22.5.07
Introduction
Wikipedia is the new age, free encyclopedia where anyone with Internet access can openly edit or update its content at anytime from anywhere. Such freedom of a user generated content website presents audiences with large amounts of raw information that has not been subjected to alternations forced by authorities. However, this openness also exposes the web encyclopedia to vandalism and publishing inaccurate information. This essay aims to demonstrate and problematize the potential of collaborative peer production through the “Taiwan independence” entry on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia background
“Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project” (Wikipedia). Launched first in English on 15th January 2001, Wikipedia serves approximately 7.8 million articles in 252 languages, varying from the wide used English to Swati, a language spoken in the Kingdom of Swaziland, a small, landlocked country in South Africa (List of Wikipedias). Founded by Jimmy Wales, and controversially Larry Sanger (Bergstein, 2007), wikipedia.org now is now ranked number 9 on the most visited sites worldwide (Alexa, 2007).
Wikipedia is run by the non-profit organisation Wikimedia Foundation, created by co-founder Jimmy Wales (Frequently asked questions). The Wikimedia Foundation relies solely on private donations and through funds raised during fundraisers. Authors of the free encyclopedia are volunteers of the Wikipedia community, otherwise known as Wikipedians. Wikipedians consists of people from all over the world, contributing vital information to the internet encyclopedia and maintaining this collaborative project. As volunteers, Wikipedians contribute their time and effort in constructing, researching and maintaining articles, as well as looking after the hardware Wikipedia run on (Wikipedia community).
Wikipedia is the largest open content project (Open content) allowing collaborative peer production. Its open content and open source nature not only allows users to browse through all the information without charge, users can also freely edit the content of the entire encyclopedia. Changes to the content appear immediately without having to go through an editor, as there is none (Anderson, 2006).
Nevertheless, Wikipedia is arguably not ‘free’. Despite describing its bureaucratic structure as flat and almost non-existent, Wikipedia does have a structure involving “administrators”, “bureaucrats”, “stewards” and the developers of the software. Wikipedians holding these titles have power over other ordinary users. For example, “administrators” have permission to completely remove pages and lock articles to prevent further edits (Wikipedia: User access levels).
Entry background
The Wikipedia entry this essay will be focused on is the “Taiwan independence” article written to explain the political movement in which Taiwan is attempting to gain independence from Mainland China and become a sovereign state. “Taiwan independence” first entered Wikipedia 20th November 2001, edited by a user named Chenyu, President of Globewide Network Academy. By time of writing this essay, it was last edited on 02.19, 19th of May, 2007. As of May 19th, the page has been edited approximately 500 times.
The Taiwanese Independence Movement aims at Taiwan becoming an independent state, defining itself as Republic of Taiwan. This movement attempts to withdraw Taiwan from the powers of the People’s Republic of China. The People’s Republic of China declares Taiwan as a part of its own territory, a province of Mainland China and strongly opposes Taiwan in becoming an independent country.
The Wikipedia entry on “Taiwan independence” is part of the WikiProject China where Wikipedians are dedicated improve all the China-related articles on Wikipedia. “Taiwan independence” is also a segment of WikiProject Taiwan, the Wikipedia project to improve all Taiwan-related articles. In relations to WikiProject China, this article is rated Start-Class on the Wikipedia quality assessment scale showing that the article “The article has a meaningful amount of good content, but it is still weak in many areas” (Wikipedia:WikiProject China/Assessment). For WikiProject Taiwan, not only the article is rated Start-Class, “Taiwan independence” is also rated Top-Importance in the Project’s importance scale.
The main article of “Taiwan independence” summarises the Taiwanese Independence Movement, highlighting history and recent facts regarding the movement. The content box of the article gives links to each sub-heading that gives further and more in depth information regarding the topic. Photos of relevance to the subject are shown all through the page. At the bottom of the article related Wikipedia and external links are given to users for further enquiries into the topic. Other subjects and topic links, which are closely related to “Taiwan independence”, are given in subject boxes at the end of the page.
