Textual Curation

Studies in Rhetoric/Communication

Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor

Textual
Curation

Authorship, Agency, and Technology in
Wikipedia and Chambers’s Cyclopædia

Krista Kennedy

© 2016 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/

ISBN 978-1-61117-709-1 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-710-7 (ebook)

For Jimmy Lee and Cheryl Kennedy

Contents

List of Illustrations

Series Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgments

Note on Styles and Conventions

Introduction

Chapter 1

Distributed Curatorial Practices

Chapter 2

Crowdfunding Curation

Chapter 3

Metaphors of Curation

Chapter 4

Content Contributors, Vandals, and the Ontology of Curation

Chapter 5

Production Collectives: Page and Screen

Chapter 6

Automated Curation

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

2014 banner appeal displayed at the top of articles

Article growth since creation, sampled at two-year intervals

Deletion and replacement of text in the Trigonometry article with misinformation

Chambers’s taxonomy of knowledge

The front page of a Wikipedia article, with page tabs at the top

The Editing interface of a Wikipedia article

Wikipedia’s Visual Editor interface

Wikipedia’s Page Curation toolbar

Curation badge

Articulated process of design, deployment, performance, and either shutoff or recursion

Emergency robot shutoff button for RussBot

Primary text of Wikipedia article on Darwin, Minnesota

Discussion page for Darwin, Minnesota, article

Tables

Comparison showing stability of article word count (length), along with total edits

Parallel comparison of the iterations of the Minerals article

Series Editor’s Preface

We are informed, should we happen to inquire in a search at the open online reference Wikipedia, that in 1728 Ephraim Chambers published his Cyclopedia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. Wikipedia was founded in 2001, almost three hundred years after the first publication of Chambers’s Cyclopedia, and it might well be thought that everything had changed, and yet, as Krista Kennedy tells us, there are intriguing similarities in the two enterprises. We can look up the Cyclopedia in Wikipedia; Kennedy shows us that we can also find Wikipedia in Chambers’s Cyclopedia.

In Textual Curation, Kennedy explores how the two encyclopedia projects were conceived, composed, and curated. In her meticulous and wide-ranging historical and critical study of the rhetoric and technology of authorship, composition, and curation, Kennedy, whose account is based on deep archival research, an extensive theoretical grasp, and close analysis of historical and cultural understandings driving both projects, gives us new ways of thinking about the encyclopedic project and about authorship itself. This volume is full of fresh insights, critical re-imaginings, and new integrations of a range of scholarly conversations. Every one of us who has ever used Wikipedia, or advised a student how to use (or how not to use) it, will find in Textual Curation an illuminating reading experience.

Thomas W. Benson

Acknowledgments

As is appropriate for a book on distributed composing practices, this work is the product of many conversations and many voices. Hundreds of textual curators, both known and unknown, contributed to the texts studied here. I am grateful that they devoted time, expertise, energy, and funding to encyclopedia building and to creating publicly available resources. Ephraim Chambers took great care in his considerations of curating encyclopedic projects and yet managed to include flashes of his own unique perspective and wit within technical texts. Nearly three hundred years after the first edition, it is still a pleasure to study his books.

This project began as a dissertation, and I am grateful to readers at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, who encouraged my work: Laura Gurak, John Logie, Richard Graff, and Michael Hancher. Thanks are owed to all my colleagues in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition at Syracuse University, most especially my research mentor, Lois Agnew, and Rebecca Moore Howard, both of whom provided extensive feedback, as well as Collin Brooke, Eileen Schell, and Steve Parks. I am thankful for the time and energy they devoted to reading drafts and proposals, offering advice, and creating an amazingly collegial place to work. The College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University generously supported research and production for this study, and Deans George Langford and Karin Ruhlandt supported release time to complete the manuscript.

Students in my graduate seminars on Authorship and Rhetorics of Craft in the Syracuse University Composition and Cultural Rhetorics Program provided helpful contemplation and feedback. Jana Rosinski and Justin Lewis were always good for intensive discussions on nonhuman agency, rhetorical invention, and information structures. Seth Long has been an outstanding research assistant with an incredible eye for detail. His thinking on data analysis and visualization has enriched my own. Kurt Stavenhagen, our program’s resident beekeeper, generously shared his extensive knowledge on honeybees and apiaries. Communication and Rhetorical Studies graduate student Albert Rintrona enthusiastically shared his expertise on Japanese language and culture.

This research would not be possible without the knowledge and skill of a number of librarians, special collections specialists, and archivists. Patrick Williams, our departmental liaison librarian at Syracuse University’s Bird Library, was immensely helpful. In London Susan Snell and Martin Cherry at the United Grand Lodge of England archives went out of their way to make me feel welcome and to direct my attention to rare resources. I also benefited from the expertise of Andrew Mussell at Gray’s Inn, Naomi van Loo at the New College of Oxford University, Joanna Corden at the Royal Society, and the brilliant desk librarians at the Bodleian Special Collections and Lower Reserve Reading Rooms as well as at the British Library. The Royal Society of London’s Sackler Foundation Archive of biographical data has been a vital resource for tracing information on the subscribers who supported the Cyclopædia’s 1728 edition. The James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, provided access to a rare hard copy of the Cyclopædia, and I also relied on open-access, searchable editions produced by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Digital Collections’ History of Science and Technology Collection and by the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) at the University of Chicago’s Division of the Humanities.

For professional encouragement and inspiration, I thank Jonathan Alexander, Joshua Gunn, Debra Hawhee, Michelle Kennerly, Andrea Lunsford, Michael Neal, Kendall Phillips, Andrew Pink, Scott Rogers, and Brad Vivian. Thanks also to my many friends and colleagues who enthusiastically discussed swarms in popular culture and recommended relevant media artifacts. I am grateful to Kristine Blair, Cécile Révauger, Kelly Ritter, Michelle Smith, and Barbara Warnick for publishing early versions of some of this research. The National Council of Teachers of English granted permission to reprint in chapter 2 much of my article “The Bee and the Daw: Situating Metaphors for Originality and Authorial Labor in the 1728 Chambers’s Cyclopædia,” which appears in College English 76.1 (2013): 35–58. Waveland Press in Long Grove, Illinois, granted permission to reprint in chapter 6 portions of “Textual Machinery: Authorial Agency and Bot-Written Texts in Wikipedia,” which appeared in The Responsibilities of Rhetoric (2009), 303–9. Aspects of this research also appear in an article entitled “Textual Curation,” published in Computers and Composition 40 (June 2016): 175-189. They are reprinted here by kind permission of Elsevier..

The University of South Carolina Press and its staff have been absolutely outstanding to work with. I am grateful to Thomas Benson for his support of this project. Thanks are also especially offered to Jim Denton, Linda Fogle, Suzanne Axland, and Elizabeth Jones for their unfailing collegiality, patience, and ability to keep the trains running on time. Two anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript offered extensive suggestions that have significantly improved it, and I am indebted for their time and consideration.

Here in the Syracuse University Writing Department, George Rhinehart has provided invaluable technological assistance and made me laugh constantly. He, Kristi Johnson, and the rest of our remarkable staff have offered tremendous help with navigating the pragmatic details of daily academic business. Janine Jarvis, Kristen Krause, Martha Love, Chris Palmer, LouAnn Payne, Faith Plvan, and Beth Wagner, you are the best at what you do.

The University of Minnesota’s Ph.D. Program in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication on the St. Paul campus fostered a remarkable community. Paul Anheier, Anthony Arrigo, T. Kenny Fountain, Marnie Gamble, Dave Kmiec, Zoe Nyssa, Merry Rendahl, and Erin Wais-Hennen, I am thinking of you. In particular Dawn Armfield, Amy Propen, and Jessica Reyman can always be counted on for incredible encouragement and challenging discussions on authorship, agency, technology, and digital texts. I especially thank Greg Schneider-Bateman, who has been my writing partner and one of my closest friends for the past decade. Also in Minneapolis Francesca Davis DiPiazza has been a soul sister and fellow writer. Here in Syracuse, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Leslie Feinberg were unfailing sources of wit, curiosity, and good cheer, as were Jenny, Lisa, and Squirt Spadafora in Boston. In London, Rachel Rawlins and Joanna O’Connell taught me the city and shared wise conversation right up until the moment the Tube stopped running in the evenings. Any errors in that remain in this project are, of course, entirely my own.

My parents, Cheryl and Jimmy Kennedy, have always been champions of the possible. Growing up around their technical manuals, tools, typewriters, and dictionaries did much to shape my research interests and relationship to work. Clio and Thalia Kennedy-Ward have been patient, hilarious writing companions who remind me that it is a good idea to step away from the keyboard on a regular basis.

And most important, my undying gratitude to Jeff Ward, who has kept me sane, fed, and laughing since we first met in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s MA Program in Professional and Technical Writing. In addition to reading and commenting on every page of this manuscript, he’s reminded me to go outside, to plant things in the garden, and to get in the car and take a look at the gorgeousness that is New York State. His intellectual companionship makes for lively dinner conversation and expands my thought in ways that I do not always see coming. And his faith in me simply keeps me going. No words will ever be enough to repay his unfailing understanding, patience, humor, and love. The simplest, best words will have to do: thank you, and I love you.

Note on Styles and Conventions

This study relies considerably on early modern source material in printed books and pamphlets as well as handwritten organizational records. My quotations attempt to preserve the original character of these texts while enhancing readability for contemporary readers. Consequently abbreviations have been expanded, punctuation has been altered, and characters such as s, f, u, v, w, and i have been modernized except where their preservation is important to discussions concerning typographic choices.

The author understands gender as a non-binary construct. The use of he/she as gender referents in this text complies with the press’s house style.

Introduction

Shortly after Wikipedia’s launch in the earliest years of this century, it became the controversial subject of significant media attention. Its crowdsourced articles were heralded as both the best possible future of the intellectual commons and the demise of civilized, rigorously vetted reference texts. The encyclopedia became a digital community, a lynchpin, and a straw man as the English-language fork of the project grew exponentially in its first five years to include more than a million articles. The notion of a collective of thousands of humans and robots collaboratively writing an encyclopedia through incremental, public contributions disrupted cherished cultural tropes concerning authorship and even who or what an Author might be. It also disrupted conceptions of what constitutes writing by accepting not just contributions of narrative text and images but also metadata, links, information architecture structuring, code, and more. The popular conversations that ensued celebrated and decried the open, distributed nature of this monolithic project and the wiki platform that it is built on, provoking extensive discussion about the ways that technological affordances and constraints shift aspects of rhetorical agency in collaborative writing.

While it is true that wiki platforms support swift, large-scale collaboration that we have not been able to achieve in the past, the concept of a collaborative encyclopedia compiled through public contributions is not new, and neither are the cultural conditions that fostered it. More than 275 years ago, English editor and translator Ephraim Chambers mused on the intensely collaborative nature of the encyclopedia he was about to publish. As he worked among the publishing and knowledge work communities of Fleet Street and Holborn, Chambers deployed arguments for careful, unoriginal research, derivative works, and crowdsourcing that were forerunners of contemporary copyleft discourse and projects such as Wikipedia. His arguments in the 1728 preface of his foundational Cyclopædia are remarkably similar to contemporary arguments for Wikipedia, and he wrote extensively about the expectations and limits the encyclopedic genre imposes on authorial invention and originality and well as the sort of writing that it demands. While his project was necessarily situated in early modern concerns and the available technologies of the time, his attitudes and techniques in many ways presaged our contemporary discussions about distributed authorship and composing processes, as well as the ethics of owning a text comprising common knowledge gathered from disparate sources and recomposed into a “new” text. His name appears alone on the title page, and he was honored as the sole originator of the edition, but he understood the work as an intensive collaboration that was built on previously published source materials. His significant contribution, he argued, came through curating such an extensive collection of information into the final form of an authoritative, navigable encyclopedia.

