User:Cristinac/ThesisQ

F: Yes, we were talking about flamingos. The point is that the man who wrote Alice was thinking about the same things that we are. And he amused himself with little Alice by imagining a game of croquet that would be all muddle, just absolute muddle. So he said they should use flamingos as mallets because the flamingos would bend their necks so the player wouldn't know even whether his mallet would hit the ball or how it would hit the ball.

D: Anyhow the ball might walk away of its own accord because it was a hedgehog.

F: That's right. So that it's all so muddled that nobody can tell at all what's going to happen.

D: And the hoops walked around, too, because they were soldiers.

F: That ' s right—everything could move and nobody could tell how it would move.

D: Did everything have to be alive so as to make a complete muddle?

F: No—he could have made it a muddle by . . . no, I suppose you're right. That's interesting. Yes, it had to be that way. Wait a minute. It's curious but you're right. Because if he'd muddled things any other way, the players could have learned how to deal with the muddling details. I mean, suppose the croquet lawn was bumpy, or the balls were a funny shape, or the heads of the mallets just wobbly instead of being alive, then the people could still learn and the game would only be more difficult—it wouldn't be impossible. But once you bring live things into it, it becomes impossible. I wouldn't have expected that.

-Why do things have outlines? - Gregory Bateson

Research Questions:

1. What mechanisms are necessary to maintain the claim to 'openness' on platforms that aggregate knowledge?

2. How does delegating the labour of policing to bots change the fabric of a community?

3. What can be done to improve the collaboration between man and machine on the above mentioned platforms?

Aims and objectives of the research:

The research aims to provide an understanding into how open communities organise themselves and establish a framework in which to function. At what point do the boundaries of an open system become visible? What are the politics of the boundary?

Research Context:

Starting with Wikipedia as an example of a large scale effort of self organisation, the essay will be looking at the means through which the rules of an open community are maintained and how the role of the guardian is distributed among its members. Wikipedia operates under strict rules, listed within its five pillars: Notability, Neutral Point Of View, Verifiability, No Original Research and Biographies of Living People.

Now a ubiquitous reference point and popular metaphor for democracy, Wikipedia has undergone many changes in its approach to self regulation. Notably, it is currently employing bots in its service to complete small organisational tasks of broad reach.

One of the case studies will be ClueBot NG, an anti-vandalism bot that was created specifically for Wikipedia by users Cobi and Crispy1989. Being extremely effective, the bot has quickly gathered a following on Wikipedia, with users leaving awe-inspired praise on the bot's user page, creating a space that is curiously and unsettlingly similar to a shrine. I will argue in that the perceived neutrality of the bot gives it a status of superuser gifted with the power of establishing the inside and the outside of Wikipedia.

Proposed structure:

1. What is the genealogy of 'open knowledge'? Here will be described how the politics of free software and open source technology, accompanied by sustaining political theory, has seeped into cultural theory. The necessity of a container of rules and the ambiguity of the word 'open'.

2. How is order established within a community? Using Didier Bigo's theory of the banopticon, I will discuss the necessity of creating delimitations. Based on the panopticon theory of Michel Foucault, Exceptionalism – Agamben.

„The ban-opticon is then characterized by the exceptionalism of power (rules of emergency and their tendency to become permanent), by the way it excludes certain groups in the name of their future potential behaviour (profiling) and by the way it normalizes the non-excluded through its production of normative imperatives, the most important of which is free movement“ (p. 32) How are boundaries negotiated within 2 different communities: KG and Wikipedia? Scope of the two platforms. The three defence lines of Wikipedia and the ratio system.

3. To what extent do algorithmic agents participate in the division of power? History of bots being used to do the cleaning up of websites. Example of dispute between user and bot over an article. Maintenance or reign? Wikipedia – soon to be the first posthuman encyclopedia.

Significance:

Bibliography:

States of Exception - Giorgio Agamben
The human use of human beings - Norbert Wiener
Liquid Surveillance - Zygmunt Bauman
The Network Society - Jan van Dijk
Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates and Pirate Utopias - Peter Ludlow