Doctoral Thesis

DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOSOFIA DOCTORAL THESIS: Wikipedia and Theories of Knowledge in Encyclopaedism Submitted by David Robert Hastings Ruiz so as to obtain the degree of doctor through the University of Valladolid Supervised by: Professor Alfredo Marcos Professor Pedro Mantas Wikipedia and Conceptions of Knowledge in Encyclopaedism David R. Hastings-Ruiz In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard re- pository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover. Douglas Adams “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” Mais une considération que nous ne pouvons trop rappeller, c'est que le nombre des systêmes possibles de la connoissance humaine, est aussi grand que le nombre des esprits, & qu'il n'y a certainement que le systême qui existe dans l'Entendement Divin, d'où l'arbitraire soit exclu. Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert “Prospectus â l’Encyclopédie” 2 Wikipedia and Conceptions of Knowledge in Encyclopaedism David R. Hastings-Ruiz Outline 3 Introduction/Introducción 4/7 Objectives 10 Methodology 10 State of the Art 11 Chapter 1- The Evolution of Encyclopaedism 21 1.1-Origins 22 1.1.1-Encyclopaedism in China 22 1.1.2- Encyclopaedism in the Ancient World 24 1.1.3- Medieval Europe 26 1.1.4- The Islamic world 28 1.2- European Enlightenment 28 1.2.1- Precursors 29 1.2.2- The Modern Encyclopaedia 32 1.3- 19 th and 20 th Century 35 1.3.1- Print 35 1.3.2- Digital 37 Chapter 2- Wikipedia 38 2.1- History 38 2.1.1- Internet History 38 2.1.2- Wikipedia History 45 2.1.3- Wikipedia Structure: Rules and Organization 52 2.2- Philosophy 56 2.2.1- Conceptions of knowledge in Wikipedia 56 2.2.1.1- Free Knowledge 57 2.2.1.2- Wisdom of the Crowd 70 2.2.1.3- Vandalism, Deletionism and Inclusionism 76 2.2.2- Philosophy on Wikipedia 81 2.2.2.1- Feminist Epistemology of Wikipedia 81 2.2.2.2- Sociopolitical Aspects of Wikipedia 87 2.2.3-Philosophical Interpretations of Wikipedia 108 2.2.3.1- Hermeneutics and Interpretation of Wikipedia 109 2.2.3.2- Wikipedia and Epistemological Anarchism 115 Chapter 3- Effects of Wikipedia 124 3.1- On the Internet 124 3.2- On Society 137 3.3- On Academia 130 Conclusions 135 Bibliography 140 Annex 152 3 Wikipedia and Conceptions of Knowledge in Encyclopaedism David R. Hastings-Ruiz IntroductionIntroduction.... Some technologies seem to inevitably change the societies they are used in. Infor- mation technologies do so in very interesting ways. The printing press was one of such technologies. As the use of it spread over Europe, the cost and utility of reading grew in such a way that problems began to arise. There was an excess of information from which it was often very hard to extract any one piece of surplus information needed at any one juncture. The excess of information was not easily turned into real useful knowledge with any alacrity. One of the possible solutions proposed by Leibniz was to organise all the useful information from the vast disarray of published works into one organised artefact. 1 In this great work every piece of knowledge would have its rightful, rational place. There would be no time-consuming overlaps, and space would be left for those ideas which, according to this rational system were yet to be discovered. This would also be necessarily accomplished in a perfect, rational language, and therefore be perfectly comprehensible to any reader in any language. As a first step in accomplishing any of this, Leibniz proposed the creation of an encyclopaedia, a book in which the meaning of all words would be defined in a complete rational way. Though Leibniz began organizing the creation of such a thing, his encyclopaedia was never really started. Other scholars were more successful in their own encyclopaedic enterprises, following the footsteps of medieval lists and bestiaries, but none as much as Diderot and d’Alembert, when they turned a project consisting in the transla- tion of Chamber’s Cyclopaedia into the enormous, successful and influential Ency- clopédie .2 The tomes of this encyclopaedia have represented and reflected the values of the European enlightenment which it was created in, and very specially the way knowledge was understood, thought to function, and used. The Encyclopédie , and other Enlightenment encyclopaedias, came to be for at least two reasons. 1 Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) [hereafter Yeo, Ency- clopaedic Visions] ,p. 1. Louis Couturat, La Logique de Leibniz d’après des documents inédits (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1901) [hereafter Couturat, Logique] ,p. 117. 