Six years later, as he prepared the second edition, he issued a call for public contributions on any relevant topics. In an unusual move for his era, he explicitly defined this “public” as including women and working-class craftspeople rather than only literate gentlemen. He called for freemen and craft guild members to share their knowledge of “mysteries,” the practical trade secrets handed down orally from master craftsman to apprentice. He also invited contributions by illiterate individuals, saying that it would be a personal privilege to transcribe the first-hand knowledge they might possess about craftwork. In doing so he prepared to significantly expand not only the text, but also expectations of who might legitimately contribute to a reference text and what form those contributions might take.

This vision of intellectual democracy was a guiding principle in his development of a compendium that was intended to circulate knowledge to anyone who could access the text, and his revised edition included information that was pertinent to potential researchers from all social classes. His project, its structure of cross-indexed articles, and his calls for public contributions confirm that we have been dreaming for centuries of a networked, collaboratively composed encyclopedia, as not only Chambers but also later H. G. Wells,¹ Vannevar Bush,² and Ted Nelson³ proposed. Technical and scientific writers’ reliance on crowdsourcing stretches back even further to the efforts of astronomer Tycho Brahe and geographer Abraham Ortelius, both of whom involved crowds in research and development of their central contributions to science.

The Romantic ideal of the solitary, originary, proprietary author has permeated our culture since the late eighteenth century, but in Ephraim Chambers’s time it was a more nascent cultural concept that had been commodified only with the passage of the Statute of Anne in 1710, approximately a decade before he started work on his project. These authors produce work through their own original genius and are understood as being “unique individual[s] uniquely responsible for a unique product.”⁴ In the centuries since, this construction of capital-A Authorship has become naturalized through juridical discourse and the convention of associating an authorial signature with creative ownership of a work. The digital age explicitly challenged this construct, which had already been destabilized by modern and postmodern critics. Wikipedia represents an ongoing contemporary challenge to the form of identifiable authorship that is rewarded not just in copyright law but within the academy in the form of grades and tenure.

This book offers a comparative, historical study of authorship and rhetorical agency in these two encyclopedias that have both explicitly challenged common viewpoints on writers, composing processes, and textual products. A deep look into the ecology of communities and ideas that supported the development work of these encyclopedias reveals a different, more distributed account than our contemporary narrative of authorship often offers. The invention process of these encyclopedias is a social act, to borrow Karen Burke LeFevre’s term.⁵ Their development within the pressures of the English Enlightenment and the early twenty-first century copyleft movement was supported by philosophically committed social and professional networks. These contributors supported the production through textual contributions, but also, importantly, through material contributions such as apprenticeships, subscriptions, and donations, and influenced the ethos of the project through often-overlooked elements like typesetting decisions, template coding, and coding automated entities that themselves become active nonhuman contributors. Each of the humans and nonhumans in these collectives, along with the beliefs that they fostered, promoted, and had imposed on them, serves as a point of articulation in the social life of the these encyclopedias. Each offers clues regarding the social forces and technologies that shape the rhetorical agency available to textual curators.

I will demonstrate that the labor of distributed authorship is accomplished not by just the usual suspects denoted by the authorial signature and the publisher’s imprint, but a broader collective of humans and nonhumans who perform the work of composing an encyclopedia. Members of this collective include human writers, editors, publishers, coders, funding donors, and readers, but also technological agents such as printing presses,⁶ the web, and robots who edit, create maps, and write text. This inclusive definition of curatorial collectives leads us to a fuller consideration of the articulated labor of authorship alongside naturalized beliefs about the actants who labor and the essence of their labor. Together all these members form what we might understand as the cultural construct of the Encyclopedist.⁷ Composed of the individual performances of its constituent actants, this collective performs a specialized form of agency. No individual actant has complete control of the text, although some exert significantly more power than others. For example, even while we might celebrate the individual author or the publisher’s contributions to these intensively collaborative texts, their work is always rewritten by readers performing nonlinear readings of a text that progress according to individual interests and serendipitous links. The encyclopedia itself is the central locus around which all these elements coalesce.

Through comparative analysis of the texts that make up Chambers’s Cyclopædia and Wikipedia as well as the discourse surrounding these encyclopedias, I examine the compositional work performed by writers working within strict genre conventions that do not place a premium on originality. This exploration significantly revises long-held notions of authorial agency, autonomy, originality, and authority. It establishes the continuity of “new” textual activities such as wikis with long-standing authorial practices that I call textual curation, and it demonstrates the highly contextual nature of authorial agency. Comparison of analog and networked texts also lays bare the impact of technological developments, both in the compositional process and the topics that can practically be included in such a text. Herein lies a second assumption inherent in this study: that new textual forms and new media artifacts nearly always—if not always—have precedents. One technology does not necessarily replace another; rather, new technologies reinforce and reinterpret older technological forms.⁸ The telegraph, which enabled instantaneous, long-distance communication for the first time, was a nineteenth-century precedent to the speed and reach of the Internet.⁹ Camera obscuras and panoramas were used as early virtual reality devices in the eighteenth century, as were zograscopes.¹⁰ Later stereograph cards and viewing devices afforded a similar experience,¹¹ and their widespread circulation through both independent and catalogue distribution served as an early, less democratic precedent to current image-sharing applications such as Flickr and Instagram.

The same is true for genres, Charles Bazerman has pointed out: “by examining the emergence of a genre, we can identify the kinds of problems the genre was attempting to solve and how it went about solving them.”¹² Examining the cultural context and networks that the Cyclopædia emerged from, as well as examining it against Wikipedia, provides a clear vantage point for locating the problems that the modern encyclopedia works to address. The goals of the encyclopedic project remain much the same over time, although the technical affordances have changed. Taken together these genre-based elements challenge contemporary ideas concerning radical differences between print and digital authorship as well as the notion that new media intellectual property issues lack historical precedent.

Curation

Curation is both a popular and an interdisciplinary term, and its interdisciplinary aspects are an important reason that I use it to describe the compositional work that this book explores. The word has been in the vernacular since the mid-seventeenth century, but it has enjoyed an explosion over the past decade. It is a term I first began using one morning in 2007 as I struggled to describe my research on the labor of composing reference texts composition to my writing partner, who was himself working on rhetorical aspects of museums. These days curation has moved out of the museum and into popular discussions of working with almost any everyday collection, most particularly digital ones. By 2009 the South by Southwest Interactive conference featured a panel entitled “Curating the Crowd-sourced World,”¹³ and the term “community-curated work” began to appear as an alternative to the older term “user-generated content” in discussions about wikis.¹⁴ In April of that year, the Business Insider claimed that “curation is the new role of media professionals . . . separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and—most importantly—giving folks who don’t want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent.”¹⁵

These days the word has proliferated even further and is usually meant to describe the curator’s primary task as one of filtering an immense amount of information through the critical lens of one’s own sensibilities (most often, one’s aesthetic sensibilities). There are curation apps such as PearlTrees and Storify to deploy, curation communities like Pinterest to join, curation contests to enter in online home design and personal fashion communities. The New York Times noted that curation is now the provenance of most any creative type: “among designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners, curate is code for “I have a discerning eye and great taste.”¹⁶ Everyone is a curator, it seems, as we struggle to make meaning within the information overload of the postmodern world, most particularly the unyielding data stream that is the web.

The problem with this increasing ubiquity of the term is that along the way, we have robbed it of its meaning. Describing and assigning meaning to curation as mere filtration, aggregation, or collection strips this compositional work of the essential skill and craft performed through the curator’s labor. Those of us who work in fields that have adopted “curation” to describe filtered and recomposed compositions may forget that curation is a specialized craft and field of study in multiple curation-focused disciplines that award advanced degrees, train specialists, launch distinguished careers, and create robust scholarship.¹⁷

I draw definitions primarily from museum studies and library science because of their long-standing, deep considerations of carefully collected and arranged sets of information.¹⁸ Both disciplines work to order collected, filtered knowledge in ways that are publicly accessible not only textually but also in terms of findability and structure. Both are also deeply concerned with the preservation of information. Encyclopedias, museums, and reference libraries also share common Enlightenment-era intersections, most notably through the older cabinets of curiosities and private collections that ordered and examined the natural world. The curatorial skills involved are hardly new: the term first appeared in English in 1769.¹⁹ Patrick J. Boylan, professor emeritus of heritage policy and management at City University London, traced the advent of specialized training in museum curation to the École du Louvre’s 1870 offerings and noted a proliferation of museum studies degree courses in South America and the UK during the 1920s and 1930s.²⁰ Library science has been concerned with findability, metadata, and circulation since Melvil Dewey launched the field’s first formal program in the United States at Columbia University in 1887. Both disciplines, along with art history, understand the skill and labor entailed in curation in specifically defined ways that are closely tied to learned craftsmanship. Their definitions can and should shape our own understanding of textual curation, since they shed light on specialized forms of compositional work: most particularly the work of composing texts that comprise collected, filtered, ordered information that must be rendered into a narrative, navigable form.

This work bears significant resemblance to Boylan’s description of eighteenth-century museum curation: “Scholar-curators undertook almost all of the museums’ specialized work: acquiring collections, specimens, and works of art, researching cataloguing, and documenting their collections, and interpreting and communicating their significance through the museum’s permanent display galleries, temporary exhibitions, publications, and educational programs such as lectures and guided visits.”²¹ To say that a text has a curator conveys an appropriately heavier emphasis on the specific performance of authorial agency demonstrated in critical assessment, recomposition, and arrangement of previously disseminated work, moving the emphasis further from individual originality. It also more accurately describes the unending work of curating a living text or body of knowledge that is in constant flux, much as the work of curating a museum is never complete until the museum is shuttered. As Simmons University library and information science professor Ross Harvey has asserted, curation of library collections is “concerned with actively managing data for as long as it continues to be of scholarly, scientific, research, administrative, and/or personal interest, with the aims of supporting reproducibility, reuse of, and adding value to that data, managing it from its point of creation until it is determined not to be useful, and ensuring its long-term accessibility, preservation, authenticity, and integrity.”²² This work of collaboratively collecting, filtering, recomposing, taxonomizing, and managing information is essential not only to museum and library curation but also to textual curation. So too are the “invisible texts” that function in conjunction with the primary reference text, such as controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, strategic linking and cross-indexing, and metadata. Johndan Johnson-Eilola has written about the ways that symbolic-analytic tasks such as filtering, sorting, connecting, synthesizing, and sharing have become central for scholars who seek to efficiently work with ever-growing streams of information.²³ Arranging, interconnecting, and recomposing are essential skills; these skills may manifest themselves in the everyday life of a writer through something as simple as a carefully ordered stack of books relevant to a chapter that is under construction or as complex as a cross-referenced, tagged, categorized reading blog that also links to external sources. Such structuring is deeply familiar work to any writer who works extensively with digital information.

