. For example, WikiScanner[25], which was designed in August, 2007, by Virgil Griffith, an 'American hacker' and student, links the I.P. Addresses of anonymous edits to their originating organization in the hopes of catching 'insider editing', that is, controversial corporations editing their own articles in their own interest.  The use of WikiScanner immediately made headlines around the world when it was shown that individuals from the networks of numerous political parties, governments and newspapers, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I, the Vatican, Fox News, the Church of Scientology, Amnesty International, and many corporations like ExxonMobil and Pepsi, had been making edits to Wikipedia, often to their own pages.

              While 'insider editing' (a.k.a. 'conflict of interest editing') may only be discouraged and not forbidden in the policy of Wikipedia, it has been found that many edits to controversial topics about a corporation originated from a network that the corporation owned. In some instances, entire sections of articles describing criticisms of a company had been deleted.  By developing the ability to associate the I.P. Address of an article's editor to its originating company, any controversial edits by an organization to Wikipedia can spark a public relations disaster, which was the end goal in Griffith's developing the  software.  In his “WikiScanner FAQ” he states: "Overall—especially for non-controversial topics—Wikipedia already works. For controversial topics, Wikipedia can be made more reliable through techniques like [WikiScanner]."[26]

            Another software with the aim of making Wikipedia more trustworthy has been developed by professor Luca de Alfaro at the University of California, Santa Cruz.[27]  Alfaro's software analyzes the entire editing history of a user to estimate their trustworthiness according to the longevity of the content they contribute.  The program then assigns a colour code to content according to its author's reliability score, giving viewers at least some idea of the reputation of an article's anonymous author(s).

            But what about cases where erroneous information remains in an article for long periods of time?  This was the case in the Siegenthaler controversy of 2005, when a hoax article that associated journalist John Siegenthaler, Sr. with the assassination of JFK remained undetected on Wikipedia for over four months.[28]  In the resulting controversy, Jimmy Wales appeared on CNN to discuss the lack of accountability on Wikipedia, explaining that the site is not reliable as a primary resource, but perfect for "background reading," and declare that since "Wikipedia's use had grown faster than its self-monitoring system could comfortably handle, ... new page creation would be deliberately restricted to account-holders only."[29] While this new restriction does not prevent erroneous information from remaining on the site for long periods, perhaps Luca de Alfaro's program, by calculating a reliability score and colour-coding the content of registered editors, will help readers to better discern what facts to trust.

            Wikipedia nevertheless remains a work in progress that is admittedly only reliable as 'background reading'. Considering the "hands off" nature of its model, I don't think Wikipedia's sketchy reputation is going to change any time in the near future.  But perhaps its reputation doesn't need to change.  While librarians continue to express their mistrust of the model, and universities continue to ban, or at least frown upon, its citation, it remains the 10th most visited site on the internet.  It is also by far the largest encyclopedia ever created.  As of November 2007, Wikipedia has approximately 9.1 million articles in 252 languages, with its English version alone at 2.1 million pages[30] in comparison to the 120,000 articles of the most comprehensive edition of the Britannica.[31] 

            This success has not stopped some groups from forking off to form their own encyclopedias that operate under what they consider to be improved principles.  Veropedia is designed to 'mirror' articles from Wikipedia in versions approved by its contributors.  Larry Sanger has broken off from Wikipedia altogether to form Citizendium in 2007, which functions on a model that seems rather familiar: 

The project aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by requiring all contributors to use their real names, by strictly moderating the project for unprofessional behaviors, and by providing what it calls "gentle expert oversight" of everyday contributors. A main feature of the project is its "approved articles", which have each undergone a form of peer-review by credentialed topic-experts and are closed to real-time editing.[32]

While not the only online encyclopedia that produces wiki articles in an 'approved' state[33], Sanger's project hopes to enlist expertise to function as an authority to create its own articles, with the hope of unseating Wikipedia as the "go-to destination for general information online."[34]

            Although Citizendium will work toward a more reliable free encyclopedia, I think that many people will prefer to stick to the anonymity and near-chaotic style of Wikipedia.  The cyborg that is the collective mind of the internet needs an encyclopedic place to express both its anarchistic and its authoritative sides. Furthermore, I'm not so sure that the experts at Citizendium will ever 'approve' the type of article that describes, with schematic diagrams, how to build a stove from a discarded soda can.[35]  Finally, with the headstart that Wikipedia has, and the lack of 'expertise' that at least some of its 252 languages are bound to have, we can expect Wikipedia to long overshadow its competition in at least some parts of the world.

               In conclusion, with Wales' description of Wikipedia as the “effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,” one can only hope that this project might continue to evolve in form and quality in order to make H.G. Wells' (and humanity's) dream come true.  After all, despite the necessary and inevitable shortcomings that arise out of the attempt to reach a consensus on virtually any topic one can think of, despite the impossibility of writing without a bias, the presentation of such a system -no matter how imperfect- is still a far more advanced opportunity than what came before for the average world citizen to perpetually educate themselves, and one can think of no other way of accomplishing this faster than with an encyclopedia that lays its doors so open for virtually anyone to engage in scholarship.

[1]    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain

[2]    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia

[3]    Slashdot: The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir

            http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95&tid=1...

[4]    Ibid.

[5]    The title of a book by Andrew Keen, a "Silicon Valley disciple" who describes himself as "a failed dot-com entrepreneur." His book essentially argues that Wikipedia, and the internet in general, is eroding knowledge, wisdom, expertise and culture.  http://arts.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article2807091.ece.

[6]    Slashdot: The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir

            http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95&tid=1...

[7]    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee

[8]    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_resolution

[9]    "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." Slashdot Interview, July, 2004.  http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales

[10]  Slashdot: The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir

            http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95&tid=1...

[11]  Scott, Jason. The Great Failure of Wikipedia.  November, 2004.  http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000060.html

[12]  Ibid.

[13]  For example, Citizendium, Veropedia, Wikitruth, Conservopedia, and Scholarpedia.

[14]  Administrative actions such as Jimmy Wales unfairly using his newly minted 'oversight' function to win an argument about his own birth date.  http://wikitruth.info/index.php?title=Jimbo%27s_birthday)

[15]  That is to say, Essjay was a highly experienced editor on the Arbitration Committee. He was respected enough to have     been interviewed for a high profile article in the New Yorker (listed below).

[16]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay

[17]  Ibid.

[18]  Schiff, Stacy. Annals of Information: Know it All, New Yorker.  July, 2006. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/31/060731fa_fact

[19]  Glaser, Mark.  Wales Discusses Political Bias on Wikipedia, MediaShift, 21 April 2006, http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/04/email_debatewales_discusses_po.html

[20]  Ibid.

[21]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_resolution

[22]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_D...

[23]  Niccolai, James.  Wikipedia Taking on the Vandals in Germany.  September, 2006.  PC Advisor.

            http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=7177

[24]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Oversight

[25]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiScanner

[26]  Ibid.

[27]  Test the demo of the software yourself at http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/

[28]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigenthaler_controversy

[29]  Ibid.

[30]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia

[31]  Schiff, Stacy. Annals of Information: Know it All, New Yorker.  July, 2006.  http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/31/060731fa_fact

[32]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium

[33]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veropedia

[34]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium

[35]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverage-can_stove