2 Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2011 Edition), Robert Mor- risey (ed), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/ (last visited 17/10/14), Prospectus, p. 1 [hereafter Diderot, D’Alembert, Encyclopédie]. 4 Wikipedia and Conceptions of Knowledge in Encyclopaedism David R. Hastings-Ruiz First, printing technology allowed the creation of large bound collections at a greater volume and faster rate than it had before, making the sale of lengthy series of books a profitable enterprise in a way that had not been possible before. As way of example; The technology had become so cheap, and was so readily available to entre- preneurs, that the piracy of books started to become an important problem, with the sale of pirated copies of mayor works surpassing the sale of originals.3 Secondly, the intellectual atmosphere allowed, and even demanded, the creation of encyclopaedias. We have already glimpsed Leibniz’s reasoning for the creation of an encyclopaedia- and will examine it again at a later point in more detail- but this philosophical construct was not the only reason behind the commercial and intellectual success of encyclopaedias. Classification and organisation were important aspects of intellectual life following the scientific revolution. In the same way that astrono- mers had studied and classified objects in the celestial sphere for years, ultimately allowing Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo, and finally Newton to disentangle, understand and conclusively prove how the stars and planets moved, intellectuals in every other sphere believed that if they classified and studied their objects of interest in a simi- larly rational way, they too could succeed. Bouffon is well known for attempting a classification of life. Throughout Europe at this time, Philology was being born, as in- stitutions and individuals created dictionaries defining and classifying words. Simi- larly, philosophers tried to classify knowledge and concepts, often resulting in encyclopaedias, in which there is an attempt to organise all human knowledge in a rational and easy-to-access manner. Simultaneously, there was a vast number of not very well-read people, low-level aristocrats and successful burghers mostly, for whom it was now a matter of certain importance to be seen as not being ignorant of the new developments in the different realms of culture and science. These people were already spending a fortune on books they very often did not understand very well. For these people, the idea of a limited series of volumes in which they might find every piece of knowledge they might need to know to be regarded as interesting and well-read at an intellectual soirée with peers at the court, university or café would be very interesting indeed. These books sold specially well when it was claimed that the knowledge within the tomes was ra- tionally organised, suggesting they were easy to read and understand. This demand for organised collections of knowledge turned what might have otherwise been 3 Darnton, Robert, The Business of the Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775-1800. ( Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979) [hereafter Darnton, Business of the Enlightenment]. 5 Wikipedia and Conceptions of Knowledge in Encyclopaedism David R. Hastings-Ruiz manuscripts along the line of mediaeval bestiaries, treatises or etymologies into a great intellectual enterprise into which work and money were continuously poured for decades on end, and the product of which ended up being read by all classes of people all over the world, shaping and being shaped by its time. Over the last 30 years, information technology has again changed the way we read. Computers, and through them the internet, have changed what we read, when we read, and how we read. The vast amounts of information- greater than the contents of any single library- that are now offered to anyone with access to the world wide web would be impossible to manage without specialised tools. One of the tools which are generally used by everyone using internet in search of information is the ‘search en- gine’. There are many such engines, the most commonly used one being ‘Google’,4 and the task they carry out is that of finding web pages with content which includes words we have searched, or similar words, in the hope that these pages will have the information we are seeking. These engines have a similar function to that of a librarian in a physical library. Another set of tools which are used are encyclopaedias.

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