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Wikipedia manifests as a significant example of produsage through its open participation and communal evaluation.
It’s a place for collaboration, for editing, for contributing…
It’s demonstrates a key theme of new media: collective intelligence…
It’s a concept which has redefined research, namely the ease of it…
It’s a form of wiki software which serves an instantaneous platform for finding out what you want…
“A free encyclopaedia built collaboratively using Wiki software. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia written collaboratively by many of its readers. It is a special type of website, called a wiki, that makes collaboration easy. Many people are constantly improving Wikipedia, making thousands of changes per hour, all of which are recorded in article histories and recent changes” (Wikipedia.org 2009).
During my high school years Wikipedia was a saviour for researching , as much to the agreement of my fellow peers and siblings. You could search anything on Wikipedia and the collective knowledge about that particular topic would provide a detailed understanding. However it was quickly – to the distraught of many students – banned as a resource for collecting information for assignments due to the ‘unreliability’ of what people added or edited on it. Yet it did prevail as a spot for basic comprehension before attacking assignments. Now, enter my university days and this is promoted as a key wiki/encyclopaedia for understanding the infinitely changing online world.
The issue therefore surrounding this fast-growing information pit stop is the reliability of information added to it, as anyone who has access to the internet has the ability to modify information. Could this be something society should scold for allowing people to rely upon information which could potentially be false, misleading or biased, or should it be praised for bringing people together to collaborate and illustrate collective intelligence, where knowledge is far greater when people collaborate. Wikipedia demonstrates a problem inherent in the Internet as a source of information. According to Graham (in Flew 2008, 28), it is much a “powerful” tool for “missinformation” as it is for knowledge, potentially producing “erroneous belief”. Alternatively, it harnesses collective intelligence – “deriving the benefits of large-scale ongoing participation and use co-creations and peer review of content to continuously improve the quality of the service” (Musser & Reily in Flew 2008, 18).
In my opinion, Wikipedia has dissolved the physical barriers of learning to catalyse the education of theories, cultures, people, technologies, and business. Whether that be the financial instability of purchasing such books as encyclopaedias, the incapacity to reach other countries, or the general inability to access the right knowledge through libraries, tertiary education etc. It includes an appropriate framework for preventing unscrupulous editors. However, another form of protection comes from the users themselves, possibly being even more effective. Those who try to deceive audiences by adding misleading information become outcast from the Wikipedia community. Due to communal evaluation being an integral concept to produsage, Bruns (2007, 25) finds “participants who consistently make such unusable contributions will also themselves drift to the outside of the community”. I guess those who are dishonest should watch out.
In relation to Public Relations, it has had little impact. Yet it had the potential to be a crucial instrument for PR practitioners. Firstly, PR practitioners could utilise Wikipedia as a tool for creating “mutually beneficial relationships” for their clients. PR practitioners could create a wiki page for their clients portraying them in a positive light. Ethical considerations then come into mind as this could indicate an exploitation of Wikipedia for organisational promotion. Nevertheless, PR organisations should begin to contemplate how they can incorporate Wikipedia as a platform for practical communications, in that it can depict their clients constructively. The PR practitioners would then have to keep updating the page and monitor it if any unhappy stakeholders of the client have added detrimental information. Possibly, PR could take it a step further and ask for feedback on clients through their Wikipedia page. On the contrary, could such use of Wikipedia by PR professionals signify an example of the previously mentioned unscrupulous user who will be excluded from the community? Should the PR industry be wary of Wikipedia as an element for communications?
Apparently, yes! Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has previously issued a warning to PR agencies against writing about companies they represent in the popular online encyclopaedia.
Ironically enough, Wikipedia and PR have been influential on a more personal scale. When I began my degree in PR and media & communications, I had no idea what PR really was – not the vaguest, smallest idea. I had only chosen it as a major out of pure elimination of other business majors. When I came to my university orientation day for PR major students, we were asked to write down what we thought it was and share it with other students. I didn’t have the faintest clue what to right down and could not offer my interpretations of public relations. Although other students gave their contributions about PR, I still didn’t comprehend what it involved. Then when I came home, curious as to what PR was (especially as I was going to be studying it for the next four years), I searched on Wikipedia. What a wonder Wikipedia provided. I could now understand what PR was.
There is a flipside to this great space for collaborative knowledge.
After studying PR I have now realised the Wikipedia page for ‘public relations’ provides a very limited approach. It is not what I now know to be as public relations. It provides a generous amount of information about ‘spin’; a term PR has fought for some time now to be abolished for the business industry vocabulary. ‘Spin’ and ‘spin doctors’ are what PR professionals are conveyed as to practice and be; an insult to the profession and industry. Therefore is Wikipedia really advantaging PR as to what people perceive it to be?
This could be due to the differences in opinion across countries as to what public relations is defined as, or it could indicate the need for an update on the page. Maybe it’s time I contribute to the public relations Wikipedia site and edit the page to what I know and have learnt it to be.
So Wikipedia may be this fantastic produsage platform that everyone can use for free… but does it come at a cost for PR as practitioners are “banned” from using it?
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