Over the past two days the Indian Centre for Internet and Society has been hosting a conference that brings a critical viewpoint to the development of the Wiki culture, particularly Wikipedia which from an Indian point of view potentially excludes the experiences of the majority of the population. Mobile, distinct from the web, far more clearly represents the Indian experience of inclusion and organisation (elsewhere they critique the impact of such issues as zero pricing).
Given that the web is only 80 million strong in India, possibly the most dynamic software producing country in the world, and that most innovative experiences happen through the mobile phone, the question they are asking is: does Wiki culture really represent the kind of organising principle that benefits the vast majority of people who are not on the fixed line web, ie the vast majority of people, full stop.
The conference includes presentations not only from academics. Though technologists are thin on the ground, two artists, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, are present. Kildall and Stern run a project that brought the wrath of Wikipedia down on them during early 2009. By way of a declaration of interest, I have worked professionally with Kildall and Stern and was an early participant in their project described below.
Their transgression was to post a Wikipedia page that claimed it was a piece of art that people could intervene in, edit and transform following the Wikipedia rules. This made Wikipedia art (and presumably by inference Wikipedia) a piece of performance art.
The Wikipedia art project provoked Wikimedia (the Wikipedia parent organisation) who contested the use of “wikipedia art” under trademark law and asked for the domain to be handed over to them.
A year later and Kildall and Stern are part of the CIS debate around Wikipedia and Wiki culture, its main focus being, are we taking this form of self-organisation too seriously and does it exclude other perspectives? The conference like the art work asks us to look outside ourselves and maybe not take too much of the wiki-life seriously.
“The accelerated growth and scope of Wikipedia as a knowledge reference of universal ambition is unheard of. The Google search engine gives preferential treatment to Wikipedia in an attempt to beat search engine optimizers and to provide a more fruitful experience to its users. Apart from leaving its modern counterparts Britannica and Encarta in the dust, such scale and breadth places Wikipedia on par with such historical milestones as Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, the Ming Dynasty’s Wen-hsien ta-ch’ eng, and the key work of French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie,” say the CIS conference organisers.
While anxious to defend Wikipedia and wiki culture the organisers also make a claim that might make uncomfortable reading:
“….the demographic profile of the Wikipedia editor as a white male geek with a limited mono-cultural worldview based on Western rationality remains a concern. However, the question of (non)diversity being formulated in Wikipedia discussions needs also to be posed beyond existing stereotypes and at the general level of discourse.”
The fact is of course that mobile is a very inclusive technology, far more so than the emerging culture of the web. I think what the CIS is challenging us to ask is this: Is there any obligation, moral, ontological or commercial, for us to fathom what that means for how we all speak, listen, learn and communicate? How should those excluded perspectives be incorporated into the work of a body like Symbian Foundation and an eco-system like the Symbian OS?
Hi, I’d like to tell you a little bit about what’s been happening here at Symbian with the creation and launch of our values, and how we’re living them. We’ve got to the point of creating and launching the imagery around our values, and we’ve made a video for you to see how we got to where we are now. And just so you know, there’ll be more to come on this.
