In my book, I did not disguise the Wikipedia-pseudonym of the administrator at the centre of the controversy. I sincerely regret any distress that this description may have caused this person. Future editions of the book will correct this situation. I have conflicting views about the ethics of online peer project research. But before detailing these views, I need to set the record straight, because of some misleading statements about my book. The easiest way to dispel such statements would simply be for people to read the relevant chapter. However, this may not always be possible. I therefore reaffirm that the events outlined above represent a small part of a case study on expertise and governance in Wikipedia, not the main subject of this case study. Furthermore, I affirm that this case study only deals with the issue of online harassment in passing – there are two brief references to it in the entire chapter – and that it does not in any way identify or analyse the administrator in question as a victim of harassment.

And now: What do Wikipedia’s unique features, both in terms of its democratic promise and its socio-technical characteristics, mean for the ethics of Internet research?

Wikipedia research necessarily involves dealing with conflict. This stems from the fact that governance in peer projects depends on the diffusion of decision-making. When combined with fuzzy guidelines such as “notability” the result is innumerable decision-makers with their own take on the rules. As previously discussed here, wiki-conflict has structural, epistemic, psychological, etc, causes. Wiki-conflict also relates to the disparities in competencies between users, some of which (known as administrators or “sysops”) can protect or delete pages, and block other editors. Though no statistics exist, it is safe to assume that the majority of admins use their tools in a responsible fashion. At the same time, the project’s development relies in part on the constant entry of enthusiastic “newbies”. The herding of these novice autonomous content providers by more experienced users along normative policy lines can generate resentment and the feeling of injustice, in the shape of participants who feel they have been ill treated, or even humiliated. The problem is compounded when experienced users dispose of administrative tools. Further, if such situations involve friendship cliques, there is an increased likelihood of abuses of administrative authority.

Consequences of this dynamic include the rise of the proportion of policy and regulatory discussion in relation to mainspace content (Kittur et al 2007); and the increasingly higher likelihood of edits by unregistered editors or ordinary editors being reverted than edits by members of the administrative elite. This last fact may be having a chilling or discouraging effect on recruitment, as the tremendous increase in numbers of participants appears to be tapering off (Suh et al 2009). To complicate matters further, the perceived lack of accountability of some so-called “abusive admins” is a grievance frequently expressed on “watchdog sites” such as Wikipedia Review or “parody sites” such as Encyclopedia Dramatica. These sites’ relentless monitoring and criticism of Wikipedia has generated cycles of mutual demonisation: Wikipedia Review and Encyclopedia Dramatica denounce the malfeasances of the “Wikipedia elite” whilst Wikipedians justify the banning of links to these frequently puerile or obscene “hypercritical” or “attack” sites because of their inappropriate revelation of personal information about Wikipedia editors and administrators.

How then should researchers deal with conflict on Wikipedia? The orthodoxic position in Internet Research ethics is to stress the Internet’s blurring of the categories of the private and the public, signifying that technical accessibility does not equal publicness, and making anonymity and informed prior consent necessary (King 1996, Waskul and Douglass 1996). Others have gone further, advocating the search for a consensus so that researchers enable research subjects to correct or change what is written about them before publication (Allen 1996), or work together with research subjects to produce research (Bakardjieva and Feenberg 2001) by practising “open source ethics” (Berry 2004).

Susan Herring (1996) raised a number of objections to this stance, which are all relevant to Wikipedia research:
(a) False anonymity: since the Internet is a written medium, in publicly archived and indexed projects it is trivial to perform a search and find the authors of a particular quote, or the protagonists in a particular situation. Anonymising subjects would therefore simply be a convention, a means of protecting the researcher’s ethical credentials, whilst allowing the identification of subjects (this is particularly the case in a wiki where all changes to the archive are automatically recorded).
(b) Lack of verifiability: how can results be reproduced by other researchers if distinguishing features are scrubbed out?
(c) The question of scale: in large projects, who should the researcher seek prior consent from? In the case of Wikipedia, literally hundreds of people may opine during a conflict.
(d) Finally, Herring flagged the possible censoring of critical research: how can researchers conduct legitimate critical research (in Herring’s case, she was investigating gender bias in email lists) if prior consent is sought out? Would informing subjects of the research project not entice them to modify the very behaviour which the researcher is documenting? In particular, what of participants who wield power over other users?