This understanding of the labor processes associated with composing in current digital environments leads us to a different conceptualization of collaboratively produced digital information structures, whatever their genre: open, interconnected, and not necessarily finished in the ways that we previously deemed projects to be complete once they were published and distributed as print artifacts. We typically consider print compositions to have reached a terminal point in development when they are published and made available to an audience. Print encyclopedias are always instantly dated; for the past three hundred years in the West, we have always understood that a new edition is forthcoming. Digital environments negate this terminal moment, holding texts in a state of potential. As multiple commentators have noted, Wikipedia’s value lies in its constant updates, ongoing project development, and minimal distribution costs. We understand it as always and ever under construction. This distinction is important if we are to understand the always-in-process nature of textual curation, particularly in networked environments. They are process, not product, and require terminology that acknowledges as much.

The process of curation is always rhetorical, as composing processes necessarily are. The authors of the UCLA “Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0” describe curation as simultaneously persuasive, technical, and technological, focused on “making arguments through objects as well as words, images, and sounds. . . . It is a medium with its own distinctive language, skill sets, and complexities; a medium currently in a phase of transformation and expansion as virtual galleries, learning environments, and worlds become important features of the scholarly landscape. Curation also implies custodial responsibilities with respect to the remains of the past as well as interpretive, meaning-making responsibilities with respect to the present and future.” Curation, then, is a rhetorical, dynamic skill set that pays close attention to the very skills that Andrea Lunsford called for in the field of digital composition a decade ago in her keynote address to the 2005 Computers and Writing Conference: “Writing: A technology for creating conceptual frameworks and creating, sustaining, and performing lines of thought within those frameworks, drawing from and expanding on existing conventions and genres, utilizing signs and symbols, incorporating materials drawn from multiple sources, and taking advantage of the resources of a full range of media.”²⁴ The essential aspects of curation are among those found in her definition of writing itself: creating conceptual frameworks through the process of building taxonomies and architectures, expanding on existing conventions and genres, utilizing signs in symbols in the form of navigational aspects and strategic linking, and recomposing text by incorporating materials drawn from multiple resources. Curation is writing, regardless of how small or invisible its texts might be. Tracing the work of textual curation helps us consider not only its rhetorical aspects, but also essential skills for functional digital writing that our students must learn in digital writing curricula.

Artifacts

The two artifacts that I trace this labor within emerged at distinct cultural moments that bear some striking resemblances, despite their taking place in separate centuries, countries, and technological eras. Chambers’s Cyclopædia emerged during a rich period of encyclopedic development and publication that was tied to the Enlightenment, which had swept Europe before finally arriving in England. This encyclopedia set the standard for many elements that we now consider to be fundamental features of the encyclopedic genre, including comprehensiveness, cross-indexing, and alphabetization. He understood his extensive curatorial work as a very specific form of authorship, and so did his publishers: when the first edition quickly became one of the more valuable publishing properties in London, they awarded him a stipend of £500 and he was swiftly inducted into the prestigious ranks of the Royal Society. Its interventions in the field of British reference text publishing were so significant that it is sometimes erroneously referred to as the first encyclopedia to introduce these organizational schemas. The English had not entirely neglected early developments in the encyclopedic tradition, having by that time developed a significant tradition of handbooks and lexicons.²⁵ Among these texts was James le Palmer’s Omne Bonum, which had introduced alphabetization as an organizational schema for reference texts in 1380,²⁶ but this method of ordering was not widely adopted at the time.²⁷ Bacon’s plans for the Great Instauration had set the new Western standard for careful planning of encyclopedic projects that were based on topical arrangements. This schema was also in particularly heavy use in the French encyclopedias that proliferated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which the British heavily relied on.²⁸

Chambers stepped into this rich reference tradition—right into the midst of it, actually—by adopting John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum; or, An universal English dictionary of the arts and sciences, explaining not only the terms of arts, but the arts themselves (1704) as the initial textual platform on which he began to build the Cyclopædia. The Lexicon Technicum was the first purely English general encyclopedia, and it concentrated on pragmatic and technical topics. It was influenced by one network that would later foster Chambers’s own work: the Royal Society. Harris was himself a Fellow of the Royal Society and consequently had access to many of the foremost scholars of his day. Collison wrote that “his use of the works of such scientists as Ray and Newton is probably the first example of an encyclopedia-maker drawing directly on the advice and help of experts and, as such, is the original precursor of the modern system of inviting contributions from specialists.”²⁹ This reliance on direct collaboration with subject-matter experts later became an essential element of the composing process for English-language reference texts such as the Britannica and Oxford English Dictionary, and Chambers adopted it more directly in his second edition. But even as he first took up the work of expanding the Lexicon, he began incorporating a much wider range of resources and topics.

The Cyclopædia’s influence in British and American print culture was far reaching throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Elements of the preface and structure are recognizable in the preface to Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.³⁰ Several of its lengthy technical passages also appear in Tristram Shandy. Sterne’s descriptions are only slightly modified and might be regarded as plagiarism today.³¹ Scientific definitions from the Cyclopædia likewise appear later in Melville’s work, with the most notable instances occurring in Moby Dick.³² The Cyclopædia also influenced at least two of the American founding fathers. Although a young Ben Franklin immediately discontinued the practice of running excerpts from it on the front page of the Pennsylvania Gazette when he bought it, he relied on it as a resource and continued to occasionally reprint entries.³³ Thomas Jefferson’s plans for the Montalto Observatory may also have been influenced by Chambers’s entry on the topic.³⁴

The necessary tradition of encyclopedic works building on previously published reference works has resulted in, among other things, a traceable genealogical relationship between the two central artifacts of this study. The Cyclopædia’s translation into French by John Mills and Gottfried Sellius formed the preliminary base of the Encyclopédie after its initial publisher, André Le Breton, contractually licensed the Cyclopædia in 1745.³⁵ The Encyclopédie in turn spurred development of Scotland’s Encyclopaedia Britannica; large sections were translated back into English to form part of the first edition text, which in turn formed the basis for subsequent editions. A full port of the 1911 Britannica, which is in the public domain, served as the initial textual base of Wikipedia, effectively making the Cyclopædia its textual great-grandparent. In addition to being composed by central writers or groups of writers who develop texts through filtration and recomposition of prior knowledge, both of these texts have relied on submissions from the public. Examining the compositional processes and rhetorical context of these two bookends of the Western encyclopedic tradition provides a snapshot of the modern encyclopedic genre at its inception and most recent iteration.

The thoroughly digital project that is Wikipedia arose from many of the same impetuses as the Cyclopædia, albeit within distinctly twenty-first-century contexts. From the beginning Wikipedia has been directed and evangelized by venture capitalist Jimmy Wales. As the public face (but never signed Author) of Wikipedia, Wales’s recognitions are comparable to Chambers’s in contemporary digerati terms: he’s been awarded numerous honorary degrees, named a fellow of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and one of Time’s 100 Top Scientists and Thinkers of 2006, and appointed to the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. From 2000 to 2002 he was assisted by Larry Sanger, who has claimed that he is also a cofounder of the project.³⁶ The text itself began as a project fork of Nupedia, an elaborate expert-written free encyclopedia that employed a seven-level vetting process. When the project produced only two dozen articles after a year and a half of work and US$250,000 invested, Wales and Sanger abandoned it after a server failure and launched a free-content version of the project. The wiki environment offered an open, flexible platform that quickly began to attract an initial community of contributors.

By October 2005 the encyclopedia was growing by fifteen hundred new articles per day.³⁷ Alexa, an early and prominent web analytics company, listed it as the thirty-second-most-visited site on the Internet on January 9, 2006; by November 1 of the following year it was consistently in the top ten, where it has remained ever since. Small contributions by more than nineteen million registered users have resulted in more than five million articles as of this writing. Wikipedia has been consistently in the news for fifteen years now, and for many reasons: its very existence (at first), for minor scandals, as a real-time news resource during major events such as tsunamis and elections, and for its ongoing fund-raising and international expansion efforts.

On many levels the project enacts the hopes and plans that Chambers wrote about nearly 275 years earlier. Wikipedia is an open-access encyclopedia that claims no ownership of the communally sourced and produced knowledge that its community curates. Chambers’s Cyclopædia was composed as the English Enlightenment’s push toward extending the investigations of natural philosophy gained momentum. It was part of a coordinated effort to broadcast the fundamentals of then-controversial Newtonian scientific principles beyond closed communities of like-minded individuals to the public, the Continent, and beyond.³⁸ Its sections on military, religious, and legal matters also implicitly addressed the need to order knowledge and make it accessible to as many people as possible.

Similarly Wikipedia arose from the intersection of multiple cultural factors: the continuing Western push toward a networked encyclopedia, open-source software development culture, the open-access movement, and the technological affordances of the postmillennial read-write web. In much the same way that the Cyclopædia was heavily influenced by the Enlightenment project and its stakeholders, Wikipedia’s development has been driven by a postmillennial commitment to public curation of the ever-expanding frontiers of civilization’s knowledge, from scientific advances to significant events. As a project that exists within an almost infinitely expandable digital platform, Wikipedia also catalogues information that marks it as distinctly of its own culture and era: significant moments in popular culture, famous personages, and the like. Throughout its development process, the central community has the ethos of open access that developed in the pre–web 2.0 Internet and open-access communities³⁹ and was then pushed to the forefront by the Creative Commons movement in 2001, the same year Wikipedia was launched.⁴⁰

The affordances of digital mediums make it possible for the collaborative labor of distributed authorship to be negotiated in asynchronous environments without central oversight, and freedom from the constraints of printed text means that Chambers’s vision of contributions from anyone with sufficient expertise and access can indeed theoretically be realized. However, the distributed structure of its collaborative labor necessarily means that it lacks the central curatorial oversight that Chambers provided for the Cyclopædia. This openness also means that casual contributors and readers become a much more active part of the production process in both productive and negative ways. While Wikipedia’s considerable expansion and quality rests entirely on volunteer labor, vandalism, misinformation, and spam are persistent issues that require community time and effort to police.

Accounting for the broader ecologies within which these two encyclopedias have flourished opens space to investigate the vital points of articulation that influence performances of authorial agency. These include cultural moments, material factors such as technological developments and production processes, the reading audience, and the discourses that ultimately surround the published text. Doing so moves us away from a notion of compositional processes and authorial agency that is confined to the small world of a writer, an editor, a text (and often a classroom). It also challenges the false division that positions these actors as both distinct and distant from readers and nonhumans.

This direct comparison of the oldest and most recent iterations of comprehensive Western encyclopedias brings into sharp relief the differences—and just as important, the similarities—between these two artifacts. This strategic juxtaposition necessarily requires negotiating a rather wide chronological span, and this study takes what Debra Hawhee and Christa Olson have termed a pan-historiographic approach. Selecting distinct, rich slices of time affords a focus on “residual accumulation of topoi, beliefs, and strategic practices, [which] brings its own kind of depth,” they argued.⁴¹ Closely examining the rhetorical nature of these two commons-based encyclopedias and the processes that were used to make them allows us to get at different questions concerning authorship and agency than would an account of the interstitial projects published in the 275 years between these two encyclopedias, many of which are deeply dependent on a culture (and cult) of expertise for their composition and production.

