인터넷 백과사전 위키피디아와 지식 권력의재구성

Abstract

The compilation of the encyclopedia is not the summation of knowledge but also functions to structure the knowledge system by selecting and relocating knowledge. This paper explores how the meaning of an encyclopedia and the value of knowledge have changed in the digital age where looking up the definition and the meaning of words through the online search-engine becomes common. In this regard, this paper analyses the characteristics of the Wikipedia, as its collective intelligence and its editing policies re-structures the knowledge production and its power. And it will examine the new type of the authority, in the collective intelligence system and the cooperative work structure of Wikipedia project. As it has the openness that everyone can participate in editing, Wikipedia is regarded as a more democratic knowledge production system. However, it has a certain hierarchy constructed with the group culture created by earlier participants. The group culture of collective intelligence often excludes ‘new entrants’, women and the Third World, and, as a result, it tends to reproduce the male-centered western knowledge-power. Wikipedia criticizes the credentialism and the professionalism in that only experts have been qualified to produce the knowledge. But it does not criticize the powers re-embedded in the established knowledge-power. Rather, Wikipedia's policies, such as the reliability, the verifiability, and the neutral perspective, tend to reproduce the power of the media organizations and the institutionalized knowledge based on the male dominant Western centrism, if we don’t pay attention to the gendered Western centrism. The knowledge–power operated in the collective intelligence in the Wikipedia is not critically scrutinized enough. As it is at risk of making the exclusion of the social minority invisible, gendered Western centrism in the knowledge-power within the digital encyclopedia needs to be more critically discussed.