Dare to edit! – the politics of Wikipedia

Citation: Geertjan de Vugt (2010) Dare to edit! – the politics of Wikipedia. ephemera (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Dare to edit! – the politics of Wikipedia
Download: http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/10-1/10-1devugt.pdf
Tagged: Wikipedia (RSS), authority (RSS), death of the author (RSS), Wikipedia featured articles (RSS)

Summary

The author provides a summary of Barthes' claim that the author is dead, and Foucault's question of "What is an author?" Adopting Mouffe's notion of politics as a set of practices and institutions through which order is created, the author argues that the original vision of Wikipedia marked what he refers to as authocracy and describes as "The author is nowhere, nowhere is authority. And the author is everywhere, everywhere is authority."

The author of the article subsequently suggests that the author in Wikipedia was "killed by the police." This death occurred when a hierarchy was established with respect to (1) policies and guidelines, (2) the "positive" policing of featured article standards and (3) the reliance upon other sources for authority (i.e., through Wikipedia verifiability guidelines.

The author's argument does not leverage examples from Wikipedia and instead speaks primarily to an ideal type represented by Wikipedia.