User:Ragesoss/Activism and neutrality

My fellow panelists have explained well the problems with the concept of neutrality and the problems with bringing that concept to reality on Wikipedia—problems made especially difficult by the kinds of activists we call “POV-pushers”. Even so, making the attempt at neutrality is essential to making the project work as well as it does.

But the relationship between neutrality and activism on Wikipedia is a paradox. You might expect that the people least inclined to activism—people who go along to get along and avoid taking sides in real life—would be the ones who form the core of the Wikipedia community. Instead, we have a community that's full of activists of all kinds, people who see editing Wikipedia as an extension of their activism. We have supporting the project something that, at its core, is an activist organization at the forefront of the free culture movement.

In fact, Wikipedians are broadly united in one activist project: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.” Many of us come to together for more specific activist causes: promoting the concept of a cultural commons; fighting efforts to diminish and enclose the public domain; working to ensure free (as in freedom) technical solutions for creating and sharing knowledge.

Institutional activism and how it affects the project

Activism at the institutional level permeates the entire set of Wikimedia projects, in ways that are not obvious to readers and new editors. The whole environment is tied firmly to the copyleft licenses we require: the GNU Free Documentation License and its Creative Commons counterpart of Attribution/Share-Alike. Erik Moeller and a handful of other free culture activists maintain the "Definition of Free Cultural Works" that informs the policies of all the projects. Both the licenses and the free cultural works definition are rooted the concept of "freedom", specifically the kind of freedom promoted by Richard Stallman and the the free software movement.

This activist definition of freedom is counter-intuitive for many would-be contributors, and the community spends a lot of energy educating newcomers and outsiders about what we mean by freedom and why. So Wikipedia, maybe more-so than anything else these days, is exposing people to this activist philosophy of free software and free culture. And that doesn't come without a price, without pushing people out and alienating people, without cutting ourselves off from a lot of wonderful work that isn't free enough for us. Because people get "the commons", the idea of putting your energy into something that everyone can share and enjoy. And they get our educational mission, of spreading knowledge to everyone who wants it. But what they often don't get is why, in order to contribute to this educational non-profit--say, to illustrate an article on Wikipedia with a picture they took--they have to release their work under a license that would let somebody else put their photo an an unsavory billboard advertisement without payment or permission.

And the reasons we demand this exacting kind of freedom is actually related to neutrality. Free cultural works are neutral with respect to the way they can be used: the Republican and the Democrat, the anarchist and the authoritarian, the volunteer and the entrepreneur--free cultural works treat everyone, every purpose, equally, and grant the free freedom even to pursue profit. There are lot of political and social philosophies that are compatible with a culture based on these kinds of freedom, but free activism means pushing for a very different kind of cultural economy from the one we live in now.

Free culture ideals are not the only kind of activism embedded in the Wikipedia project. The neutral point of view concept itself is what we might think of as epistemological activism. Neutral point of view is a methodology for organizing, evaluating and presenting contested knowledge. While this is sometimes controversial, institutionally-speaking, it's a means to end. Whereas free cultural works are the goal of the institutional activism of our licenses and software, neutral point of a view is not something that we try to extend and promote in the broader culture--we don't say all knowledge projects should be based on neutral point of view. It's just a way of creating an environment where people can work together, where people who disagree can nevertheless come to a sort of meta-agreement about their disagreements.

But the reason why it works as a basis for collaboration is also what makes it a potent tool for activism. Really embracing the idea of neutral point of view--not just paying lip service while gaming the system--is one of the most powerful ways for activists to win people over to their side.

NPOV as a rhetorical strategy for achieving social change

“...no believer will find his faith shaken by evidence that is evidence only in the light of assumptions he does not share and considers flatly wrong...when you think a view wrong, you don't see what is seen by those who think it right—those who live and move and have their being within it.“ - Stanley Fish

The goal of neutral point of view is to end up with an article where, for all the different viewpoints that are included, an adherent to any viewpoint could look at the article and say, yes, the part that describes my viewpoint is an accurate representation of what I think. And for any activist trying to convince other people of the truths she holds dear, that is key.

We've seen this in practice over the last few decades with homophobia and anti-gay prejudice. The key indicator of whether someone supports gay marriage and other gay rights is whether they personally know someone who is gay. You can try all you want to argue the case for gay rights. But until a person has a way to connect to the viewpoint of someone who is gay—to empathize—it's a losing battle. But now we're in the midst of a cultural tipping point, where it's increasingly difficult not to be exposed to the perspective of gay people—and consequently to see them as people first.

People hate, fear, and reject what they don't understand. So what the neutral point of view does is analogous to the ongoing shift to a gay-friendly society. Neutral point of view creates an environment where, because their own views are acknowledge and respected, they can take the views of others seriously and try to understand why they believe what they believe. And for activists, that's most of the battle right there. The activist is convinced that, if only other people could see the world the way she see it, they would realize why her cause is important.

NPOV isn't a rhetorical strategy that works for every form of activism. For some, in fact, acknowledging the actual viewpoints of opponents can undercut the energy of righteousness that drives the activism. I would go so far as to say that any activism that is ethical will be compatible with the neutral point of view; ethical activism ought not require distorting or silencing the viewpoints of others.

The kinds of activism that are not merely compatible with NPOV, but actually actively benefit from it, are the kinds where intellectually honest education is a key part of the activism. So even setting aside the free culture activist agenda of the Wikimedia community, the Wikipedia project—of creating the best possible free encyclopedic resource around the concept of neutral point of view—is what I would call meta-activism. It's not just about educating people through through neutral content. It's about setting standards, showing the broader culture what they should expect out of all kinds of authoritative knowledge sources: neutrality, transparency, respect for multiple viewpoints, leaving value judgments up to the user. It's getting a lot of the public to think about knowledge and authority in new ways, and to set apart the things that can be agreed on and the the things that can't. So that's what I mean by meta-activism: Wikipedia, and particularly its embrace of NPOV, is a sort of cultural stepping stone that can prime society for a whole range of more specific positive changes that have been held back before by misinformation and ignorance and false balance.