In order to develop a grounded view of this authorial work and its processes, this study brings together a variety of forms of evidence. I rely on extensive archival research to recover as much information as possible about Chambers’s own work and the collectives that supported and contributed to the Cyclopædia. My work offers new tracings of Chambers’s life by illuminating the ways that the then-nascent United Grand Lodge of England, which was working in conjunction with the Royal Society to evangelize Newtonian science across the United Kingdom and the Continent, supported the development and production of this encyclopedia. Chambers himself did not leave behind a rich amount of archival material to work with: as someone whose material wealth largely consisted of a personal library that was too large for his extended family to manage, many of his papers and belongings were either sold, destroyed, or lost after his death. What material would have remained in the archives of the Longman and Midwinter publishing houses was destroyed when the Luftwaffe bombed the areas surrounding Fleet Street and Paternoster Row during the Blitz. The Gray’s Inn library and archives were also largely destroyed, along with the inn’s other major buildings and the multiunit structure that Chambers leased a large apartment in for many years.⁴² Fortunately he left a voluminous preface, a précis for the second edition, and the second edition itself, which include his written thoughts on the problems of encyclopedic authorship. It is also possible to trace various supporting collectives, most especially in the archives of the Royal Society and United Grand Lodge of England, which have remained intact over the centuries. I am necessarily indebted to Robert Collison and Richard Yeo’s careful recovery work on the Cyclopædia’s publication history. With its vast public archives, Wikipedia presents the opposite problem for researchers, since each individual article’s publication histories and development conversations are public, as are all of Wikimedia’s annual reports. The nonprofit’s ethos of openness also dictates that regularly issued updates on infrastructure and interface development are publicly archived. These documents have been a rich resource.

I provide examples from a variety of article types and the discourse surrounding them, including a selected number of articles on topics that are directly comparable between Wikipedia and the first and second editions of the Cyclopædia. Selection of a random sample is complicated by the chronologically specific topics that these texts cover. The permanence of print also presents a complication: The Cyclopædia did not include entries on specific places, people, or news events because the tediousness of gathering this information and the changeable nature of these topics were simply outside the purview of a laborious project that was printed and revised approximately once a decade. Working from the most granular brackets of Chambers’s 1728 taxonomy of knowledge (pictured on page 99), I selected articles on topics that had retained their popular meaning and centrality over the time span between these two texts, eliminating topics such as spherics, conics, and dialling. After further eliminating articles that comprised less than one hundred words in either text and fewer than ten edits in Wikipedia, I narrowed the sample to five articles on the following topics: Minerals, Trigonometry, Fortification, Falconry, and Garden. This limited sample of approximately 10,700 edits was hand-coded for edit types, typographic shifts, and human or nonhuman compositional work. This sort of coding relies on human judgment and cannot be automated, which necessarily limits the scope of the sample. The resulting data is not generalizable in the same way that a big data study that relies on computerized analysis would be, but it provides valuable insight into writing practices, individual edit type and size, and the contributions of production community members and technological agents. Taken together the examples and data reveal the distributed nature of authorial and rhetorical agency in encyclopedic texts and the extent of the ways that rhetorical agency is distributed among human and nonhuman agents.

Chapter 1 Distributed
Curatorial Practices

To get a sense of how definitions of this sort of work were constructed early on in the Western encyclopedic tradition, we begin with our eighteenth-century source: the primary curator of the Cyclopædia. In the preface that appeared in the first two editions, Ephraim Chambers wrote at length about the problems of curating a reference text that aspired to cover the whole of human knowledge. Devoting more than a decade of his life to gathering and filtering previously published scientific, legal, and religious texts before recomposing the results into what became the first edition of this groundbreaking encyclopedia had given him plenty of time to think deeply about the philosophical, ethical, and practical problems the project posed.

The communal nature of his project was absolutely central, he argued: “The work is what it ought to be, a collection—not the produce of a single brain, for that would go but a little way, but of a whole Commonwealth.”¹ The pervasive textual borrowing necessary for producing what he called “a work so disproportionate to a single person’s experience, and which might have employed an academy”² required debts to a multitude of scholarly resources. No available author was spared, regardless of era, creed, nationality, or area of expertise, and no resource was left unrifled, whatever its genre. Consequently he saw himself as only the most recent in a long line of scholars, “an heir to a large patrimony, gradually raised by the industry and endeavors of a long Race of Ancestors.”³ In effect each of these prior authors and texts functions as part of an asynchronous collective, contributing across time to the project of expanding and collecting information on the known world. The resulting Cyclopædia “is not mine, ’tis everybody’s: the mixed issue of a thousand loins,”⁴ he wrote, adding that there are very few pages in the final text that do not include several instances of this type of borrowing—so few, in fact, that he would not attempt to list the pages that might meet modern standards of originality.⁵ He went so far as to invite the reader to assume that any given article in the work was drawn from at least one other text, and indeed he describes the Cyclopædia as “derived” from these materials. His use of this term was commensurate with our contemporary North American legal definition of a derivative work, a work that recasts or transforms one or more preexisting works. By openly acknowledging this extensive borrowing, he effectively circumvented potential charges of plagiarism.

This practice of large-scale borrowing from other texts for the purposes of recomposition is the privilege of the encyclopedist, Chambers argued. Common knowledge belonged to and in the commons. Similarly thoughts that were committed to circulation in print became properly available for the use of others, in his estimation: “’Tis idle to pretend anything of property in things of this nature. To offer a thing to the public, and yet pretend a right reserved therein to oneself, if it not be absurd, yet it is sordid. The words we speak—nay, the breath we emit—are not more vague and common than our thoughts, when divulged in print. You may as well prohibit people to use the light that shines in their eyes because it comes from your candle.”⁶ Positioning knowledge as a nonrivalrous good in the preface accomplishes several important rhetorical goals. First, it directly counters the pervasive arguments that prominent denizens of London’s publishing community were making concerning intellectual property’s equivalence with physical property. In doing so Chambers made an ethical appeal for his reuse of prior texts, claiming that it honored the essential nature of information as a social good produced by and for the community. If free circulation and use are in fact the highest purpose of information, then his own reuse and his curated product were by extension also both ethical and legal.⁷

What is most important, he established his contention that knowledge is ecological, produced by collectives who constantly collect, refine, and circulate it. The labor of curation is distributed across both time and space, carried out recursively by scholars, publishers, and booksellers as they curate and distribute texts, reusing and expanding the same information base. The growth of knowledge is evolutionary, evolving as each iteration is introduced into the ecology. This point in turn has ramifications for his conceptualization of rhetorical invention and the agency available to writers in the invention process. His explication of the pervasiveness of creative influence reaches beyond descriptions of encyclopedic authorship, claiming that writers in all genres work to construct texts from a patchwork of prior influences. This assertion bolstered his argument about the basic ethics of authorship and, in the process, prefigured prominent twentieth-century theories of influence and originality. The essential nature of invention is dependent on the information ecologies in which the writer lives and moves, he argued:

Even at most, what we are said to invent, is only what results or arises from something already in us. . . . There is no more real invention in the poet than in the tapestry or mosaic worker, who ranges and combines the various colored materials furnished to his hand, so as to make an assemblage or picture, which before had no existence. . . . In effect, the inspiration of the poet amounts to little more than relating things that are naturally incongruous. He presents new objects, new worlds, but ’tis only by differently combining the parts of the old one. He does not make any thing, he only patches. He does not invent, he only transposes. Nor has he the least power to move, other than what he derives from the novelty and strangeness of his combinations. (xii)

All writers, then, create compositions based on prior influences, contributing by developing novel arrangements and presentations rather than inventing original work through solitary processes. If all writing is always social, Chambers argued, then there can indeed be real merit in recomposed texts. He positioned his own foundational contributions as dependent on improving these prior resources by combining information found in individual texts as well as adding the latest information on each topic, thus transforming it into a richer, more finely detailed product. As someone who was intimately connected to the natural philosophy community that coalesced around the Royal Society and the United Grand Lodge of England, he was well positioned to be aware of and incorporate the latest scientific thought in his editions.

He had arranged this information into a tome that purported to form a complete, systematic course of study for any literate individuals who wanted to become educated and could get their hands on the two volumes that made up the encyclopedia. These books, which introduced the interface innovation of cross-indexing and helped popularize alphabetization in early modern English reference texts, would help the reader learn to think critically, “forming a sound mind, i.e. a system of perceptions, and notions agreeing to the systems of things.”⁸ By working through the systematic arrangement of this text, then, the reader would also come to see the fundamental truths in Newton’s then-controversial view of a systematic, clockwork universe. Further, through the curator’s labor of collecting, recomposing, and recirculating knowledge, contemporary knowledge would continue to be improved and extended. In a period that saw tremendous scientific discovery and the slow build-up to evolutionary theory, Chambers obliquely proposed that encyclopedic texts were best built for the sort of incremental development that could be facilitated by “the advantages of a continued discourse.”⁹ This view depended on distributed contributions not just to the creation of textual content, but also to its circulation through reading, lending, and discussion in private societies as well as public venues such as coffeehouses.

Rather than aligning himself primarily with the first rhetorical canon, invention, Chambers defined his work as more closely integrated with the second canon, arrangement. In the opening passage of the preface, he described his primary compositional task as one of filtering and organizing materials, then developing a usable information architecture that would be navigated intuitively by the reader: “Such are the sources from whence the materials of the present work were derived, which, it must be allowed, were rich enough not only to afford plenty, but even profusion. . . . The chief difficulty lay in the form, in the order, and [the] economy of the work: to dispose such a variety of materials in such manner as not to make a confused heap of incongruous parts, but one confident whole.”¹⁰ This focus on composing not just narrative text but also the larger information structure is but one element that distinguished these reference volumes from others, which frequently relied on topical groupings rather than alphabetization and cross-indexing as their organizational schema. While he listed himself as the Cyclopædia’s sole formal author, Chambers explicitly disavowed ownership of the public knowledge he had collected from myriad sources and curated as a new encyclopedia. Authorship and ownership of this sort of text were not intertwined, he argued.

In his estimation, identifying the legal author of his editions was not at all difficult because there existed a valid claim to sole authorship based on his own considerable curatorial skill and labor. His initial work was largely undertaken alone in the back rooms of a globe maker’s shop, where he composed the first edition instead of attending to his apprentice map-making duties. His employer supported him, but it was lonely work that required focused thinking about how to compose and structure the text and then creative labor to implement it: “and here it must be confessed there was not assistance to be had,” he remembered, “but I was forced to stand wholly on my own bottom.”¹¹ His approval of his name as the authorial signature that was prominently printed in large, red type on the title page suggests that he both accepted responsibility for the text and expected recognition for what he understood as valid compositional work that was based heavily on arrangement and recomposition. He got both in the form of monetary reward from his publisher, his reception at the court of George II, and his formal election to the Royal Society. His reflection on these seemingly conflicting claims reveals the nuances of textual curation as authorial labor and as a considered stance on the ethics of knowledge production and distribution.

Throughout the process of developing the first edition, Chambers served as the only identifiable and credited curator of the project. As he prepared the second edition, he sought to shift his role to an extent by inviting contributions from the public. He would still serve as the central curator, but by enrolling contributors from as many walks of life as possible, he would coordinate a collective project that brought together multiple social networks that had coalesced around not just class strata but also skill sets. By 1734 he was no longer quite so concerned about justifying the social process of building an encyclopedia. Rather he intended to make it even more explicitly and productively social, and so he placed magazine advertisements soliciting article submissions from the reading public. He also published a pamphlet entitled “Some Considerations Offered to the Public, Preparatory to a Second Edition.”

