Wikipedia hits financial trouble, community responds

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In December Jed Hallam wrote on the Wolfstar blog that Wikipedia discourages community and was in fact “a dictatorship that’s run by sixteen geeks in San Francisco.” We’ve been talking about this in the office and I think Jed’s wrong. Just before Christmas a plea appeared on Wikipedia from the site’s founder Jimmy Wales saying if Wikipedia didn’t raise $6 million they were going to have to start accepting advertising on the site or make Wikipedia a paid subscription service. The Independent are now reporting that subsequent to Wales’ plea donations rose from $30,000 a day to $215,000 easily reaching the goal.

I think those donations, especially the 8,186 which came in the first 24 hours prove Wikipedia has a community. The donations made ranged in value from $5 to $1million; that’s people pitching in what ever they can to save something they feel a part of. There are hundreds of millions of websites on the internet we each see dozens maybe hundreds a week but none we’d give money to not even save, Wikipedia wouldn’t have gone away, but preserve because we have no investment in them. Plenty of us, though, have an investment in Wikipedia if it’s an alteration we’ve made, editorial discussion we’ve become embroiled in or just the knowledge that it carried you through your degree. Investment in something and collaboration (the massive editorial discussions) to make it work are community and financial donations are proof positive of that investment.

Is blogging the dumbing down of news?

First I should probably introduce myself. Hi, I’m Paul crouch and I’ve just graduated from Durham in Sociology and am now trying to find a job in PR so I’m hanging round the Wolfstar office and generally getting in the way in the hope of eventually finding one. I wrote my undergrad dissertation on blogging and politics so Chris asked me to write a little something on here.

In the 1930s social thinker Theodor Adorno began writing on what he saw as the destruction of art and intelligence at the hands of mass culture, what he named the ‘culture Industry’. For Adorno the ‘culture industry’ was attacking the intellectual (French Art-house cinema for example) in favour of the empty and standardised (think Hollywood rom-coms) observing a pattern in which “The connoisseur and the expert are despised for their pretentious claims to know better than others.”

That was in the 1930s and his ire was saved largely for film and music yet for many in the mainstream media Adorno could have been predicting the future that is blogging. He would see bloggers as the ill-informed majority attacking the expert and connoisseur; the massive proliferation of cheap, ill informed news sources providing proto-news and dumbing down.

In the red corner however we have Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, who popularised the phrase ‘Art for Art’s sake’, would have loved blogging: He claimed art had become obsessed with refusing to acknowledge the point of art being anything but itself. For our purpose I must tilt Benjamin’s complex writings to make the journalist’s process focused on sales and accolades (anyone who watched the last season of The Wire will recognise this in Scott Templeton’s pursuit of the Pulitzer at the expense of the truth). Thus Blogging ends ‘l’art pour l’art’ by removing the artist (professional journalist) in favour of the everyday person voicing opinion with, importantly, no ties to an institution and consequently the need to generate stories to sell papers and chase the Pulitzer.

Some could see Benjamin’s point, I do to an extent. We are all specialists in our own field from posters at the The Daily Kos knowing more about their local politics than any journo to the millions of ‘Mummy bloggers’ I’ve discovered in the last few days who apparently are experts in thriving with only two hours sleep a night; In Iran blogging is a voice of revolution speaking out where all other media is muzzled telling the world of real life in Iran. Put simply if a million people each with their own small corner of knowledge put their thoughts forward how can blogging not be as reliable as any newspaper?

Well, at the Daily Kos (ignoring its partisan nature, a whole different blog post) this works; every post has its very own peer review and investigation team in the form of its comments system. At most blogs though this simply isn’t available, only a handful have the massive traffic required for such a process to work. The result is a divergence; millions of unchecked little read blogs creating white noise and a few massively read highly reliable blogs, these however are highly commercial: once a blog reaches a certain popularity the blogger realises they can do this for a living and becomes a professional journalist often going as far as being becoming official bloggers for established media. By joining the commercial media the blogger cannot help but become involved with l’art pour l’art. The Daily Kos is a perfect example of this, proprietor of the site Markos Moulitsas is a full time political pundit, has a book deal and relies heavily on advertising on his site, does he really want to threaten these with the content of his site?

So here’s the rub: the most popular blogs become the same as traditional media performing l’art pour l’art. If a blog does not possess the popularity they don’t have the fact checking and investigation that readers provide. Smaller, less read blogs become an uninformed voice shouting at the expert and connoisseur for their claims to know. This leaves blogging in a precarious position: In my opinion the sheer number of small blogs with some readership creates lot’s of unreliable news versus only a handful of larger, wider read blogs working as little more than mainstream news sources robbing blogging of credibility, for the moment at least.