Mapping Multiverse Alternative Facts In the Age of Post-truth

Team Members

• Ivan Kisje
• Kaspar Beelen
• Derrek Xavier
• Tommaso Elli
• Felipe Escobar
• Abraham Koshy
• Jesper Hinze
• Emillie V. de Keulenaar
• Marc Tuters
• Daniel de Zëuw
• Giovanni Profeta
• Nina Welt
• Aurelio Amaral
• Michele Mauri

Contents

General introduction

I. Alt-facts and edit wars on race and intelligence from Wikipedia to Altpedias

Introduction

• Metapedia
• Infogalactic
• RationalWiki
• Encyclopedia Dramatica

1. What are the basic “facts” of Altpedias?

2. What are the particular “worldviews” defended by each Altpedia?

3. How do Altpedias rely on information provided by Wikipedia, and how do they then alter it?

4. In light of existing research on Wikipedia, what can we say are the main dynamics governing Altpedias?

5. Taking into account the above-mentioned questions, how can we say different Altpedias “do issues”

Methodology

This sub-project has been divided in several methodological steps.

The first of these was to justify our choice to examine the Wikipedia and alt-pedia pages on race and intelligence. This project was originally intended to focus on their pages on the Holocaust, due to the prominence of harder ‘factual’ historical evidence we could easily scrape and examine with computational techniques. This was not a sufficiently well-grounded reason, however, since the Holocaust page was not amongst the most visited in alt-pedias. In Metapedia, in particular, the most prominent pages are on the Ku Klux Klan, Anglo-Saxon far-right parties like Britain First and the American Freedom Party, and several pages focused on race: race and crime; race and physical attractiveness; and race and intelligence. Of these, race and intelligence was most prone to contain ‘factual’ information, such as statistical numbers, visual evidence, cited arguments and sources. Most importantly, race and intelligence was a page we found across all wikis -- and, as we explain further on, was an important source of disagreements amongst editors from one wiki to another.

In order to assess how pages race and intelligence were edited across wikis, we first needed to determine from which of these wikis each of these pages originated from. Wikipedia’s page was not always the original source other wikis used. Through Wikipedia and Metapedia’s APIs, we were able to extract all textual from their respective race and intelligence page, their revision history, editor user IDs, and size. Combined with a manual analysis of other wiki’s page history, edit history, size and textual content, we traced the edit times and edit sizes for the race and intelligence page of each wiki. We then discovered that Wikipedia was the first to publish a page on the subject, and that, since then, only Metapedia and Infogalactic forked from it at different stages in time. Metapedia’s edited version of Wikipedia’s page was then forked to Rightpedia. Rationalwiki started from scratch and forked to no other wiki.

Having determined the origin and forks of each wiki’s page, we then wanted to assess how every page was progressively ‘rewritten’. We decided to first obtain a general impression of how pages differed from one another in their general composition, through their table of contents. Through each wiki’s API and with NodeJS, we extracted all of their table of contents overtime and visualised them via an animated dendrogram. The dendrogram juxtaposes the table of contents of the original article with that of the fork article.

We then focused on a closer reading of every page and its editing history. There were multiple elements of interest that emerged at this level of analysis, the most important of which was to determine why and how pages were forked from one wiki to another. To answer this question, we revisited the edit history of each article, from the original to its fork. We manually tracked important moments in the course of the article’s edit history, noting edit periods whereby significant amounts of text were deleted or brought in. We examined edit summaries and interactions between editors to better understand why text was added or deleted. To better illustrate this process, we made a video that showed (in the lines of Jon Udell’s Heavy Metal Umlaut) significant textual changes on the front-page of the page. Our video first showed significant edits on the original article and then goes on to detail how the forked version diverged from its original version. Significant editing moments were determined by a combination of edit size and important changes indicated by the history of a page’s table of content.

With this information, we then manually determined specific stylistic changes in edited sentences. We sought to better contextualise these stylistic changes by making a comparative text analysis of two prominent, forked wikis: Wikipedia and Metapedia. Our visualisation gave us an idea of how the language used to write each wiki’s page diverged ideologically.

Findings and discussion

Altpedias are then often the product of editors that have been banned from Wikipedia in the context of an edit war, vandalism or a violation of conduct often at the source of deep epistemological schisms. In response to Wikipedia’s perceived ‘epistemological bias’, Altpedias a set of more objective scientific criteria that attend to more just values elaborated in their mission statements. Against Wikipedia’s ‘highly centralized structure’, Infogalactic welcomes ‘Relativity’ as a key pillar of its content guidelines (Infogalactic, 2018a). Against Wikipedia’s ‘leftist, politically correct, and anti- White bias’, Metapedia proposes to restore the ‘original meaning’ of concepts related to European history in an attempt to advance a metapolitical, ‘pro-European’ ‘cultural struggle’ (Metapedia, 2018a; Metapedia, 2018b). Rightpedia, which branched off of Metapedia in around 2007, aims to make up for its predecessor’s ‘Zionist’ agenda by providing ‘the truths that those in power don’t want people to know.’ (Rightpedia, 2018a, 2018b). Such qualifications delimit the frontiers in and out of which Altpedias question the veracity of one another.

