Enlightenment and the Encyclopédie

 
From its beginning, Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie bridged a gap between ambition and reality, between its editor’s vision of collective knowledge so transformative as to have “the power to change men’s common way of thinking” and a political environment of controversy and persecution. In 1751, Diderot published his Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (Encyclopédie), a comprehensive collection of common knowledge, encompassing “not only the fields already covered by the academies,” but indeed “each and every branch of human knowledge” (App 2010). This work was the first encyclopedia to include the contributions and perspectives of a diverse group of thinkers working in mathematics, literature, history, economics, mechanical arts, theology, and many other fields. Within one year, the project was suspended by the French courts. Within five years, subscriptions to the Encyclopédie had grown to 4,000 readers. By 1759, the project was formally suppressed by the government under claims that it presented dangerous ideas made powerful by their open publication (Denis Diderot).
 

Enlightenment in the 21st Century: Quick and Collaborative

 
Today, 374 million unique visitors access Wikipedia every month. A free, open, and participatory model of an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is the 5th most visited site on the web. Driven by a robust and diverse community of participants, this 21st century encyclopedia project makes the troubled political history of Diderot’s Encyclopédie seem antiquated. The story of this earlier encyclopedia, though, remains relevant in representing the challenges that accompany negotiation between a plurality of voices. Wikipedia, and wikis as collaborative forums more broadly, enable communities to negotiate, enact, and standardize shared goals, norms, languages, and practices.

As of this writing, Wikipedia has been a work in progress for 14 years. By the fleeting measure of much of the Internet, this makes the site a grandfather of the Web 2.0 framework. Given the length of time over which it has developed, Wikipedia has formed a rather codified set of practices that serve as the shared language with which its diverse users communicate in pursuit of a shared goal: to become “the largest encyclopedia in history, both in terms of breadth and in terms of depth.”

Adrianne Wadewitz, in her “Using Wikis as a Teaching Tool” guide emphasizes that while an aggressive, trial-and-error approach works well for exploring many forms of technology, contributing to a wiki requires engaging with an existing community of practitioners, including experts. She stresses that students and other novice users learn to respect existing community standards first by beginning with legitimate peripheral participation (copyediting, adding secondary sources, creating multimedia resources) before undertaking more significant contributions of externalized accommodation (changing artifact structure, removing or adding concepts, etc.)

Newer and less standardized wikis projects, like those created for individual classrooms, as with our EDTEC 467 class, or for an inter-classroom project like the Flat Classroom Project do not necessarily have this formalized structure of practice in place. Instead, the norms evolve alongside the contributions of its users and the emerging content of the wiki artifacts. As users act, the community collectively negotiates to build consensus on acceptable practices.
 

Diverse Perspectives: The Practical and the Political

 
This week, I also became interested in the idea of wikis as a forum for activism. Wadewitz stressed that users should question given sources and structures of information and think carefully about the perspectives that are presented as common knowledge. As she notes, “every edit is political.” For much of the history of publishing, consumers of information have relied on expert voices to select the perspectives to be passed down as fact through written history.

In this sense, the collaborative function of wikis seems at first to be a democratic tool with an equity agenda. This impression, though, is perhaps mistaken, as the Wikipedia standards at least stress that the encyclopedia is decidedly not a democracy. While the content relies on a plurality of voices, best-practice standards require that contributors use reliable sources to support additions or changes to articles. “Using Wikis as a Teaching Tools” cites “using reliable sources” as a key policy of the community. The guide goes on further to say that reliable sources are most often third-party sources with reputations for fact checking, those that represent significant viewpoints rather than fringe work. I was interested and troubled by this criteria. Certainly, to serve as a repository of information for global use, Wikipedia should require a high degree of standardization in fact-checking to neutralize falsehoods born of personal bias. Still, this approach serves to potentially diminish the potential for marginalized voices to emerge in our collective storytelling of our shared global history.