0.5 Digital humanities 2.0: a report on knowledge  (Page 10/10)

Let me end by throwing down the gauntlet and arguing that Wikipedia is not only a model for the humanities but also for the university today. To be sure, there are other examples that I might have mentioned, but Wikipedia is probably the most pervasive, non-corporate, digital technology platform for knowledge generation. Far from a web-based encyclopedia for “intellectual sluggards” engaged in a “flight from expertise” (to quote Michael Gorman, former President of the American Library Association [qtd. in Stothart]), Wikipedia, I believe, represents a truly innovative, global, multilingual, collaborative, knowledge-generating community and platform for authoring, editing, distributing, and versioning knowledge.  To date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in 47 languages (Wikipedia Statistics). This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia could, in fact, be a model for rethinking collaborative research and the dissemination of knowledge at institutions of higher learning, which are all too often fixated on “individual training, discrete disciplines, and isolated achievement and accomplishment” (Davidson and Goldberg, 14). 

Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open-ended network for knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author.  But you perhaps object: The content is amateurish, open to anyone, and, hence, cannot be trusted. Why would we want to abandon credentialing and expertise? And I reply: The point is not credentialing versus amateurness (or expertise versus crowd-sourcing); it's the fact that expertise and credentialing are distributed and shared in a way that increases the depth, scope, duration, and impact of both. Moreover, consensus never finally arrives when the system keeps an ongoing and ever-expanding record of each change and, significantly, always exposes its own conditions of possibility for knowledge production. At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind.  That's worth some pause and reflection.

The point here is not that Wikipedia is “the answer” to the crisis of the humanities or that humanities scholarship should turn into Wikipedia entries; rather, it's that Wikipedia represents a very different model for creating, authorizing, and distributing knowledge; Google Earth and HyperCities represent others; social technologies, virtual worlds, and creative commons authoring environments offer still others. A central part of the work of the humanities must be to create and interrogate new models for knowledge production in our “computerized” societies of 2009. Not only do we have to rethink how knowledge gets created, we also have to rethink what knowledge looks (or sounds, feels, or tastes) like, who gets to create knowledge, when it is "done" or transformed, how it gets legitimated and authorized, and how it is made accessible to a significantly broader (and potentially global) audience. The twenty-first century university has the potential to generate, legitimate, and disseminate knowledge in radically new ways on a scale never before realized, involving technologies and communities that rarely (if ever) were engaged in a global knowledge-creation enterprise. We have just begun to do this. And that's what Digital Humanities 2.0 is fundamentally about.

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