Wikipedia also has unique socio-technical features which differentiate it from the MUDs and discussion lists early Internet researchers dealt with. Non-disruptive Wikipedians do not participate in the project to share personal stories and experiences, find emotional support, experiment with identity, or play: they participate to write an encyclopedia following strict editorial and technical design rules. Wikipedia is a working environment; but it is also imbued with a strong pseudo-legal culture. When participants are deemed to be disruptive or when a conflict starts to heat up, specific guidelines and institutions come into play. The supreme conflict-resolution body on Wikipedia is the Arbitration Committee or “ArbCom”. The ArbCom invites witnesses to provide testimonies, gathers evidence, and adjudicates through (secret) votes. Evidence on Wikipedia takes the form of “diffs “ (the “difference” between two versions of a page showing a new edit) which must be produced whenever a claim is made about the actions of an editor.

Whilst new or inexperienced users may not be aware that all edits on Wikipedia can potentially be subsequently referred to, the same cannot be said of experienced editors and particularly of administrators. It is precisely the mastery of the socio-technical forms of evidence presentation that enables experienced editors to present convincing cases during disputes. Wikipedia thus has a culture of public “rational-critical” discussion (Hansen et al. 2009) where experienced editors expect their words and actions to be be evaluated and criticised.

In short: on the one hand, everyone has a right to privacy, and the “golden rule” of doing no harm should be respected. On the other hand, Wikipedia operates as a transparent workshop and tribunal. Important events on Wikipedia are so well-known within the community, and so easily searchable from without, that it is unclear to what extent disguising real names or pseudonyms is a guarantor of anonymity. In addition, the dilemma posed by Herring (1996) has lost none of its salience: the ethics of not doing harm to subjects needs to be balanced to the ethics of potentially not addressing injustice unearthed by research.

The early days of Internet Research saw a host of stimulating examinations of the emergence of commons-based legal systems in MUDs and MOOs (see Maltz 1996, Mnookin 1996, Lemley 1997, Perritt 1997). To my knowledge, there has been little examination of Wikipedia’s internal legal structure. I think this is a telling sign. The discussion of the legality of administrative actions implies an examination of particular cases and decisions. Since Wikipedia-law is (a) unstable, as it can potentially be challenged and rewritten and (b) constantly used as a tool in a hornet’s nest of micro-conflicts, it is understandable that legal scholars would hesitate to comment. But more broadly, this points to the difficulty with practising what Macek (2006) calls “radical media scholarship”, understood as “politically-motivated research on the media which attempts to understand the world in order to change it and which is typically informed by Marxism, materialist feminism, radical political economy, critical sociology and social movement theory” (1031-1032).

If the point of such critical research is to have some impact on reality, it is difficult to see how this could be achieved without referring to specific examples of practices and procedures – which then runs the risk of identifying individuals, even when their identity is disguised, for the reasons outlined above. Should researchers, then, strictly obey the “golden rule” by only conducting quantitative analysis at the macro level (“there may be cases of abusive authorities because of structural factors x, y and z”), thereby staying out of Wikipedia’s embodied arrangements of power? Or is a hybrid form of critical research, in collaboration with the Wikipedia elite, possible?

Note: Thanks to David Berry for stimulating my thinking on this topic.

References

Allen C (1996) “What’s Wrong with the “Golden Rule”? Conundrums of Conducting Ethical Research in Cyberspace”, The Information Society 12 (2): 175-187.

Bakardjieva M and A Feenberg (2001) “Involving the Virtual Subject”, Ethics and Information Technology 2 (4): 233-240.

Berry D (2004) “Internet Research: Privacy, Ethics and Alienation: an Open-Source Approach”, Internet Research 14 (4): 323-332.

Hansen S, N Berente and K Lyytinen (2009) “Wikipedia, Critical Social Theory and the Possibility of Rational Discourse”, The Information Society 25 (1): 38-59.

Herring S (1996) “Linguistic and Critical Analysis of Computer-Mediated Communication: Some Ethical and Scholarly Considerations”, The Information Society, 12 (2): 153-168.

King S (1996) “Researching Internet Communities: Proposed Ethical Guidelines for the Reporting of Results”, The Information Society 12 (2): 119-128.

Kittur A, B Suh, B Pendleton and E Chi (2007) “He Says, She Says: Conflict and Coordination in Wikipedia”, in Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San José, CA, 28 April–3 May: 453-462.

Lemley M (1997) “The Law and Economics of Internet Norms”, Chicago-Kent Law Review 73: 1257-1294.

