Filed under: Pro-Am | Tags: Citizen Journalism, folksonomy, Pro-Am, Wikipedia
Pro-Am – the professional amateur is a term that can be applied to almost any professional area that is experiencing increased participation by those who aren’t “qualified”. It has been seen in my past blog on citizen journalism, but this week Bruns chooses to examine it through Wikipedia, again. Although it is getting increasingly tiresome to see this word pop up page after page, I will admit this chapter did offer interesting discussion. Although, in conjunction with this, I’m also going to go back and examine the pro-am divide in journalism.
Initially, it is Sanger who raises the question of expertise: who has it? What constitutes it and why? More importantly, how can we distinguish experts from ordinary people? I discussed last week the comparison of Wikipedia and Nupedia, and how the former was able to take advantage of the “everyday genius”. It calls to the self-professed experts in fields of midwifery, Star Trek and Mahayana Buddhism and asks them to contribute. It’s noted “regardless of whether Wikipedia actually is more or less reliable than the average encyclopedia, it is not perceived as adequately reliable by many librarians, teachers and academics”. But why is this so?
Bruns suggests that it may be those academics whose expertise is directly “under threat from produsage models”. Knowledge, as it is today, is in a state of flux, and furthermore many fields such as climate change and human evolution are under constant debate. As it is argued by Kelly, knowledge was never more stable than it is today, however perhaps it is that we are just beginning to treat it differently. It could be as simple as the passive v active approach, with one side taking the view that knowledge is self organising and concrete, whereas the more active approach recognises that certain aspects of knowledge are merely representative, and are worth arguing over. This suggests that there is no definite point of expertise, and if that definition were to broaden, professional amateurism may come under its umbrella.
As mentioned above, pro-am does not just refer to knowledge in academic fields, it branches in to professions such as sport, and journalism. Citizen journalism, as discussed in previous weeks, is becoming increasingly more credible and influential. However Duffield argues in his text I, Journalist, that the pro-am line is not as blurred a division as everyone claims. He argues that journalistic method is something that an amateur can never master. It is acknowledged that the increasing use of the World Wide Web as a platform for anyone to distribute information, however disagrees that this should be termed journalism. He offers the viewpoint, like Zelizer, that journalism should be thought of as a way of thinking and doing, not just pumping out stories before a deadline. Is this the line that professionals everywhere are clinging to? That training and experience will always be paramount? In this respect there will always be a pro-am divide, with amateurs approaching a profession such as journalism believing it requires no skill or quality, and the professionals admiring the practice it takes to deliver a quality piece.
It’s been discussed in previous blogs how different concepts are taking advantage of web 2.0, and how it’s kickstarted the evolution of online communities. This week, Axel Bruns has presented a chapter on the ins and outs of Wikipedia, including its adherence to the principles of produsage. It would seem that, if Wikipedia were hiring, Axel Bruns would be its perfect “poster boy”, with every criticism contained in the chapter seemingly able to be refuted with ease. An examination will be made in terms of its key aspects; open participation, ad hocracy and infinite content.
Any person is able to contribute to Wikipedia, from your average joe, to your average genius. The pros and cons of this ability have long been in contention, with many academics putting in their two cents worth. The positives are highlighted by Bruns by his contrast with Wikipedia’s predecessor Nupedia, which was comprised of heavily reviewed academic articles. Sanger notes at the end of 18 months, there were only 12 published articles. This was arguably because it failed to recognise the fact that the community itself had the ability to contribute useful content. I recall the day my grade 12 physics teacher had walked in to the classroom and proudly announced to everyone that he had contributed to the article on supernovas. The girl next to me said, jokingly, “so did I”. Although the comment was made humorously, it is still somewhat a concern that a 17-year-old girl is capable of asserting as much authority on the subject as an expert in the field.
At the time of Bruns’ publication, Wikipedia had 2 million articles in the English language. According to the site itself, it now has almost 3 million. It is in this way that it capitalized on one of the major failings of traditional encyclopedias; seeking not to capture knowledge in a freeze frame, but to recognise that it, along with society, is in a state of constant flux. That which we know today may change tomorrow. It was reported at the time of Steve Irwin’s death that it took a person two and a half hours to edit his Wikipedia site. This self-correcting process has been labeled by Sanger as incredibly robust, as there are many online communities that are ready and waiting to edit their own topical field.
Wikipedia is an example of what is known as an “ad hocracy” – despite being a structured system it has little or no regulation. One regulation it does adhere to however is NPOV – the neutral point of view system, which co-founder Jimmy Wales states is “absolute and non-negotiable”. It is arguable that this concept allowes, as Sanger observes “widely divergent opinions to work together”, however Wikipedia does have its fair share of malicious users. Whether defending their contribution with “watch bots” or even as QUT Digital Journalism lecturer Alan Knight does every Sunday; sit at his computer and wage war against a fellow contributor on Sir Joh Bejelke Peterson’s wiki. It is here that we see how Wikipedia is created by people, and therefore “pettiness, idiocy and vulgarity are regular features of the site”.
Overall, although it offers a very well informed academic insight into Wikipedia, I did not enjoy this reading. Bruns takes it upon himself to forcefully educate users on the ins and outs of the site, vehemently defending it against its critics. I begin to wonder if this is because Wikipedia is not, in fact, the perfect example of ‘produsage’, but the reason for the term’s conception.
Bec's Blog 