Who's Your Daddy? Authority Relations in Wikipedia

My focus here is on the relationship between the reader and the writer in works of cybertext and hypertext, with Wikipedia as my example.

As I mentioned in my first post on Wikipedia, this free on-line encyclopedia contains efficiency-conscious innovations in organizational and mechanical arenas, which makes it revolutionary among “great books” of compiled knowledge (i.e., libraries and encyclopedias) and for information retrieval in general. That explains the hypertextual aspect and advantages of its character, which is primarily about nodes and links (see Nelson, Bolter, and Landow).

However, Wikipedia is also a cybertext, meaning it “centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure” (Aarseth 1). It accomplishes this through its use of wiki software, which allows for a very interactive forum, through which almost anybody can add or edit articles, with only minimum intervention by a staff of volunteers.
The consequent merging of the reader-writer roles leads to the central controversy over the validity and worth of Wikipedia as a reference source; at the same time, these ambiguous roles are a defining aspect of what it is to be a cybertext, which is by definition ergodic, or reader-interactive, in form.

This ergodic nature is important in that it is seen to foster democracy through invoking the participation of the reader, in addition to the writer; in other words, cybertexts like Wikipedia are said to empower traditionally passive readers with a voice. At a basic level, a reader can, with hypertext, create new readings by selecting different links, thus giving them some power over the outcome (Bolter 6). The levels of participation increase as the author (or developer) loses more and more control over how the reader (or user) recreates the text (Aarseth 164). Wikipedia lies somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. The content of what users can add is not preset or just a matter of establishing links to preexisting material. There is real room for significant contributions to furthering the Wikipedia community’s knowledge on the given issue.

However, we must consider that “if the difference between author and reader has vanished or diminished…then the real author must be hiding somewhere else” (Aaresth 165). This hidden author is not so much an author, who creates information, but rather the hidden controls of censorship, which quiet information. In Wikipedia’s case, a large group of administrators is “privileged with the ability to prevent articles from being edited, delete articles, or block users from editing in accordance with community policy” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Authors). Although I am not entirely aware of Wikipedia’s expulsion and rejection processes, scholar Espen Aarseth explains that, without digital civil right on networks, there is “only the judgment of the local network owners” (166). Even if there are now more regulations, they are more than likely not as stringent as those normally followed in American legal proceedings, and are therefore less bound to respect freedom of speech. In its own autobiographical article, Wikipedia admits that it has been criticized for “systematic bias [and] preference of consensus to credentials” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia). This is an inherent problem because almost any system operator is going to have an agenda, whether it is good or bad. An additional obstacle to the “democracy” that applications like Wikipedia are supposed to secure are issues of societal inequality (such as economic disadvantage) that restrict some users from Internet access completely or from being anything more than “silent surfers,” unable to engage in web production (Aarseth 172). Although new technology applications have the potential to be forums for the free exchange of unrestricted information with equal access for all people, this is clearly not the reality.

So Wikipedia, “Who’s your daddy?” The question is not so simple anymore; it includes writers (website developers as well as reader contributors, or “editors,” as they are flatteringly called); it includes individual readers (which inevitably includes many if not all writers); and finally it includes the “hidden authors” or controls—the administrators, staff, and even those societal power structures that give some better access than others. All of these sources may be considered Wikipedia’s creators, because, as argued, even each reader will also create his or her own reading; readers are always writers, and writers are almost always readers.

[Optional dorky added ending, cuz I’m just that weird-LOL!:
…readers are always writers, and writers are almost always readers. Yet the system can go further. Aarseth describes, “[J]ust as the game becomes a text for the user at the time of playing, so, it can be argued, does the user become a text for the game, since they exchange and react to each other’s messages” (162). This concept of mutual relations between technology and man where both are senders and receivers (writers and readers) can be extrapolated to a world where artificial intelligence coexists seamlessly with humans. In that not so distant future you may re-ask the question to Wikipedia’s descendent: “Who’s your daddy?” And in that age of ambiguous authority among anatomically authentic and anthropomorphically assembled automation, that Wikipedia-related machine might just answer, “(Insert your name), I am your father.”]