Macek S (2006) “Divergent Critical Approaches to New Media”, New Media & Society 8 (6): 1031-1038.

Maltz T (1996) “Customary Law and Power in Internet Communities”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2 (1) June 1996.

Mnookin J.L. (1996) “Virtual(ly) Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2 (1).

Perritt H (1997) “Cyberspace Self-Government: Town-Hall Democracy or Rediscovered Royalism?”, Berkeley Technology Law Journal 12: 413-475.

Santana, A and D Wood (2009) “Transparency and Social Responsibility Issues for Wikipedia”, Ethics and Information Technology 11 (2): 133-144.

Suh B, G Convertino, E Chi, and P Pirolli (2009) “The Singularity is Not Near: Slowing Growth of Wikipedia?”, International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym), 25-27 October, Orlando, FL.

Viégas F, M Wattenberg M and D Kushal, “Studying Cooperation and Conflict Between Authors with History Flow Visualisations”, CHI 2004, 24–29 April 2004, Vienna.

Wascul D and M Douglass (1996) “the Electronic Participant: Some Polemical Observations on the Ethics of On-line Research”, The Information Society 12 (2): 129-140.

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The relationship between Google and Wikipedia is central to the online encyclopedia’s success. Why did Google start returning Wikipedia articles in the top 5 results for searches? Something to do with Wikipedia’s internal link structure? That should not count: only links from other sites are supposed to be measured by PageRank. In any case, it’s safe to say that if Google searches had not raised the profile of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia would not have developed in the same way.

The famous quote mentioned above does raise the issue of Wikipedia editors possibly relying overly on online sources, particularly when deciding whether some topic or other is notable, or during deletion debates. Following the publication of my article on expertise and Wikipedia, I was contacted in early May 2009 by Sage Ross who offered some comments and we had a discussion about various issues relating to the article, one of which was precisely the question of online sourcing. Rather than rehashing the discussion I asked Sage if it would be OK to post the relevant excerpts and he agreed – first on a Wikipedia discussion page and now here.

[Sage wrote:] On an unrelated note, you write later in the article that “marginal
cultures which have not been digitised and uploaded run the risk of becoming invisible.” I have two comments. First, Jimmy Wales’ facetious comment that “If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist” is not, and has never been, normative on Wikipedia; rather, it seems to me like a statement of the zeitgeist of the Internet age. Second, if
marginal cultures are not covered in any digitized content, they don’t run the risk of becoming invisible…they already are invisible. If they aren’t on Google, that means that there are essentially no books or scholarly articles about them and that publishing institutions (including, in recent years, the Internet-connected public) have been
ignoring them since the rise of electronic publishing. That’s not to say that Wikipedia doesn’t play a role in re-enforcing patterns of marginalization; through the “Reliable sources” guideline, in particular, it does do that. But I think it’s unfair to lay that marginalization at the feet of Wikipedia, since that only causes problems when marginal cultures have already been made invisible (or rather, have never been made visible) by the forms of media that Wikipedia builds on and is built from. I would argue that Wikipedia actually levels the field for the unjustly marginalized, who are normally crowded out by the popular. There were thousands upon thousands of newspaper articles and television stories about Anna Nicole Smith; there are just a few dozen* corresponding Wikipedia articles. Conversely, there are Wikipedia articles for small villages with no particular claim to fame for which the only sources are census and geographical data…the invisible and marginal made visible and human-readable. In a paper encyclopedia, editors would have to find content to remove for every bit that got added, so that encyclopedia sets would not grow without bound and could still be sold to suburban families by door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen.

*This is a wild estimate.

[Mathieu responded:] Re. your second and related point, I did not say that J. Wales’ comment was normative, but it does encapsulate a certain reliance on a handy http page to link to buttress one’s point. I think there might be a “loop effect” deriving from Google’s ranking of WP as well. This is a complicated issue, which also depends on whether one does believe that everything which could have been digitised has been (I don’t), or on where one stands on the notability question, or perhaps even on what constitutes original research in an encyclopedia which has no space limitations. So, while I appreciate your point that WP may level the playing field in some respects, I would have to reserve judgement until some more definite form of empirical evidence has been produced.

[Sage reponded:] Following up a bit on marginalization and sources…

You say:

> So, while I appreciate your point that WP may level the playing field in some
> respects, I would have to reserve judgement until some more definite form of
> empirical evidence has been produced.

