HACKERS, CYBORGS, AND WIKIPEDIANS: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF WIKIPEDIA Andrew Famiglietti A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2011 Committee: Victoria Smith Ekstrand, Advisor Nancy C. Patterson Graduate Faculty Representative Radhika Gajjala Donald McQuarie David Parry i ABSTRACT Victoria Smith Ekstrand, Advisor This dissertation explores the political economy and cultural history of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It demonstrates how Wikipedia, an influential and popular site of knowledge production and distribution, was influenced by its heritage from the hacker communities of the late twentieth century. More specifically, Wikipedia was shaped by an ideal I call, “the cyborg individual,” which held that the production of knowledge was best entrusted to a widely distributed network of individual human subjects and individually owned computers. I trace how this ideal emerged from hacker culture in response to anxieties hackers experienced due to their intimate relationships with machines. I go on to demonstrate how this ideal influenced how Wikipedia was understood both those involved in the early history of the site, and those writing about it. In particular, legal scholar Yochai Benkler seems to base his understanding of Wikipedia and its strengths on the cyborg individual ideal. Having established this, I then move on to show how the cyborg individual ideal misunderstands Wikipedia’s actual method of production. Most importantly, it overlooks the importance of how the boundaries drawn around communities and shared technological resources shape Wikipedia’s content. I then proceed to begin the process of building what I believe is a better way of understanding Wikipedia, by tracing how communities and shared resources shape the production of recent Wikipedia articles. ii For my father, who taught me that creativity is a human right, not a property right. and For my mother, who taught me that service to the community is what makes us really human. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many people to thank for this dissertation. First, of course, I owe a great debt to all of the members of the committee for their patient and consistent work with me in improving this dissertation. In addition, I'd like to thank my many colleagues and friends in the American Culture Studies program at Bowling Green State University for their support, their reviews of early drafts, and for many inspiring and fruitful conversations that helped shape my thinking on the topic of Wikipedia, and on peer production more broadly. Though I cannot possibly list all those deserving thanks here, Colin Helb, Mark Bernard, Cristian Pralea, Jason Zeh, Marnie Pratt, Jamie Stuart, Mike Lewis, Gavin Mueller, Kelly Watson and Lisa Avila are among my many Bowling Green colleagues and friends who I would like to single out for their support during this process. I would also like to thank Roger Whitson, Melanie Kohnen, and Robin Wharton for a series of discussions that helped lead me to my current theoretical frame for this piece. Finally, I must thank all of the editors of Wikipedia for their help in describing the remarkable free encyclopedia they have built together. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION........................................................................................... 1 Defining Cultural Studies and Peer Production …..................................................... 5 Common Features of Cultural Studies and Peer Production ..................................... 8 Cultural Studies, Peer Production and the Problem of Property.................... 11 Cultural Studies, Peer Production and the Regulatory Abilities of Non-State Entities ........................................................................................................... 17 Existing Wikipedia Literature.................................................................................... 22 Wikipedia’s Uses and Coverage .................................................................... 23 Wikipedia’s Accuracy.................................................................................... 25 Wikipedia and Search .................................................................................... 30 Wikipedia Demographics............................................................................... 31 Growth and Sustainability of Wikipedia........................................................ 32 Motivation of Wikipedia Contributors........................................................... 33 Wikipedia Community Governance .............................................................. 35 The Cultural Studies Gap............................................................................... 38 Chapter Breakdown ................................................................................................... 40 CHAPTER II. THEORIES AND METHODS ..................................................................... 42 Reading Networks of Associations: Bruno Latour and ANT .................................... 42 The Embodiment of Wikipedia: N. Katherine Hayles............................................... 48 Methods ............................................................................................................ 56 v The Anatomy of a Wiki Site .......................................................................... 58 Wikipedia Mailing Lists ................................................................................ 61 Non-Wiki Sources.......................................................................................... 62 CHAPTER III. EMBODYING FOSS .................................................................................. 65 The Cyborg Individual Illustrated: OLPC ................................................................. 66 The Genesis of Cyborg Individualism: Hacker Embodiment.................................... 74 The “hands on imperative” and the evolution of the personal computer....... 75 How Information Lost Its Body: How Hackers Built New Geometries of Connections Between and Among Humans and Machines ........................... 87 Cyborg Anxieties ........................................................................................... 100 CHAPTER IV. THE EMBODIMENT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WIKIPEDIA 109 “An Encyclopedia Located Everywhere:” The Cyborg Individual Ideal Present in the Early Wikipedia ........................................................................................................ 110 In Fork We Trust: Benkler’s Belief in the Cyborg Individual as Guarantee of Media Diversity ............................................................................................................ 115 The Wikipedia Utility: The Centralized Embodiment of the Contemporary Wikipedia ............................................................................................................ 128 A Web of Linkbacks: The marginal role of Wikipedia Mirrors .................... 132 “In every case I have given you what you wanted:” The Fork and Wikipedia’s Appetite for Free Labor ................................................................................. 139 “We have partisans working together on the same articles:” Labor as Force Shaping Features of Wikipedia Policy .................................................................................... 160 vi Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 164 CHAPTER V. WIKIPEDIA AND GOOGLE ...................................................................... 166 “What Google Liked:” Search Visibility and Wikipedia........................................... 168 “We make the internet not suck:” Wikipedia as Engine of Content Creation ........... 171 “If you are not on Google, you never existed:” How Search Informs Wikipedia’s Retention of Articles ................................................................................................. 177 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 201 CHAPTER VI. A CASE STUDY OF THE CONTEMPORARY WIKIPEDIA: THE GAZA WAR ARTICLE ............................................................................................................ 203 Bounding the Community From Above: Admin Actions in the Gaza War Article... 206 Article Protection: Setting the Default Community................................................... 208 Disciplining Individual Editors: Arbitrator Action in the Gaza War Article............. 214 Negotiated Neutrality: Key Negotiations Among Members of the Editing Community that Shaped the Gaza War Article.............................................................................. 220 WP: V as Mechanism for Resolving the Difficulties of Neutrality ............... 222 Reliable Sources as Contested Terrain .......................................................... 229 A Scarce Symbol: The article title as breakdown of the neutrality process .. 241 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 251 CHAPTER VII. CONCLUSIONS........................................................................................ 254 The Limitations and Potentials of the Ideal Body of the Cyborg Individual............. 255 Wikipedia Research Methodology: Opportunities