Demonstrate the potential of collaborative peer production
Wikipedia is an open source and open content software. These basic characteristics of Wikipedia, allows users to freely use, copy and modify all its contents free of charge. Wikipedia is a collaborative project with participants from all over the world, sharing distinct knowledge in different languages. The content of Wikipedia changes constantly, allowing users to be up to date with the most recent information. Articles on Wikipedia appear immediately after creation, without going through any sightings of editors, as they are none existent in Wikipedia. Working with a team allows collaborative learning, where peers can correct each other’s mistakes. Through collaborative peer production, a community is created, where groups may gather to protect the content of the page or to discuss the issues in the article.
Collaborative peer production allows Wikipedia to obtain mass amounts of information from people with different location, cultural background, written language and etc on its articles. Users living in different locations or have received dissimilar teachings may perceive and respond to an issue in a different way. In the issue of “Taiwan independence”, Wikipedians with a People’s Republic of China background may share different views to the subject as to Wikipedians who are from Taiwan. Through editing the article by both parties, readers will be able to gain insights to the different ways the two conflicting groups views the issue of Taiwan independence. In physically existing encyclopedias, updates are nonexistent unless users are willing to pay for a newer version of the set of books. Through Wikipedia, users are also allowed to be up to date with the information regarding the topic as with the many volunteers working on the article, there is high likelihood of a Wikipedian updating the article when a related news break out. Even though some view Taiwan’s struggle for independence began in the 1600s, it is only recent years where most of the movement took place. Frequent updates on the matter are crucial in relations to “Taiwan independence” as any move made by either government on the topic will affect the timeliness of the article, and the accuracy of the content. With no editors, Wikipedia lets its contents be on time. If every time a change is made on the “Taiwan independence” article, the editor would have many pieces of information to read and research through and it would no doubt reduce the speed in which the articles are updates. Therefore the article may loose its accuracy and users would be presented and perhaps misled with out of date information.
Through collaboration, users can share their knowledge and learn from each other (Thagard, 1997). In an example above, where Wikipedians from Mainland China and Taiwan may share different views of Taiwan independence, these two opposed parties can not only share their knowledge on the topic, they can also learn from each other and gather a more thorough, and less biased view on the issue. Examples of collaborative learning are available from the ‘discussion’ tab of the article, where people share and discuss their knowledge on “Taiwan independence”.
An online community or communities can be created through working on the same topic together. Winning a Webby Award in 2004 for "community" (The Webby Awards, 2004), the Wikipedia community is a well-presented example of an online community formed through collaborative peer production. Through volunteering their time and energy to build a free, online encyclopedia, users become part of the Wikipedian community, sharing the same motive of maintaining Wikipedia. In addition, a sub community may be formed within Wikipedians to the community that is dedicated to updating and maintaining the “Taiwan independence” article. Sharing the same interest, these Wikipedians can discuss the facts of the topic and ways of improving the article through the discussion tab on “Taiwan independence”.
Video: Taiwanese Wikipedian Meetup with Jimmy Wales / 吉米威爾士台北見面會
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h_xMqDrQK8
Collaborative peer production in context of Wikipedia and the article on “Taiwan independence” is constructive in view of the fact that it provides users with and allows users to share distinct and timely knowledge regarding the topic, let users learn from each other and forms online communities who strive for the same goals.
Problematize the potential of collaborative peer production
Despite all positive facts of teamwork, collaborative peer production on Wikipedia does have its drawbacks. When working in a large team, it is often difficult to define contributions of single members. Even though Wikipedia is an anyone can edit encyclopedia, the actual content distributors are a minority of Wikipedia users. Wikipedia offers no authorship to contributors and may cause disputes between Wikipedian as to who did what. As there are no requirements to referencing, the content displayed on Wikipedia may be subjected to plagiarism. As all edits are published immediately, inaccurate and inadequately researched information may mislead users of the article to acknowledging the wrong information. In addition, conflict may be raised between Wikipedians with varied views on the topic and editing each other’s work to suit their own interest. Wikipedia is also subjected to vandalism. Its open content characteristic allows anyone, even vandals, to purposely mislead or delete all the information from the encyclopedia.
