Page 16 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

162. Chief criticisms of the project ReliabilityThe Wikipedia model allows anyone to edit and people do not need to prove their knowledge, academic quali cations, membership of societies or other credentials in order to write for it. Critics commonly question to what extent it isa reliable resource for the students wishing to consult it.The quality, breadth and development of the articles found in Wikipedia is uneven and diverse owing to its very nature, as we shall examine in detail in the following paragraphs. Comparative studies have been conducted taking random samples of articles related to school programmes to check their reliability. One of the most notable was carried out in 2005 by Nature magazine,11 in which 42 articles of the English edition were approved in quality and length, and in 2012 a team of researchers from Oxford University carried out a comparative study of Wikipedia and other online encyclopaedias such as the Britannica. They reported favourably on the reliability of Wikipedia.12Decentralised and non-academic authorship has its advantages, as it asserts the idea of knowledge permanently under construction.In future, in a knowledge environment underpinned by the paradigm of certainty (Wallerstein: 1999), it will not be possible tofully trust a resource like Wikipedia. But thisis equally true of other knowledge resources, though Wikipedia is the most visible and popular (Wikipedia, according to Alexa, ranks 10th in the Spanish-speaking world, the RAE 2868th).13Collaboration and decentralised authorshipAround 1977 the Encyclopaedia Britannica commissioned Emir Rodríguez Monegal to write the article on author Jorge Luis Borges: a scholar with a particular fondness forencyclopaedias and whose literary and critical reasoning advocated decentralised authorship, the automation of processes and the fantasy of a library rewritten in the eternity of a Babelian dream of knowledge. Scholars have even pointed out the similarities between Borges’s thought and the Internet and its new collaborative age (Sassón-Henry: 2007).Borges was also fond of conceiving works notas authors’ products but as rewritable summae, as in a virtual palimpsest that can be improved and written as knowledge grows, shrinks or expands – like Wikipedia itself, which for this purpose has a policy of detachment from what is written. Contributions are permanently donated, with the exception that they can be improved, modi ed or replaced by new knowledge stemming from the academic community who carry out research day by day.In a world of wikinomic production, it was free software that showed the rest of knowledge production the advantages of collaboratively revised and manufactured production. ‘Weapons of mass production’ (Tapscott: 2006) helped a new platform like Wikipedia to function as a di use author in which millions of people all over the world were nevertheless placing their trust. Will Wikipedia need to be have its certainty assured by part of the academy? And if so, how could it be granted such status?Such decentralised authorship has its advantages, which can help improve people’s perception of scienti c certainty by widely advocating the idea of a knowledge that is permanently under construction. Any omission or misinformation generated by a Wikipedian can be remedied by that Wikipedian or by others. In science, however, a mistake can be the downfall of a career or cause endless discredit. ‘Wikipedia contributors receive much less bene t than scientists for getting things right and su er much less cost for getting things wrong’, notes K. Brad Wray (quoted by Fallis: 2009).THE WIKIPEDIA PHENOMENON IN TODAY’S SOCIETY: FIFTEEN YEARS ON · IVÁN MARTÍNEZSmart Culture: Impact of the Internet on Artistic Creation