The concept of public in England then typically meant something very different from our twenty-first-century American notion of a broad, egalitarian public. Reference materials and codified knowledge were most often accessed through extensive home libraries, religious institutions, universities, and societies. They were typically accessible to the landed gentry and to some extent members of the professional class who had the funds, social connections, and leisure time to access these texts. Formal education of women was limited, infrequent, and not considered a good use of family financial resources. Consequently it was most often well-connected men who were understood as having acquired real, substantive knowledge, and the aristocracy occupied many (although by no means all) of the formal roles within the Royal Society. The society also inducted a number of professional men during the time that Chambers was nominated, perhaps as a gesture toward a limited intellectual democracy.¹²

Chambers sought more egalitarian contributions to his second edition, and when he addressed the public, he had the broadest possible audience in mind. After opening with a consideration of what it meant to undertake revision and expansion of a comprehensive encyclopedia, he clarified his understanding of the project’s audience and actively invited contributions from the public, much like an analog version of our modern Wikipedia. The Cyclopædia was, he wrote, for “all of those concerned in the acquisition of learning, that is of all persons in general, for I know of no rank, condition, or even sex, that is dispensed from the necessity of cultivating and improving their own minds” (2). By encouraging collaborators from as many walks of life as possible, he opened up the possibility of significantly widening the collective that developed this project. This was his invitation, which included the rather radically defined public he imagined:

In this invitation are included persons of every rank, profession, and degree of knowledge: men of letters, of business, and of pleasure; the Universities, the Court, Country, Army, and Navy. Not a college, a chapter, a mercantile company, a ship, scarce a house, or even a man, but may contribute his quota to the public instruction. . . . The less learned may here lay aside their apprehensions of appearing in a work of literature; being masters of the subject, they need not be solicitous as to the style and manner. Many even among the illiterate may here find place, and be of use to men of the profoundest learning. They will find an amanuensis in me, who shall even think it an honor to be dictated to by some who can neither write nor read. Numerous things are wanted from the last quarter—and the more so, as they are not extant in books, libraries, and cabinets of curiosity, but hid in shops, garrets, cellars, mines, and other obscure places, where men of learning rarely penetrate. Rich fields of science lie thus neglected underground: trades, crafts, mysteries, practices, short ways, with the whole vast apparatus of unwritten philosophy. (3)

Here we see Chambers advancing a radical vision of intellectual democracy, one that placed the advancement of knowledge at the center of all human concerns while issuing an open invitation to contributors regardless of class, gender, profession, or literacy levels. In this definition everyone is a potential worker with valid knowledge to contribute to the collective project. The crowd, he argued, can cover the breadth of modern knowledge that a single scholar simply cannot, given the exigencies of information overload.¹³ After quickly acknowledging the more obvious resources of the aristocracy and distinguished institutions, he included also the professional middle class he worked and lived among. But he devoted a significant amount of print space to the working classes and their unwritten craft knowledge. The knowledge of these groups is just as essential as the knowledge of anyone else, he argued, and represents a central contribution to the Enlightenment project. In making this call, he acknowledged the communal, hive-like nature of encyclopedia building, ratifying it with his signature and the brand of his successful, sought-after encyclopedia. By working to broaden the contributing community and resources, he also subtly highlighted the transformative labor of the encyclopedic author, who filters gathered material and recomposes it into a new (and theoretically improved) text.

He asked not just for contributions of new information, but for contributions of all types. He invited subject-matter experts to offer corrections to existing articles and all readers to submit editorial corrections to the wording of articles so that “any point [might be] set in a better light than unusual, or brought into a shorter compass, or reduced to a juster principle, or disposed of in a more convenient method, or pursued to a greater length, to communicate the same by this means to the public.”¹⁴ He also asked that other readers take note “as any thing occurs in the course either of their reading or speculation” and contribute information on any topic, term, references, or other knowledge that were both already extant in the text or that should be included.

Chambers served as the central curator of all these submissions, a job made necessary by the technological constraints of a paper-based submission and manuscript preparation system. No archival records of the submissions remain, but there is evidence that he managed a tremendous amount of information in preparation for the second edition. He employed two amanuenses, Mr. Ayrey (from 1728 to 1733) and Mr. Macbean,¹⁵ whose duties may have included assisting in research and expansion of the manuscript. Ayrey recalled that during his time of service “he copied near 20 folio volumes, which, Mr. Chambers used to say, comprehended materials for more than 30 volumes of that size, though he at the same time added, they would neither be sold nor read if printed.”¹⁶ Macbean wrote that Chambers had written to him from Islington, where he was convalescing, that “I want all the apparatus I used in correcting the new edition of my book, to be brought to Cambury-house . . . particularly a number of books, I believe ten or twelve, and an index wrapped in thick brown paper; the first volume of the Dictionary too, I was at work upon, should be sent.”¹⁷ At his death Chambers left behind enough material for seven additional volumes.

By inviting readers to assist with the expansion of information included in the Cyclopædia, curators like Chambers partially dissolved the barrier between author and reader. But a barrier of sorts did necessarily remain, since in each instance the central project curator retained responsibility for soliciting submissions as well as curating the final textual product. The contributors were hardly a full-fledged author, in terms of either agency or responsibility: curators still retained the necessary primary editorial responsibilities, vetting the submissions before moving to more curatorial concerns such as dealing with the arrangement and composition of the final text.¹⁸

These practices functioned this way partly because of traditional vetting processes, but also because of the practical limitations of print production technologies. At bottom it is an interface and platform issue: there is no technological means for thousands of writers to simultaneously contribute to and build a printed text. It was easy enough for individual or small teams of readers to peruse the text, determine what was missing in their area of expertise, write the piece(s) they’d like to contribute, and then submit via mail or courier. Recall also that Chambers did not require literacy of his contributors; it was similarly easy for them to complete an interview and for their knowledge to be transcribed. But there is no practical way for an analog crowd to do the close work of composing a usable architecture or handling production and distribution. Some central person or group must perform the labor of filtering the submissions, integrating chosen contributions with the central architecture, managing the navigability of the expanded structure, and then submitting that completed work to the publisher, who in turn makes arrangements for the material labor of printing. Along the way the original submitter’s performance of agency may be significantly altered—that is, rejected or altered through the communal and participatory processes demonstrated in the craft of curation.

Chambers was hardly a pioneer in crowdsourcing through reader contributions. The sixteenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was one of the first to solicit crowdsourced observational data in scientific publications, and the laboratory tradition of scientific work has been frequently, if not heavily, collaborative.¹⁹ Chambers also referenced the crowdsourced contributions to many magazines of the day, such as the Spectator and Tatler, which he described as “carried on with surprising Spirit and Success.”²⁰ Other reference texts in production during the same period, such as Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique and Zedler’s Universal Lexicon, made a similar practice of incorporating reader comments in subsequent editions.²¹ The innovation of these eighteenth century reference authors was to make space for participation by the broader reading public, rather than hand-selecting authors from a credentialed group or closed community. This practice remained customary in later reference projects: Diderot’s Encyclopédie would incorporate a considerable community of contributors, as did the 1884 Oxford English Dictionary.²² The production of the Encyclopædia Britannica has long relied on a network of invited, credentialed authors, as do most encyclopedic products that aim for an authoritative reputation.

The strategic inclusion of distributed contributions in the Cyclopædia demonstrates an astonishing similarity to the work that has more recently been invited and undertaken in Wikipedia. The open structure of the wiki platform and Wikipedia’s policies explicitly facilitate the sort of open contribution system that Chambers and his publishers worked toward in their requests for analog contributions from the public. Since read-write web platforms enable contributions directly from the public without the mediating agency of a central curator, performances of agency necessarily shift, as does the potential rate of production and type of contributions. A theoretically unlimited number of individuals can directly contribute to the project, subject to access and server capacities. In the print production process, the number of contributors is constrained by the amount of centralized human labor available to read, edit, incorporate submissions, proofread, set type, and create print runs. If ten thousand contributors send articles to a staff of three, either they will be processed long after they are received or some contributions will not be processed at all. If other factors demand that the edition must go to press before the filtering can be fully completed, then some submissions will necessarily either be saved for the next edition or discarded. Since wikis remove the intermediary submission, filtering, and incorporation stages by facilitating direct edits by readers, the potential for successful outside contributions increases.

Part of the reason for Wikipedia’s successful project life, then, is the innovative ease of the MediaWiki interface, which functions as an important actor itself: with the click of a mouse and a few keystrokes, readers can easily become writers and then, after completing their contributions, return to reading. The readers are transformed into curators, adding their own contributions directly to the central text and changing prior text as they see fit. Project policies about formal vetting processes also muddy the traditional divide between writer and reader: because there is no single, unified vetting process, each event of reading is a potential vetting. Readers are invited to simultaneously perform as reviewers because the act of “many eyes” crossing the pages and locating errors constitutes one of the fundamental WikiPhilosophies of eventualism, the idea that enough readers over enough time will improve the quality of a page. Sometimes, though, more eyes on a page increase the potential for destructive contributions in the form of vandalism.

Another formerly necessary intermediary stage is removed as well: that of the printer. Digital text does not require the labor of typesetting, inking, printing, and binding. There is no direct correlation between printer and coder here, because of the WYSIWYG editing interface of the platform. As the reader-turned-curator clicks the “save” button, the edited text immediately appears and is accessible to the world, “published” by the same person who was, just moments ago, reading the text. In the world of Wikipedia, it is impossible to draw clear distinctions between the formerly distinct roles of reader, writer, editor, and publisher, since a single rhetor can perform all these roles and exercise the agency that was formerly distinct to each.

Many hands working simultaneously on the same project leads to chaos, but it also can lead to exponential productivity. This potential is the basis of what Yochai Benkler calls commons-based peer production. This production method offers two distinct advantages, as Benkler has argued in The Wealth of Networks. First, it distributes decision making, which renders robust peer review an inherent part of the project. Second, it allows more individuals to scour more resources than any single firm or market would accomplish through traditional methods. Each contributor can contribute a small, manageable module that, when added to the whole, moves the entire project significantly forward. Wikipedia, of course, is built primarily on these sorts of incremental public contributions.²³

Textual Curation and Authorship

Encyclopedic composition challenges commonly held cultural notions of what constitutes both authorship and writing. Far from the conventions of original creativity we expect in poetry and prose, which demand that writers compose as inventively as possible within the constraints of their chosen genre, encyclopedias require the creation of text that is factual, pragmatic, and arranged according to a culturally acceptable order. While the creative writer and essayist’s claims to originality are culturally accepted and expected (even as we acknowledge the pervasiveness of influence and remix), the reference writer is instead explicitly commissioned to produce derivative work. Encyclopedic articles are expected to rigorously report factual information gleaned from expert sources, not opinion, interpretation, or original research. In both print and digital encyclopedias, working as a textual curator involves engaging fundamental questions of genre, architecture, and meaning making.

