Page 11 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

1. Wikipedia: the free Internet encyclopaedia.Premises: daughter of free software and French encyclopaedists.Nearly 15 years since it was created, Wikipedia, the self-styled free encyclopaedia, is a resource that serves 16 billion pages per month. Its self- regulated ecosystem, its editorial standards and its capacity to enlist nearly 75,000 volunteers1 who extend and modify it daily is the subject of research, criticism and everyday comments in the main environments of cultural reproduction and transmission of knowledge: the family, the mass media and schools. It is one of the most dynamic, ambitious and collaborative Internet projects (Ortega: 2009).The Wikipedia universe is a dense web of volunteers who exploit this diversity. It embraces a variety of trends, in uences, motivations and opinions from all over the world and is following a steadily upward course. Nearly 500 academic writings are produced year after year, including exercises, quantitative and qualitative analyses, comparative studies and above all criticism of the project. They attempt to nd answers to and predict a phenomenon which, although having a few signi cant actors, bears on its shoulders the weight of an encyclopaedia that has undoubtedly had a social impact on Internet users worldwide, probably with the exception of China, where it was totally forbidden at the end of 2015.2Wikipedia is a living resource that is part of millions of people’s lives. And as such, its relationship with society, like that of many other resources for reproducing knowledgeand information, is not without controversy. The clash between the poles of production and reproduction of traditional knowledge with their global industries, associations, universities, schools, organisations and cultural secretariats and a ‘bunch of nobodies’, as Wikipedian and journalist Andrew Lih a ectionately calls thecommunity in his book The Wikipedia Revolution, is a living fact in the process of nding common ground.The direct precedents of Wikipedia are Richard Stallman’s GNUpedia project (Lih: 2009) and, in particular, his free software philosophy that has developed intensely since the 1980s and is now an irreversible factor in part of the hardwareand software that make the technological world possible. As Peter Burke has pointed out, there is a direct link between the French encyclopaedia and Wikipedia’s current level of dissemination at the start of the twenty- rst century. Its model of entries is predominantly based on the structure established by the French in the eighteenth century, preserving the classi cation standards of the latter practically intact, albeit possibly enriched by the famous Britannica, with which it is often associated and compared.3The early Internet saw the explosion of replicas of electronic likenesses ranging from the ‘real’ world to that of the Web 1.0: virtual museums, virtual walks, virtual marketplaces, email, ebooks. And the new big bang triggered by the Web 2.0. gave rise to the creation of the collective power of the predicted prosumption (To er: 1980), that is, creation and emergence based on collective, dynamic content generated by people.Wikipedia’s direct precedents are the philosophy of free software, collective content generated by people and the eighteenth-century French encyclopaedia.This went hand-in-hand with a type of organisation which, as Yochai Bechler pointed out (Lih: 2009), was already being practiced in computational environments in free software communities: peer production of knowledge based on fruitful interaction between the notion of common good or, rather, the commons,and technology (Lafuente: 2008), all in an environment where tools are relatively easyto learn and the meritocracy spurs an almost egocentric personal satisfaction.AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 201611Smart Culture: Impact of the Internet on Artistic Creation