on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
I previously signed my posts with the username CJ. For better or worse, I have decided to abandon this name and use my real name: Nicholas. See my work profile here.
What I do here & how I do it
editI became a Wikipedian in November 2004 . Somehow, I've managed to restrict myself to a relatively small amount of articles (see my edit count). I keep a modestly sized watchlist partly because life is too short but also because I don't want to spread myself too thin. As a rule of thumb I'd say that I am a mergist as I believe that information is best understood, in its entirety, in context.
I write about Wikipedia in other contexts, for example in the journal Health: (London) and The Information Society.
What I feel about Wikipedia
editIn rather grand terms, John Stuart Mill once stated that "The truth emerges from the collision of adverse opinion", reflecting his staunch belief in libertarian pluralism. From a different perspective, in 1929, Mikhail Bakhtin argued that "a unified truth demands a multiplicity of consciousnesses" (as seen in Hirschkop 1999: p. 205). Although both Mill and Bakhtin are coming from very different angles, I refer to them here because these two quotations help to encapsulate what I feel about Wikipedia: this encyclopedia thrives on the dialogue that takes place between various utterances and the competing claims to knowledge that these utterances represent. This website allows a diverse range of voices to interact and inter-animate each other, and in the process, it has the potential to shed significant light on the "limitations, biases, and potentialities" (Brandist [1]) of competing worldviews.
Attempts to suppress the open-ended nature of this dialogue and attempts to limit individual expression on Wikipedia, such as attempts to police userboxes, are not only futile but also possibly detrimental to the project's wider ambition - to be 'the sum of all human knowledge'. The belief that Wikipedians could, and indeed should, cast aside ideological and emotional "baggage", by removing userboxes, in order to pursue a genuine consensus, would seem to deny the considerable (and occasionally constructive) impact of such forces in the construction of knowledge.
Contact me
editLeave me a message on my talk page or email me using this address: nicholascimini[AT-sign-here]gmail[DOT-here]com
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