While building encyclopedias curators collaborate in multiple temporalities, particularly in large, commons-based collaborative projects such as Wikipedia. They may collaborate after the fact with authors of the texts they are filtering and recomposing; asynchronously or in real time with contemporaneous community members who manipulate their text by not just adding words but manipulating it through code; and then with still other contributors who may alter the text years in the future. Because of the sheer mass of information that must be managed, recomposed, and arranged in order to successfully develop a large digital text, curators are frequently working in collaboration with prior contributors over extended periods of time, as seen in Wikipedia’s development. Collaboration occurs recursively throughout production stages as well as after the fact when the readers begin to write their own experience of nonnarrative texts by finding their own paths through it via cross-indexing, links, or individual choices.²⁴ The textual curator’s contributions, then, come through honed research skills, astute arrangement, clear recomposition, and curatorial information management.

This sort of distributed collaboration can be understood as dialogic, following Ede and Lunsford’s landmark 1990 study of collaborative writing. They understand dialogic collaboration as a loosely structured, fluid collaborative practice in which “one person may occupy multiple and shifting roles as a project progresses.”²⁵ The intensely dialogic nature of curatorial collaboration proceeds in exactly this way, especially in large collaborative projects where collaborators may wear multiple hats in a single work session, let alone over the life of the project. A curator may add primary text to a page, then edit another person’s contributions to another text, audit and clarify metadata, then switch to conducting research in order to gather broad information for filtration and recomposition. In another session the contributor may make sure that navigational links are up to date; all the while other contributors intersect with the first curator’s work, both asynchronously and in real time. The work may occur with little direct communication, discussion may happen behind the scenes, or arguments may break out and then move to arbitration. The Internet’s inherent affordances of speed and reach, which Gurak has written about at length, further enhance both the collaborative potential in digital environments and the potential for fluid shifts in curatorial roles.²⁶ These affordances have fostered the increased deployment of distributed collaboration in both organizations and individual business practices.²⁷ Similarly they have given rise to the sort of distributed collaboration found in open digital projects like Wikipedia that depend on many contributors from all over the world working through a nonhierarchical collaborative process to develop projects that are frequently based on creative works that are in the public domain.

How, then, should we understand the question of authorship in this sort of textual situation? Throughout this study I use the term authorship not to refer to compositional processes, but rather who gets to claim the status of “author” and the ways that we theorize, reward, and punish authors and their creative products. The historically and materially situated ways that we understand authorship have shifted considerably over the past fifty years or so since Barthes and Foucault began to destabilize them with their famous debate over the nature of the Author. Reproductive technologies that simultaneously afford circulation continue to be a central factor in this shift, which is not yet complete. Our own cultural moment is approaching a critical juncture when it comes to these issues. Considering the technological actors that are essential for facilitating this kind of collaboration and production poses further complications. In the quarter century since AOL entered American homes, we have become intensely familiar with networked, social forms of writing. We now carry them everywhere in our pockets, using smartphones to broadcast short-form texts across social media platforms and longer texts through e-mail. We share memes, gaining small bits of social capital by circulating the creative work of others. We launch Google Drive and peck away at shared documents. We quickly look something up on Wikipedia and perhaps make small edits to a page. When hundreds or thousands of collaborators work together asynchronously in networked environments, making contributions that can consist of recomposed texts or one metadata term or a line of template code, our conceptualizations of authorial agency, credit, and property are deeply challenged, along with our notions of what constitutes writing.

This networked information economy has imposed a seismic shift on traditional media production ecosystems and understandings of how authors are positioned within them.²⁸ Thousands of professional photographers have increasingly found themselves out of work over the past decade as prominent publications have come to rely on Creative Commons–licensed photos on Flickr for image content. Citizen journalism contributes to and often drives media coverage, changing the economics of the news and magazine journalism. Twitter streams provide crowdsourced, real-time commentary on emerging news stories that is often repurposed by mainstream media outlets or simply followed by users who now ignore traditional media entirely. And in 2012, after a long public war with Wikipedia, the Encyclopædia Britannica ceased print production and began to extend its ongoing project through an entirely digital edition with limited social contributions.

During roughly the same period, the inclusion of highly usable media production software on laptops alongside the introduction of faster broadband connections that facilitated easier access to digital media artifacts drove the rise of remix culture. With Apple’s 2001 “Rip, Mix, Burn” campaign launched in 2001, the term “remix,” which loosely refers to recomposing found multimodal artifacts into new texts, entered the common parlance. Writing studies scholars investigated the various implications it posed for theorizing composing practices and pedagogy, incorporating playful repurposing and ethical reuse into writing assignments that complicated originality and authorial credit.²⁹ Popular discussions about authorship and intellectual property have also evolved commensurately as public intellectuals have taken the debate outside of the courtroom and academy through public talks and popular publications.³⁰ The popularization of remix culture through sampling, fan fiction, and video production subcultures such as machinima brought visceral demonstrations of the pervasiveness of influence.³¹ As a result contemporary writing is commonly (if not always) considered to be networked and social, always marshaling a plethora of influences in its invention and production. Alongside these developments postmodern critiques of authorship³² and originality³³ have been naturalized in the humanities over the past half century.

Despite this received construction of a destabilized, networked Author, our systems of credit and reward remain resolutely dependent on the idea of an identifiable, discrete genius (either human or corporation) who creates a product that can receive individual credit in the form of copyright, grades, or tenure. We expect this product to meet standards of originality that render it defensible against charges of plagiarism or copyright violation.³⁴ If prior texts are incorporated, we demand that they not just be folded in, but awarded either rigorous citation or credits that are often accompanied by royalty payments.

Consequently the capital-A Author still looms for many of us who study theories of writing and circulation, regardless of our disciplinary affiliations. This Author is a mutable colossus, alternately dead, reborn, deconstructed, distributed, reduced to a signature, anonymous, pseudonymous, feminized, contemplated. And yet, in spite of this plethora of theoretical manifestations, it remains strangely unified within popular cultural depictions. When we consider the Author, the creature we are still most often referring to is the Poetic Author, creator of various forms of literature. Its value lies in the original genius of the novels, plays, poetry, or essays produced. The notion of originality is central: it is considered vital that the work be fresh, inventive, and unusual within its cultural context, lest it lack cultural value or be vilified as plagiarism. Martha Woodmansee has deftly described this Romantic Author as a “unique individual uniquely responsible for a unique product.”³⁵ Lockean sweat-of-the-brow doctrine indicates that with originality comes ownership, in both senses of the word: responsibility for the legal and cultural consequences of the text, as well as the right to compensation for labor. Western intellectual property theory and law are founded on the idea that the original genius demonstrated in these works carries with it these inherent property rights.³⁶ The existence of this proper-noun Author, then, becomes an incontrovertible cultural fact—even an essential attribute of a Real Writer—and copyright law represents the institutional embodiment of that fact.³⁷

Constructions of authorship are intimately tied to historical and material moments of both textual production and critical analysis. The emergent contemporary popular understanding of authorship as social is not new; it existed in a different form in manuscript cultures but has experienced a substantial period of flux that is still with us to some extent. As Margaret J. M. Ezell has argued in her important study of authorship in manuscript texts, there has been a tendency to impose our contemporary understanding of authorship as a lens for examining texts in earlier eras, assuming that what was true now was true then and has been true during any intervening period as well.³⁸ Authorship and composing processes are increasingly figured as social and intimately connected with contemporary technologies, but Ezell established the sociality of authorship in rural areas of Interregnum and Restoration England. The handwritten, mostly single-copy poetry and prose that she examined was, by virtue of its material form, produced for very localized audiences and generally not intended for publication or wider circulation. These manuscripts were often contributed to or transcribed by close family members, with a focus on the creative process and communal readings rather than on publication. “The network of writer and reader that in my view characterizes manuscript literary culture and social authorship is created by the process of being an author rather than by the production of a single text, in Eisenstein’s terms, one capable of being fixed, attributed, and catalogued,” Ezell wrote. Integrating machinery into the equation to set this sort of handwritten manuscript in print and reproduce it for circulation would transform the figure of the author and the author’s social standing in ways that were often considered undesirable by the subjects of her study. For this reason many composers of the collaborative manuscripts in Ezell’s study actively avoided publication.

The rise of a substantial print economy in London across the seventeenth century drove a pragmatic reconceptualization of authorship that was largely predicated on economic interests. Printing technologies represented significant capital expenditures by printing houses, and the market for printed texts offered substantial rewards. The Stationer’s Guild consolidated tremendous power, functioning with the cooperation of the Crown as the central regulatory body that determined who might print and what materials were printable (that is, not blasphemous or seditious). Officers also carefully regulated printing technologies, destroying unauthorized presses or materials and levying harsh punishments. Despite this, a robust underground printing community continued to produce radical pamphlets and broadsides for wide circulation. The mainstream printing house and bookseller communities of Fleet Street and Paternoster Row also flourished, partly because they held full rights to any texts they produced.³⁹ By the final decades of the century, prominent writers in London were deeply concerned with the ways that ownership of their work belonged exclusively to the publishers, and a hotly contested conversation took place in the larger creative community over a number of years.

As Mark Rose and others have established, the construction of the modern Author is contemporaneous with the rise of print. Creative works are transformed into material literary property by print and its potential for broad circulation and economic reward. The idea that an author (rather than a muse, a patron, or a publisher) might own his or her work and thus benefit as the owner of an intellectual property is a distinctly modern concept, and it is one that is intimately intertwined with the affordances of print technologies. The network of nonhuman actors that facilitate the material production of print is as essential as all the humans who take part in the technological system of print production and circulation. And yet the end result—the bound book on the desk—renders invisible the collective of humans and nonhumans that produced it and instead reveals the Author, who in order to logically be awarded ownership must be understood as the sole originator of the text. Print texts consequently drove a reconceptualization of the social author as originary and solitary in order to be proprietary, and this construction did not begin to significantly shift in the popular consciousness until the affordances of desktop computers and cheap, fast broadband created the conditions for a rebirth of the social author.

Curatorial Authorship

The encyclopedic form demands creative compositional responses to communication problems. That is, the text itself becomes an actor in the collective of agents who create encyclopedias. “Agency is textual or, put differently, texts have agency,” Karlyn Kohrs Campbell has reminded us.⁴⁰ This agency is demonstrated in part through familiar features that guide the audience through processing the text. Form has “a power to separate a text from its nominal author and from its original moment of performance,” she noted, and successful form leads to imitation. Continued imitation in turn leads to prevalent audience and genre expectations. Contemporary audiences now expect encyclopedias to be divided into discrete, topical articles. Print encyclopedias are expected to present these articles in alphabetic order, while digital encyclopedias must include a robust search function, sufficient metadata to be easily searchable, and a hyperlinked information structure. Illustrations are welcome and expected to be clear and targeted. If an encyclopedic project fails to meet these expectations of form, its authority will be called into question regardless of the quality of the textual curation and composition demonstrated by its writer(s).

Despite the derivative nature of this writing and the many moving structural parts that it includes, the textual curator is an author every bit as deserving of the respect accorded to Authors as an essayist or poet is. The curator’s value is demonstrated through the work of improving the quality of information available, the quality of writing in the articles, or the accessible arrangement of information. And indeed the authoritative reputation and success of any encyclopedia rests primarily on the successful execution of these skills, which we commonly understand as not just invention and revision of narrative text but also linking paths through the text with cross-references or hyperlinks and creating contextually defined metadata through keywords and headings.

