Course:LIBR559A/Fuchs (2014)

Citation

Fuchs, C. (2014). Wikipedia: A New Democratic Form of Collaborative Work and Production? In Social Media: A Critical Introduction (First Edition). United Kingdom: Sage Publications.

Annotation

Fuchs outlines three main dimensions of communism: subjective, objective and subject-object. The subjective dimension is the cooperative production of goods. The objective dimension is the communal ownership of property that is produced by the subjective dimension. The subject-object dimension is the creation of a society in which individuals are able to improve themselves and contribute to the subjective dimension because they posse leisure time. Fuchs then examines the practices of Wikipedia within these three dimensions. This illustrates how Wikipedia embodies many of the ideals of communism while also suffering from some intrusion by capitalist systems.

The main argument of this chapter is that Wikipedia is a communist community because it excels in exhibits these three dimensions. On the subjective dimension, Wikipedia is the product of all members of the community and decisions on production are made through consensus and participatory democracy. On the objective dimension, the software Wikipedia runs on (MediaWiki) is owned by a public non-profit that makes the software available to anyone. The output of the wikimedia community is also freely available to anyone on the internet. On the object-subject dimension, Wikipedia allows people with free time to engage in a fulfilling intellectual activity that generates common goods.

Two qualifications to this that Fuchs provides are the elite nature of Wikipedia's editors and the licensing of Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike License (CC-BY-SA). Most of Wikipedia's editors are westerners with the time and free time to engage in the cultural activity of creating content for Wikipedia. For Wikipedia to become more fair, society must move closer to providing everyone access to leisure time. Fuchs also notes that by licensing Wikipedia under the CC-BY-SA license it is possible for private companies to reprint the content on Wikipedia for a profit. Thus allowing for the intrusion of private interests into the Wikipedia commons.

While Fuch's discusses the way that the CC-BY-SA licenses undermines the communist ideals of Wikipedia he does not discuss other private intrusions into Wikipedia. This would include such activities as the editing of Wikipedia by private organizations or the use of Wikipedia editing by powerful interests. This would suggest that Wikipedia may not in fact be a communist organization since there is a gradual creep of private interests on to its pages. This also seems to undermine the idea that Wikipedia is a communist alternative to the corporate internet and that Wikipedia can compete with corporate interests online.

Fuchs analysis of Wikipedia through a communist lenses is a useful framework for librarians consider how to bring in more cooperative activities into their libraries. It is also an excellent illustration of the role libraries can play in promoting the knowledge commons. Fuchs identifies online literacy as a critical component of a communist web, for example.

Areas / Topics / Keywords

Marxism, Knowledge Workers, Knowledge Economy, Wikipedia

Page Author: Logan Bingle