Representation and the problem of bibliographic imagination on Wikipedia

Brendan Luyt
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引用次数: 2

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 unfortunate effects 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 acquiring overseas 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 written that 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.
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维基百科上书目想象的表现与问题
维基百科的惊人之处在于,尽管它的制作方式是这样的,但它的产品还是和它本身一样好,而且差不了多少。但这并不是自满的理由。正如其他人所记录的那样,维基百科有代表性的盲点,这是由其编辑社区的性质和他们的话语惯例造成的。本文希望探讨源对某些盲点的潜在影响。作者用了一个扩展的例子,维基百科关于菲律宾-美国战争的文章,来说明缺乏对用于为在线百科全书制作叙述的来源的关注所带来的不幸影响。选择菲律宾-美国战争的文章是因为它在美国历史上的重要性。这场战争把关于美国未来的辩论和一个共和国获得海外殖民地的合法性提上了前台。时至今日,这个词仍然存在争议,因此它在维基百科上的表述必须健全。不注意来源(缺乏书目想象力)产生代表性异常。某些消息来源在不应该享有特权的情况下获得了特权,而其他消息来源则被忽视或被认为是不合格的。总的来说,这篇文章的认识论边界在编辑界认为什么是可靠的和学者界认为什么是可靠的关于战争的知识没有重叠到他们应该重叠的程度。因此,由此产生的叙述就没有原本可能的那么丰富了。虽然有越来越多的文献研究维基百科的代表性盲点(性别、阶级、地理区域等),但重点一直放在编辑群体的人口构成上。但对代表性问题同样重要的是该社区使用的资源。已经有很多文献试图描绘被边缘化的社会世界,但维基百科并没有使用它,尽管它很容易满足维基百科社区设定的可靠性标准。这是一个悲悲性的疏忽,它使维基百科的目标——成为世界知识的储存库——变得比以往任何时候都更加难以实现,即使在现实中无法实现,这也是一个值得称赞的目标。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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