Fair enough. But you seem willing to judge Wikipedia for marginalizing topics that don’t have digital sources, without presenting definite empirical evidence and despite the fact that, in both policy and practice, Wikipedia encourages the use of print sources (including ones that are not available online). Online sources are treated as a convenience for readers, but there is no hesitation to use offline sources when they are superior.

Do you have particular cultures in mind that you see as being marginalized by Wikipedia’s Verifiability requirements?

[Mathieu responded:] In general, I would venture that marginal / underground / subcultural /counter-cultural events, people and artefacts that existed before 1995 would not necessarily have been comprehensively digitised. I had some anecdotal
evidence of this when I created an article for a by no means insignificant art / cultural group active 1988-1993 which was judged not notable because no online sources were available. The point being, the group in question definitely made an impact on the cultural scene at the time but the sources which document this (art or music magazines, exhibition catalogues, concert flyers, fanzines, radio shows, etc) are not online. Now, I didn’t even know about the whole AFD process then; and the art / cultural group was active in Paris, while I created an entry on WP-en. So things might have turned out differently on the French WP… people might have known about it or been more receptive or whatever…

[Sage responded:] Thanks. It’s true that Wikipedia creates threshold for inclusion that
re-enforces existing patterns of marginalization. It sounds like what you’ve run up against has more to do with Wikipedia’s definition of Original Research than Verifiability; offline magazines, and possibly exhibition catalogs as well, would be considered Reliable Sources on Wikipedia that could be used to establish at topic’s Notability. Of
course, Wikipedia is only the most prominent example of a whole class of wiki venues that follow the model Wikipedia created but often have different social structures; some of these are open to a wider array of content, and in a both a cultural and technical sense they exist because of Wikipedia. So I think I understand where you’re coming from now, but I still think it’s misleading to blame Wikipedia for the
shortcomings of cultural institutions whose role it is do the kinds of things that on Wikipedia are called “Original Research”. (The problems with that definition are interesting; there is a gap that exists for some areas of knowledge between what is allowed on Wikipedia and what is considered original enough to merit publication elsewhere, e.g., in terms of the analysis of literature.)

The other problem you ran into, perhaps, is the opaque complexity of the way Wikipedia works, so that your work was pushed out because it didn’t conform to Wikipedians’ expectations even though it might, in principle, have been made into something stable. That kind of thing is a big problem, and one that the community is constantly struggling with.

[Discussion ended]

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In a recent series of interviews on peer governance in Wikipedia posted by Vasilis Kostakis, Michel Bauwens argued that the victory of deletionists over inclusionists imposed an artificial scarcity, which breeds boundaries and hence power structures. Now, the inclusionist vs. deletionist battle is useful for defining the specificity of Wikipedia: it’s true that what distinguishes an online encyclopedia written by amateurs of varying competencies from a traditional expert-based encyclopedia is the absence of space constraints. Another consequence of this freedom and absence of editorial oversight may be a lack of discernment in distinguishing the trivial from the profound, a collapsing of what is historically momentous and what is “just for the fans” – for example the English Wikipedia entry on “democracy” has 9,550 words; the entry on the TV series “Lost” has 11,380 words. So, inclusion or deletion is a central philosophical question regarding what Wikipedia should be in terms of content. But when it comes to issues of power, I would argue that notability battles are a symptom of a larger issue, which is that conflictuality is endemic in the project.

Why is there so much fighting on Wikipedia? The answer could be framed in structural terms: governance in peer projects depends on the diffusion of decision-making. When combined with fuzzy guidelines such as “notability” and “consensus” the result is innumerable decision-makers with their own take on the rules. Or it could be an institutional problem: there is no Constitution to spell out important roles and processes such as the exact powers of the charismatic founder or recall mechanisms for abusive authorities. Then again conflicts could arise because of the nature of the technology: the speed of the transition between writing and publishing does not give much of an opportunity for people to cool off. Or they could result from the nature of an encyclopedia, which is based on assertions as to what truth is, rather than on opinions, which can vary: such assertions do not leave much space for others.

All of these answers are contributing factors. But the simplest and most convincing explanation is that on Wikipedia, completely different people with completely different opinions are attempting to work together; let’s not forget that a lot of content disputes originate not in whether to delete or keep an article, but in what articles actually say. To explore the issue, I will draw on a recently published article which offers a remarkable analysis of conflicts in the French Wikipedia, whose title could be translated as “The negotiation of points of view: a social map of conflicts and quarrels in the French Wikipedia” by Auray et al. The article combines two distinct approaches: social network analysis, with its focus on quantitative maps of social relationships, and pragmatic sociology, with its emphasis on interactions between people understood as sequences of actions.