In this sense, Altpedias are not just articulated by different content and vernaculars, but also by a different normative definition of knowledge and what it ought to be used for. This tightly knit relation between science and ethics echoes Lyotard’s own description of what he called the ‘delegitimation’ of competing types of knowledge (Lyotard 1984, 37). At the source of the questioned legitimacy of a type of knowledge is a question of ‘double legitimation’: ‘[...] who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?’ (Lyotard 1984, 8-9). Both of these questions are answered by each Altpedia to various extents, but always within declared opposition against those it sees as ignoring the types of content it considers legitimate. Just as Lyotard argues that knowledge is legitimised by laws that are promulgated as norms (Lyotard, 1984, 8), Altpedia mission statements will select and argue in favour of norms it defends as criteria of ‘good’ knowledge. They then elucidate what content does or does not satisfy to these standards within a structure starting from the normative approach of mission statements to the practical guidelines of manuals of style. Wikipedia’s own mission statement (what it calls ‘Purpose’) recurs in many respects to a universalist and post- ideological vision of knowledge, validating criteria it perceives as necessary to obtain an ‘open’, ‘free’ and democratic form of knowledge production (Wikipedia, 2018e, 2018f). Metapedia, Rightpedia and Infogalatic’s mission statements all undermine the universal extent of Wikipedia’s, accusing it of bias and omission of valid topics.

What is ‘neutral’, ‘objective’, ‘reliable’, ‘credible’ and ‘accurate’, however, does diverge considerably between Altpedias. For the most part, topics worthy of being written about (or ‘known about’) are directly those that fail to classify as ‘good’ knowledge, if as knowledge at all, in Wikipedia and ‘mainstream’ media. We have seen that Rightpedia identifies these as fringe theories, conspiracies, and pseudoscience, while Metapedia aims to do justice to corpuses of far-right political thought whose concepts they perceive as having lost their ‘original meaning’ as a result of a ‘successful cultural struggle’ from their ‘political opponents’ (Metapedia, 2018b). It thus reanimates taboo debates such as Holocaust revisionism, the correlation between race and IQ, or white supremacy, as if by rescuing these from their general classification as objects of poor or gravely immoral knowledge. Although Metapedia shares a similar lexicon in pages containing information about the notion of ‘veracity’, it associates ‘veridic’ information to its documentation of the Shoah, which it considers a ‘hoax’ peddled by ‘deniers’. The issues that every Altpedia specialises in are then close to what each will accuse each other of being biased about.

Conclusions

It is not that Altpedias do not necessarily go on a direct affront against truth, nor that their criteria of truth are distinct. Altpedias are rather applications of mission statements, content guidelines and editing ‘language games’ that spell out different criteria as to what is and is not worth and good knowing. These guidelines are written in direct opposition to other wikis, as each of them results from unresolved epistemological ruptures separating one another. These ruptures are marked not just by disagreements regarding content, but also about how each wiki allows one to qualify knowledge as ‘good’, and thus knowable, based on the normative guidelines it stands upon. It may be fair to say that, with the exception of Rightpedia, all wikis share a more or less similar set and definition of key concepts in their guidelines, including neutrality, objectivity, the need of references and citations, criteria for their reliability, credibility and accuracy. All agree that neutrality, reliability, credibility, accuracy and the use of good sources are necessary tenets for an encyclopaedia that wishes to be credible, serious and exhaustive about the content it publishes. But their choice of what content attends to these values mark ‘epistemological biases’ from which follow different applications of ideas as to what is and is not ‘good’ knowledge, how best to substantiate it, and which criteria best ensure its credibility. Following this analysis, we would add to Lyotard’s description of postmodernity as a period characterised by knowledge past meta- narratives a slight but important nuance brought by this small case study on alternative encyclopaedias. While data banks’ remain ‘the encyclopedia of tomorrow’, they are still subject to agonistics caused by unresolved disagreements as to what amounts to ‘good’ knowledge. As is the case in Altpedias, normative definitions of knowledge are still elucidated by different visions of history, and, in this sense, narrative knowledge. While Wikipedia has been designed to host as many ‘narratives’ as possible, it does so within a limited spectrum as to what are good and bad conducts, criteria, and forms of knowledge. Altpedias attempt to surpass these limits in their very condition of ‘alternative’ data banks curated by alternative narratives.

II. A cartography of Rational-Wiki

Findings

A) Image comparison per article

8. References