Wikipedians are volunteers, they gain no authorship to their contributions and are not recognised for individual efforts. With all articles on Wikipedia, including “Taiwan independence”, no Wikipedian have authorship to any part of the content despite the time and effort they have spent on researching and creating the information. It is often difficult for users to prove their contribution to the article unless they open an older, out of date, archived version. It could also causes disputes between users in regards to who did what. As the article is often altered, Wikipedians may delete some content, and put up similar content, taking the edit as their own contribution. Users of Wikipedia may also plagiarise the work of other academics, as there are no strict requirements of referencing when posting information.
The quality and accuracy of articles on Wikipedia are highly questionable. As there is no responsibility in posting inaccurate information, a single member of the production team may post information that misleads the whole team. Edits are posted immediately without an editor checking the content, therefore the information submitted may be completely wrong and users would receive and perhaps pass on inaccurate knowledge if no one bothered to make corrections. In relations to “Taiwan independence”, anyone can post for example, ‘research shows, 90% of Taiwanese living in Taiwan believe they are superior than their Chinese neighbours from Mainland China and therefore would like to be independent of powers from People’s Republic of China’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Taiwan_independence&oldid=132726391). This piece of information is completely made up and if posted on Wikipedia, users reading the article on “Taiwan independence” may obtain the wrong view and believe Taiwanese are completely arrogant. Acknowledging this piece of inaccurate content, users may mislead other non-Wikipedians to believe this false statement and cause many people to presume that Taiwanese are arrogant.
Different people may strongly hold different views towards the same issue and conflicts are raised when both parties refuse to acknowledge information from their opposition. In “Taiwan independence”, the two opposing parties mainly consist of supporters of Taiwan independence (most arguably being Taiwanese), and supporters opposing this movement (arguably mainly Mainland Chinese). The Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China strongly believes in the One China Policy, where Taiwan is a province of China. However, the Taiwanese government is fighting for independence, attempting to break free of Mainland China. Both parties have and have spread the powerful reasons in their decisions in order to gain support from the people. In the Wikipedia entry “Taiwan independence”, supporters for the movement may create biased points on the issue. Enraged oppositions of the movement may then destroy all the content in support for Taiwan independence and place their opinions on the page. This type of conflict between Wikipedians not only create chaos in the community, the representation of strong, one-sided information also minimizes content accuracy.
Vandalism is a major issue on open source, collaborated projects such as Wikipedia, as the content is open to be manipulated or destroyed by vandals (Kleeman, 2007). As stated in the Wikipedia entry “Researching with Wikipedia”, “Wikipedia's radical openness means that any given article may be, at any given moment, in a bad state: for example, it could be in the middle of a large edit or it could have been recently vandalized… Wikipedia is certainly more subject to subtle vandalism than a typical reference work” (Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia). In “Taiwan independence”, the article has previously been vandalised many times. Severely, the page was vandalised on 22nd of May 2004, where all the content on “Taiwan independence” was replaced by rude, aggressive language irrelevant to the issue (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Taiwan_independence&oldid=3693499). This type of vandalism happened again on several other occasions where arguably people opposing to the movement have replaced the article’s contents with false, rude and hurtful comments towards Taiwanese (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Taiwan_independence&oldid=7530207).
Collaborative peer production in context of Wikipedia can be problematic as shown through the article on “Taiwan independence”. Teamwork on a collaborative project such a Wikipedia can have negative effects as disputes can be raised caused by the various problems of no authorship, open content, and users could be misled by other Wikipedians and their work are also subjected to vandalism.
Conclusion
Wikipedia, in context of “Taiwan independence”, successfully demonstrated the positive potential of collaborative peer production as well as the problems collaborative peer production face. Volunteers who have sacrificed their time and energy in creating the “Taiwan independence” article have benefited through the teamwork environment by being part of a community, learn from others and freely express their knowledge. These Wikipedians have also experienced first hand the problems of collaborative peer production through the disputes about the article and the vandalism the entry often faced. Therefore, collaborative peer production has both positive and negative effects in context of Wikipedia.
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