I have argued elsewhere that the development of autonomous online scientific expertise has evolved since the origins of the Internet when it was based on the proven expertise of hackers, to the present situation where the competence of contributors to open projects such as Wikipedia is impossible to ascertain. In a similar vein, Auray et al. preface their analysis with the observation that the rise of Wikipedia parallels an evolution of our relationship to “scientific truth” as manifested by the reopening of scientific controversies and the questioning of traditional authorities.

The population of Wikipedia editors comprises a great mix of people: scientists, interested amateurs, consumers, advertising agencies, industry spokespersons. All these people with diverse interests and competencies must negotiate together, which can give rise to conflicts. Negotiation has previously been analysed as an essential part of the work of open communities such as free software projects. When people start fighting, they have two avenues: they can try the mediation of a public discussion, but the heterogeneous nature of participants and remnants of previous confrontation can result in new disputes erupting, governed by the logic of honour, of not backing down. A second avenue is arbitration: the appearance before a tribunal where claims or accusations are made, evidence is presented, and witnesses can testify. Editors who contribute a lot tend to make lots of accusations. This is because as participants become more and more involved in the encyclopedia, they become more and more familiar with its rules, and seek more and more to apply them to enable the project’s functioning, as a form of personal engagement which is also a moral initiative.

Auray et al. identify several factors which contribute to conflictuality, such as the number of participants, the location of disputes, and the identity choices of participants.

The larger the number of contributors, the more likely discussion is; the threshold number seems to be eight. When there are more than ten participants, discussion increasingly moves to the talk pages of users, and is more likely to degenerate into insults. A surefire indicator of fights are references to policy pages. These can be statistically measured: research by Kriplean and Beschastnikh has shown that pages with more than 250 posts had 51% of the links towards policy pages.

There are two main types of articles where conflicts erupt: first, the usual suspects are topics with burning current affairs value involving inter-ethnic or inter-faith conflicts; second, “scientific” categories with low academic legitimacy such as homeopathy and chiropraxy are strong conflict zones. Suspected “sock-puppetry” (fake identity) is also a source of conflict; an attenuated version of this being the lack of regard for people who have not registered on the site and instead just use an IP address: more than half of the text inserted by “IPs” is deleted, and they are more likely to be present in semi-protected articles which is where disputes and insults typically occur. IPs are also more likely to insult others, so there are suspicions that IPs are registereds users who use “socks” to engage in insulting behaviour which they would not dare to do under their registered identities.

In conclusion, the authors ask what happens when conflicts arising from the negotiation of points of views cannot be resolved or pacified into reasoned discussion? In this case there occurs what they call a “re-singularisation”, where, after the discussion being generalised, taken to the higher level of public mediation, it reverts to one person being blamed. This finding of a personal “fault” by troublemakers or persecutors can be described as a key “managerial strategy” on Wikipedia (others may be tempted to call it a major flaw).

This analysis has the benefit of explaining the often-found fact that the proportion of policy and regulatory discussion in relation to mainspace content is rising – as a function of the process of acculturation into the project of its custodians, the pre-admins and admins. It also points to the paradox that since the project’s development relies in part on the constant entry of enthusiastic “newbies”, the subsequent herding of these novice autonomous content providers by administrators along normative policy lines cannot but generate resentment and the feeling of injustice, in the shape of participants who feel they have been ill treated, or even humiliated, by registered editors and admins. Unfairness can be hard to evaluate, as both sides in disputes invariably feel they are in the right, so a structural example will best illustrate the issue: creators of articles set its tone. Because of a “first-mover advantage”, the initial text of an article tends to survive longer and suffer less modification than later contributions to the same article. It is to be expected that article creators who maintain an interest in the article would put it on their watch list and, despite the project’s injunctions, would experience feelings – if not of ownership – at least of heightened sensitivity and possible unhappiness if someone attempts to “improve” their baby. The problem is compounded when editors dispose of administrative tools. Further, if these kinds of situations involve existing friendship cliques, there is an increased likelihood of abuses of admin authority. In this sense, conflict would appear to be an inevitable by-product of the Wikipedia development model.

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