I suggest that these essential skills constitute a category of compositional craft called textual curation. The labor and small texts necessary for this work are not less important or diminished writing but carry with them the value attached to writing-as-skilled-craft. This expanded skill set of filtration, recomposition, and composing for findability and navigation includes careful attention to some aspects of writing that we have traditionally emphasized, such as source assessment and citation, but also demands a reconsideration of the canon of arrangement’s vitality. This reconsideration includes a broader conceptualization of textual organization that moves outside of individual texts and into the ecologies they exist within,⁴¹ both in their original state and in new ecologies that are constantly collaboratively developed. This recomposition, which most often requires working with multiple informational texts that will be filtered and recomposed into a new text, pushes against traditional expectations of original authorship.

Given its frequently collaborative nature, it also requires becoming comfortable with forms of authorial agency that are explicitly distributed and contextual. Jodie Nicotra has argued that in the case of the crowdsourced taxonomic vocabularies known as folksonomies, “rhetorical agency and intention become much more complicated, because invention is revealed as not simply the product of an individual, isolated mind, but as a distributed process driven by the interaction of a multitude of users” (273). The same is true for other curatorial tasks that require us to reconsider the requirements of original, single-authored writing, such as writing metadata for another’s article, collaborative editing, distributed architecture development, and the like. Addressing this need means teaching the curatorial moves required when writers are managing digital information in both personal and business contexts, whether it be categories on an organizational blog, a basic business website, a citation library on Zotero, tagged images on Flickr for a nonprofit, a Storified archive of tweets collected via hashtags at a convention, or the information architecture of a digital humanities project.

Modern encyclopedias present a unique rhetorical and textual situation within which to analyze the fluctuations of authorship: they are utilitarian rather than creative, real-world rather than fictional, objective rather than subjective, and schematically arranged rather than narratively structured. The pragmatic aspects of dealing with such a broad project necessitate collaborative authorship: since the information explosion of the Enlightenment, it has been impossible for a central reference text to be originally written and mastered by a single author.⁴² Neither has it been necessary, since vast amounts of previously published dictionaries, lexicons, and handbooks—and eventually encyclopedias—were available for “inspiration.” The curatorial process is almost directly counter to the more usual conceptualization of an author as someone who creates an original text through his or her own individual genius.⁴³ In fact original research has traditionally had no place in the modern Western encyclopedic tradition and is specifically banned in Wikipedia on the grounds that it runs counter to the project’s Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy.⁴⁴ As Collison wrote in his discussion of plagiarism allegations against D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, “The truth is that new encyclopedias are always built on the structure of their forerunners, and thus reflect the process of the accretion of knowledge itself.”⁴⁵

Curation and Invisibility

Curatorial authorship is not often acknowledged as authorship or even as writing because of its invisibility when done well: a beautifully curated reference text allows users to simply access the topical area they need without undue thought, and the authority bestowed on canonical encyclopedic brands also largely relieves them of needing to consider the sourcing, filtering, and recomposition processes. The textual-curator-as-subject is often similarly obscured. This author departs from our continuing notions of easily identifiable authorship in a variety of ways, chief of which is the ways its inherently collaborative aspect frequently obfuscates easy identification of individual writers. Because of the sheer mass of information that must be managed, recomposed, and arranged in order to develop an encyclopedic text, the encyclopedist is always working in collaboration with prior scholars and writers as well as assistants and coauthors. Since the writer is also very rarely the printer or coder who handles large-scale information architecture and textual production tasks, collaboration occurs at the production stage as well as after the fact, when the readers begin to write their own experience of the text. Retreat to the proverbial garret is simply not an option, and in both our early modern examples and Wikipedia, the individual authorial signature is purposefully banned. The encyclopedist’s contributions, then, come through research skills, astute arrangement, clear recomposition, and the sheer labor of project management.

A number of helpful terms for understanding similar authorship forms have emerged from writing studies’ highly collaborative subfield of professional and technical communication, which offers a natural arena for examining authorship that is primarily collaborative and does not rely on cultural notions of individual original genius in the same ways that poetic and academic genres do.⁴⁶ Jessica Reyman has argued that “authorship as applied in technical communicator professional practices is a far cry from the concept of authorship purported in the academic environment. In a professional context, technical communication is rarely considered an individualized activity; it is not something to which we assign ownership by an individual writer; and it typically does not produce something valued most for its originality.”⁴⁷ In contrast to from the conventions of academic work, technical communicators engage in compositional work that is quite different from that taught in traditional composition classrooms: single-sourcing; development and use of boilerplate; repurposing documents for varied internal and external audiences; and producing corporate documents that bear no authorial signature and are produced under work-for-hire agreements that place the corporation in the legal role of author. Consequently the properties of authorship in technical genres look quite different from the properties (autonomy, proprietorship, and originality) that have been central to modern understandings of authorship.

Curators of encyclopedic articles frequently work under similar conditions. During the first one hundred years of the contemporary Western encyclopedia, individual authorship of individual articles was not identified in the final product. It was not until the 1824 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica that authorial signatures began to appear at the end of articles in the form of contributor initials.⁴⁸ Today signatures vary by project; the standard byline on Wikipedia articles credits the work to “Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.” Authors are rarely if at all referred to in social references to encyclopedia articles: we refer to “The Britannica” or “Wikipedia,” not to the writers who wrote it. Articles are expected to be composed of previously established and published facts, and to conform to a general template for introductions, standard illustrations, order, and formatting. Careful metadata management is required in the form of cross-indexing or live links.

In recent years scholars of technical communication have described this collaborative, primarily less-original composition in a variety of workplace studies. In his 2005 study on workplace collaboration, Scott Jones described common technical communication tasks such as “document borrowing,” which includes single-sourcing and adapting prior documents for new contexts.⁴⁹ Through these and other collaborative tasks, all done as work-for-hire, the writers in his study transitioned from “being the sole creators of mainly independent units of texts to being among the creators of highly interconnected parts of a very large unit of text.”⁵⁰ Other scholars have described this process of recomposing and structuring texts in a variety of ways: “layering,”⁵¹ “environment selecting and structuring,”⁵² and “textual coordination”;⁵³ the resulting assemblages of texts are understood as “genre ecologies” by Freedman and Smart and Spinuzzi and Zachry.⁵⁴ Both Jones and Slattery have suggested that these changes are at least partly due to changes in technology, which encourages broader collaboration by making the tasks of coordination more efficient. This sort of distributed teamwork has driven the composition of encyclopedic texts for centuries,⁵⁵ but the technological affordances of wikis certainly facilitate this sort of work in far a more immediate fashion.

While curation shares some aspects in common with each of these terms, it differs fundamentally in its context especially in the case of Wikipedia: the wilds of the Internet rather than controlled corporate environments. Each of the above studies examined the work of recomposition within workplace contexts. While textual curation can certainly be performed within institutional contexts, it is also common in technical communication and knowledge work that are commonly practiced outside of corporations. It is also most frequently practiced by composers who would not consider themselves to be technical communicators and who are not formally employed in this profession. I suggest that this technical, distributed work constitutes technical communication in the wild, not only in the perhaps more obvious case of Wikipedia, but also in games,⁵⁶ piratical file-sharing communities,⁵⁷ and forums devoted to technical topics such as high-end audio or woodworking. Studying these and similar sites that exist outside of traditional workplaces has the potential to reveal the extent to which such work is shaped by the contexts of production, availability of technologies, and the constraints of genre.

Rhetorical Agency and Collectives

The text, its curators, its production technologies, and other agents who form part of the collective that produces it all function as points of articulation that drive the curatorial process forward. The vitality of these connections is particularly apparent in examinations of authorship and ownership in the encyclopedic tradition, and they, along with the specific exigencies and demands of what we might loosely term the encyclopedic situation, impose a paradoxical agency. The curator’s authority is partially derived from the particular forms of agency that are shaped by the production process of a comprehensive reference text.

From one perspective this author has very little agency, since he or she works within a tight form with rigid genre expectations, recomposes information gleaned from other resources, and works toward the strict goal of organizing information in ways that provide optimal user experience. Encyclopedic projects are supported and constrained by a number of social as well as material forces: religious and political dictums regarding knowledge, the publisher’s threshold for courting controversy, and the physical problems of printing or navigating such a large textual object. They are also driven by economic alliances: The Cyclopædia was pushed forward by the mores of the Enlightenment project, one material expression of which was the newly formed United Grand Lodge of England’s devotion to advancing and distributing scholarship on Newtonian science. Wikipedia is supported in part by supporters of commons-based and open-access philosophies that have thrived in postmillennial digital cultures. But at the same time this author exercises extraordinary agency in the process of curating a text because the encyclopedist wrestles with and decides what constitutes knowledge and how readers might access it. In the process curators frequently confront the nature of knowledge and the ethics of access.

These performances of agency are also distributed across many agents—more than three hundred thousand in the case of Wikipedia⁵⁸—working together to expand, improve, produce, or even vandalize a central encyclopedic project. Their performances can involve direct dialogue with each other but just as frequently involve interaction only with the text and interface as they make contributions. Just as these contributions often push against our notions of what constitutes real writing, they also push against typical conceptualizations of agency that are based on full arguments presented to an audience, dialectic between two agents or among a small group, or conversations that drive civic participation. Curatorial performance may consist of robust arguments about whether a topic is notable enough for inclusion, but it may also involve the insertion of a single metadata tag, inserting a link and thus transforming text into to live code, or reverting vandalism. It may be demonstrated by an automated agent inserting census data or an automatically generated map, or even reshaping human performance by patrolling for common curse words. These granular contributions constitute direct action that impacts the form and content of the text, and they require recognition or response from the community, who may let the changes stand, build on them, or remove them.

The curator and his or her collaborators, both human and nonhuman, demonstrate the highly contextual nature of rhetorical agency. In her exceptional essay on aspects of rhetorical agency, Campbell described the ambiguous, polysemic properties of agency, “a term that can refer to invention, strategies, authorship, institutional power, identity, subjectivity, practices, and subject positions, among others” (1). For Campbell agency is fundamentally the capacity to act, and to be “recognized or heeded” by one’s audience. No rhetor succeeds in persuasion by acting entirely alone. Given the fact that persuasion always necessarily involves multiple actors, it is also then essentially social and contextual, she wrote: “Agency is communal, social, cooperative, and participatory and, simultaneously, constituted and constrained by the material and symbolic elements of context and culture.”⁵⁹ The performance of agency occurs within a complex network of cultural factors, which include institutional and community pressures as well as expectations regarding form.

Both agency and authorship occur not as essential properties of a subject or object but as interactive processes that involve exchange between multiple agents, texts, and influences. Agency itself lies in rhetorical performance, in what Carolyn Miller has described as an exchange of kinetic energy between agents.⁶⁰ Conceptualized as performance rather than as inherent capacity, agency is not a property that a subject can possess⁶¹ or a force that arises from original genius (in the case of the Author), but rather it arises through response to a situation composed of parameters beyond the control of any single actor. The rhetor brings forth and responds, prompted by any number of contextual impetuses: discourse, community constraints, genre constraints, usability requirements, or code. Agency lies in the potential between that response and its reception.

