Book review: Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality

Abstract

The book entitled Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality by McDowell and Vetter is intended to address an important gap in media communication and information technology by exploring the complex disconnect between formalized policy and the unspoken norms behind common knowledge-making processes. It is presented in five chapters and begins with the controversies tagging the popularity of the English Wikipedia (the 13th most visited website globally, which has more than six million articles and nine billion page views per month). Chapter 1 introduces the authors’ arguments behind the representation of Wikipedia as common knowledge. In the review, the authors explain the five pillars of the actual practice of how Wikipedia collects all branches of knowledge and distributes them to everyone for free. The first pillar tells the readers about the lofty goal of Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia that provides objective information and reality to its readers (Menking and Rosenberg, 2021). The second pillar states that ‘Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view’ to remove ‘editors’ personal opinion and interpretation (pp. 3–5). The next pillar highlights one of the foremost features to be criticized but rarely well understood by the readers. They are Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) and Libre and Open-Source Software (FLOSS), where anyone has licence to compose, copy, edit and distribute all information freely under the attribute of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) copyright. The fourth pillar states, ‘please don’t bite newcomers’ (p. 10), indicating that all editors should treat each other with respect and courtesy. The last pillar says that ‘Wikipedia has no firm rules’ (pp. 11–12). Chapter 2 discusses what counts as reliable and verifiable information. It also addresses Gofman’s critiques of the crowd-sourced and errors revision models of Wikipedia information construction. These critiques came up because Gofman failed to understand the multitude of guidelines and policies Wikipedia has in place to protect against misinformation and errors. Therefore, McDowell and Vetter introduce the ‘Neutral Point of View’ and ‘Verifiability’ policies to guard against the insertion 1125590 GMC0010.1177/17427665221125590Global Media and CommunicationBook review book-review2022