Wikipedia and the politics of openness

Wikipedia and the politics of openness.md

2 Obama administration combined political ideas with Web 2.0 ideas
3 "openness" is now a central concern in politics
5 Wikipedia as example for networked knowledge production
7 Wikipedia as "post political", no agonist/antagonist models, but merit, charisma ad-hocracy and the possibility to looselessly leave by "forking"
12 Need for woman's contributions is framed by Wikimedia spokesperson  as "they can bring information which other's cant" (instead of fairness or so)
15 Popper = Openness in politics
18 Popper: It is not about race, class or identity but how knowledge and practices can change
19 Hayeck= Neoliberal. Similar thought structures as popper. Since modern societies are too complex as system, a decentralized solution is needed to organize working together: The market
20 "Open Source" arguments are isomorph to Hayeck’s/Popper’s argumetns. They are not gainst closed knowledge, but against closed infrastrucutre. 
23 Stallman = political = "free"; Raymond= unpolitical = "Open source"
24 Opposite of free is proprietary. This detaches the embedded liberalism of "free/open" from the idea of property.
24 The cathedral is used by Raymond as a metaphor for central planning (but see Turnbull!)
32 Openness is used by the political left and right, on local scale up to goverments and for the market as well as against it. 
34 Poppers open society focusses on individuals.
36 If the open socienty can be made more open, there must have been some non-openness there. 
38ff Method: Statements (Focault), What statements do (Deleuze, Guatarri). Relation also: After Method, John Law
49 Policies like Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View mediate between different views
50ff On (not) deleting a provocative art article
65 Author claims discussion pages are easy to use (but later, in the bot example, he shows some problems with them, see 112) 
71 Frame analysis: Frames are meta communication – what can be said here, what makes sense, what is "in the frame"?; Frames can be materials (see Latour: Society made durable) like the "theater" frame which induces a certain behaviour for the audience (silent) and allows a otherwise not acceptable reality on the stage. 
72, 73 Frames help participants to answer "What is going on here"
74 Frame disputes: different opinions on what is going on. Does X belong in the "Wikipedia-Frame"? E.g. "this is only art. Art is not encyclopedic"
78 Those who wanted to remove pictures of Muhammed were unable to do so becuase they could not express their concerns in the relevant frameds
81 Boundary objects (or particular: The shared-loosly structured/disciplinary-strongly stuructured) is like a veen diagram
84 Collaboration like on WP is relatively new, maybe this is why we do not notice the politics of it some times 
85 Power in Wikipedia is created by fitting things in frames cleverly. This is strong in decetral organizations since they have organizing (central?) statemens 
86 Frames tell what should be done "to fill the frame", e.g. by "write an encyclopedic article"
88 Bureaucracy is general method to organize ANY end; As possible end-in-itself(?)
90 Bureaucracy is 1 Labour division 2 hierarchy 3 permanence (Toffler) 
92 In contrast to bureaucracy: The "associative man" (toffler) 
94 people can leave ad-hocracies and thus tolerate and combine different froms of goverment (e.g. benvolent dictatorship=
98 Wikipedia has firm, written rules (although there is also a written rule to ignore rules)
100 Users do not always know the written rules – they do not need to since the rules are inscribed implicitly into software, content and processes
105 Wales was influenced by Hayeck, Rand and Objectivism
108 Neutral Point of View policy allows to side step the "what is true?" question since multiple truths can be described neutrally side by side. However if "Jesus is a prophet" (debated by non christians) is replaced by "Christans believe that Jesus is a prophet" it also created a truth statement.
111 Materiality of Wikipedia: mediawiki software, Offices, PCs, Bots…
112 Mediawiki is not well suited for discussions (but see statement on 65) 
116 Bots are algorithmic actors creating and enhancing social rules, emotions, classifications
117 Every time an bot edits , it becomes a bit stronger (→ ANT); Also, the social order it works towards (e.g. all discussion edtis shoud be signed) gets stronger; also, if it is disputed but allowed to continue it gets stronger. 
123 guidelines need to be weighted against each other
134 Forking-possibility is a safety-net if stuff goes wrong the project can be left but code and content can be taken along.
144 the looseless transformation of digital data, specifically code, is only possible with a lot of work. The actual possibility to make a fork work is not inherent in the code or license itself
146 Forking spanish Wikipedia was a lot of manual work
146ff Forking discussions from an ANT lens. 
178 Neoliberalism and Openness have a shared history
179 Wikipedia is not neoliberalist, but it responds to the same problem – centralization.