Wikipedia and the Collective Intelligence

Henry Jenkins’ article “Interactive Audiences?” makes a good point when he discusses how fans found each other prior to the web. I can boast a former membership with the Original Beatles’ Fan Club back in the late 60’s, which was suddenly ended in 1970 when they split up. I still bear the scars.

Yet during the 70’s, the fans lived on and found Rick Rann’s memorabilia and Joe Pope’s fanzine “Strawberry Fields Forever” (SFF) and the numerous Beatlefests in various places (although I never went). Yes, we fans found each other, and as Jenkins also points out, we were self-organized and connected by affinities, not localities (137). But in those days, correspondence was notoriously slow. You’d send Rick a check in the mail and a couple weeks later, a small package would arrive at your doorstep, often long after you forgot what you had ordered.

Enter the Internet. Not only can fans interact on an immediate basis, but just everything feels faster, tighter and the world, smaller. Information can get to the bands more easily through the Internet--- as yesworld.com clearly shows: each year that the progressive rock back Yes goes on tour, they have a survey of the fans as to what “little known” fan favorite would we like to hear this tour. And they always listen.

Thanks to the Web, bands who haven’t played together in ages have found that they actually have a fan base, and after literally decades, artists like the Bonzo Dog Band, The Rutles, Roky Erikson and The Moon have gone on the road, much to the small number of loyal fans’ delight who held the lonely torch all those decades. Yet ironically, this has met with the demise of many hardcopy fan artifacts such as fanzines. The Moody Blues’ “Higher and Higher” and The Beatles' “Strawberry Fields Forever” are gone now—although I’m not sure, about SFF, as I’ve stepped away from the heavy fan base of the Beatles, believe it or not.

Jenkins talks about the jammers--the sniping of cultural signs (149)-- and the bloggers, stating that these new technologies have made grassroots networks possible.

This moves us to Wikipedia, as Stacy Schiff discusses the development of Wikipedia by ex-PhD candidate Jimmy Wales and the resistance of Encyclopedia Britannica to this collaborative archiving of all knowledge. The 17th most popular website on the planet, Schiff says that the argument is that collaboration doesn’t mean accuracy; it’s whoever outlasts opposing views regarding content. As the site continues to grow, there have been some triumphs for Wikipedia. If Britannica has 3 errors, Wikipedia has 4. I do think that’s a triumph, especially since Britannica “never claimed to be error-free.”

A long time reader of Wikipedia, today I became an account holder and actually added some content to the Authorship page in Wikipedia (thanks to the requirements of this course). I felt strange adding to someone else’s work, but decided to create my own subcategory on the “Auteur Theory and the Mantle of Authorship” as a springboard to someone else’s page on The Auteur Theory.

I wasn’t sure how this would be viewed, as Schiff mentions that Wikipedia now has over 1000 people policing content and someone else may not view my tie-in to Sarris as belonging to notions of authorship. A few hours later, when I came back to the site, my hesitation apparently had been well-founded. My entry was gone!

Since I thought it should at least stay up until the discussion for next class, I went back and added it again. According to Schiff, I can revert my comments a total of 3 times before being kicked off for 24 hours. We’ll see if my new authoring relationship with Wikipedia was only to last a day. One man’s “collaboration” is another man’s bullying. Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be outlasting my opposition.