This sense of energy and flux is particularly suited to the encyclopedic form, which is driven by an ever-broadening cultural quest for new knowledge and, consequently, new textual iterations that are shaped by the affordances and constraints of available technologies. This unending process of discovery and development is evident in the Greek origins of the word “encyclopedia,” enkyklios paideia, which roughly translates as “circle of knowledge” and conveys the idea that knowledge is without end. The invention process is also without end. Each of the actors in this study functions as what Campbell has called a point of articulation, negotiating material, linguistic, and cultural constraints in order to function as “inventors, in the rhetorical sense, articulators who link past and present, and find the means to express those strata that connect the psyche, society, and world, the forms of feeling that encapsulate moments in time. In this sense, agency is invention, including the invention, however, temporary, of personae, subject-positions, and collectivities” (5). As we will see, our actors invent not just encyclopedic texts through the process of curation, but also new collectives that have shaped human knowledge for the past three hundred years. In the eighteenth century they helped define natural philosophy (which we have come to know as science). In the twenty-first they have shifted our notions of what the encyclopedic genre can be and what it means for it to function as an open compendium of knowledge.

Conceptualizing agency as performance that is dependent on contextual, social response necessitates abandonment of the idea of an autonomous agent, instead shifting the emphasis to engagement and action. Performance of agency is not necessarily coupled with an agent: as Lundberg and Gunn argued, “Every action, discursive or otherwise, is only born of an engagement with the set of conditions that produced it” (96). Diane Davis further developed this view of response-ability, theorizing that agency is not “heroic”—that is, located in a self-determined individual—but is instead “an ethical relation that precedes identity, intellection, and intentionality. . . . Rhetorical agency, before it can involve symbolic action, requires an extra-symbolic signification, a saying, and the responsibility to respond.”⁶² For Davis as well as Lundberg and Gunn, response-ability through engagement with an ecology is at the foundation of rhetorical agency. This broader conceptualization of agency makes space for an expanded view of rhetoric, allowing for serious consideration of extra-symbolic, material aspects that are vital in shaping the conditions of rhetorical performance. We engage with other humans, certainly, but focusing exclusively on humans and symbolic communication does not provide a full picture of the real “set of conditions” that produces rhetorical action. We also inevitably engage the contextual, material constraints and affordances that shape rhetorical action: space, sound, images, and, most important to this study, technologies.

Thomas Rickert argued in his award winning book Ambient Rhetoric that acknowledgment of this engagement with the material world enriches our understanding of rhetoric’s possibilities and of its reality, allowing for a far more holistic examination of the properties of suasive force. For Rickert a more comprehensive model of rhetoric accounts for pervasive, ambient factors, “reject[ing] the notion of situations as mere composites of what is subjectively requisite, or the intersection of networking strands, with everything else relegated to epiphenomena, and instead see[ing] all elements as operational and even necessary, albeit at various levels of scale” (7). Dissolving the subject/object dichotomy saves us from the arrogance of presuming a human-centered universe and, at the same time, renders us more human in the best sense, more capable of acknowledging and accounting for the other agents we dwell alongside.

Developing a model of a rhetoric that includes material forces and nonhuman agents has profound implications for our understanding of rhetorical agency. “The change in perspective is crucial,” Rickert wrote. “Not subjective agency in a (necessary) context but a dynamic interchange of powers and actions in complex feedback loops; a multiplication of agencies that in turn transform, to varying degrees, the agents; a distribution of varied powers and agencies. Such an assertion dethrones the idea of mind as the engine of reason and seat of the soul” (10). Once the presumption of a fundamental subject/object divide is discarded, sentience no longer constitutes a necessary or sufficient requirement for the performance of agency. The human, with its underlying privileging of sentience, is no longer the baseline of what we understand as performance. Instead nonhuman actors come to the table and occupy a third position, one in which, as Bruno Latour has theorized, they “escape the strictures of objectivity twice: they are neither objects known by a subject nor objects manipulated by a master (nor, of course, are they masters themselves).”⁶³ Their rhetorical agency thus takes forms that we have not yet quite defined, let alone fully acknowledged in the field of rhetorical studies.

We can locate and explore them within ecologies of actors and events that provide a view of agency as networked, articulated performance. Decentering the human as the absolute locus of rhetorical action, agency, and ethics creates a fundamental expansion of our models of how rhetoric functions, transforming it from an emphasis on actors to an ecological model that is fundamentally dependent on interaction with nonhumans as well as human interlocutors. Consequently it also leads us to a more nuanced understanding of agency that can account for multiple agencies apart from the traditional model of an autonomous human. Clearly neither a simple pencil nor a complex interface exerts the same form of agency as a human writer. But neither can a human write without a writing technology, even a technology as basic as a stick for writing in sand. “Ambience itself is a form of agency,” wrote Rickert. “While it may not be the agency we customarily attribute to human beings—and while we must grant such agencies different weights and values (which is of itself rhetorical work)—nevertheless, it is of a magnitude and scope to challenge more traditional notions of human agency” (16). It also challenges us to acknowledge the ways that we work alongside and with nonhumans at many junctures in rhetorical action, and the ways that affordances and constraints of tools shape our own action.

A full, responsible vision of rhetoric is obligated to account for the potential and implications of multiple agencies. This book does not pretend to develop such a comprehensive vision but rather works to contribute by exploring some of the ways that distributed agency is performed in collectives of humans and nonhumans who are engaged in the work of textual curation. In the process of composing carefully architected information structures like encyclopedias, we are intimately engaged with nonhuman actors such as texts and tools, both as collaborators in rhetorical action and as discrete actors themselves. Understanding agency as performance means accounting for the full range of human and nonhuman performances, correctly placing emphasis on action and exchange between actors rather than presuming a human-centered emphasis on autonomous cognition. Without humans collaboratively curating information and writing the small texts that support information architectures, without lead type and presses and binding, without the Wikimedia interface and Internet infrastructure and bots that write, these encyclopedias would not exist or circulate. These texts are the mixed issue of a thousand actors and just as many agencies.

Chapter 2 Crowdfunding Curation

Like Wikipedians, the creators of the Cyclopædia did not think small. The full title of the first edition advertised the “universal” scope of the endeavor, positioning it as both comprehensive and designed for a broad readership: Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Containing the Definitions of the Terms, and Accounts of the Things Signify’d Thereby, in the Several Arts, Both Liberal and Mechanical, and the Several Sciences, Human and Divine: The Figures, Kinds, Properties, Productions, Preparations, and Uses, of Things Natural and Artificial: The Rise, Progress, and State of Things Ecclesiastical, Civil, Military, and Commercial: With the Several Systems, Sects, Opinions, &c: Among Philosophers, Divines, Mathematicians, Physicians, Antiquaries, Critics, &c: The Whole Intended as a Course of Ancient and Modern Learning.

While Chambers was the central curator, a project that was designed to achieve this breadth and then expand in future editions required substantial material support for both development and production. The social pressures exerted by multiple investors as well as the philosophical commitments of the collectives they and Chambers participated in shaped his performance as curator, driving a commitment to developing a text that could be accessed and read as broadly as possible. Chambers developed this text with multiple audiences in mind: potential readers as well as the publishers who invested in the project and the societies that philosophically and financially supported it. Working within these social pressures, he constructed a compendium of knowledge that furthered just his own intellectual interests and goals, but also those of the still-unfolding English Enlightenment and its vested supporters. The complex network that supported the project through financial and textual contributions was a predecessor of the much larger network that supports Wikipedia today, funding and maintaining a radically open project that is dependent on a far more distributed model of curatorial responsibility.

To appreciate the scope of this undertaking, it is important to understand the networks of material support in both projects, focusing on the subscribers and publishers who have applied their money, machinery, and philosophical commitments to launching and supporting these compendiums of knowledge. Such investments have shaped the content and ethos of these encyclopedias in ways both large and small, and they also provide a glimpse into the rhetorical stakes of these projects, which are inevitably situated within the cultural contexts and technologies of their time. Analysis of support streams provides a means of more closely examining the vested networks that supported these sprawling, continuing projects. The Cyclopædia was situated within a culture of observation-based expertise that saw tremendous surges during the Enlightenment as well as the physical networks that Chambers moved within. These included not only the gentlemen associated with the Royal Society, but also the publishers, translators, and booksellers of Fleet Street and Paternoster Row. Both of these communities intersected with members of the then-developing community of Freemasons who were in the process of forming the United Grand Lodge of England. Partly because of the digital affordances of speed and reach,¹ Wikipedia has been shaped by a much broader and more anonymous network, but one that is committed to an open-access philosophy and a culture of information expansion that is a legacy of both earlier Internet communities and these early eighteenth century Newtonians.

Nonhuman actors play an important role in these collectives, not just as tools that are inextricably intertwined with human performances in production processes, but also as central impetuses for fund-raising. The materials and technologies for physical production and circulation were as essential for the development of these encyclopedias as human compositional and production skills were. Obtaining and maintaining these nonhumans requires substantial amounts of money, whether it be for paper, ink, type, presses, and binding materials or code, servers, domains, and the infrastructure that makes up the Internet. Nonhumans may not run the projects, but the projects are run on nonhumans and their intimate entwinement with human skill and work. Consequently they are important actors in cycles of fundraising drives, even bringing together human associations to distribute the commitment, risk, and rewards of financing the materials and machinery of encyclopedic production. Nonhumans are interwoven in this narrative, glimpsed among the humans who formed the public faces of the communities that shaped these projects.

Networks of Material Support: The Cyclopædia

The intellectual, professional, and frequently aristocratic publishing and scientific research communities of London were a somewhat unexpected place for Ephraim Chambers to find himself. Born in 1680, he grew up on his parents’ farm in Kendal and received a basic education at local grammar schools.² After sending his older brother Nathaniel to Oxford, his family had no money left over to educate Ephraim, the youngest of three sons. Consequently he was sent to London to become a machinist’s apprentice, presumably at the usual age of around fifteen. He was evidently not a particularly successful apprentice; an account of his life that appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1785 reports that he had “a perfect aversion to the business, and, young as he was, having formed ideas not at all reconcilable to manual labor, he was removed from thence, and tried at other business, which was full as little conformable to his inclinations.”³ At the rather remarkable age of thirty-three, he found himself apprenticed to John Senex, who is primarily remembered as a master globe and mapmaker. Senex was also a successful scientific publisher who would be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1728. He was deeply invested in the scientific research emerging from what was then called natural philosophy.

Rather quickly the two seem have come to an agreement that Chambers would continue on as an apprentice, but that his primary occupation would be to work on expanding Harris’s Lexicon Technicum, to which Senex had been an initial supporting subscriber. He was rarely seen behind the shop counter, according to accounts: “Mr. Chambers made no considerable improvement in the technical part of the business. His mind was too much engrossed by his studies to permit him to pay much attention to mechanical acquisitions, so that, when his apprenticeship expired, he was indeed a good geographer, but a very indifferent globe maker.”⁴ Instead he took advantage of being in proximity to a considerable collection of reference texts and devoted his time to encyclopedia building.

That “improved edition” of the Lexicon Technicum eventually became the Cyclopædia, which earned tremendous accolades and launched him into the social spheres he would be professionally associated with for the rest of his life: the Royal Society with its connections to the Freemasons, and the London publishing community that clustered along Fleet Street and Paternoster Row. His work in the Republic of Letters took the form of a variety of commercial jobs while he developed the second edition of his other, more personal project. These included serving as a translator and editor for a number of publications, including the Literary Magazine . . . by a Society of Gentlemen and the Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure. He also specialized in translation of scientific texts from the French, translating Herman Boerhaave’s A New Method of Chemistry and an abridged edition of the Philosophical History and Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Science at Paris.

Chambers’s careful negotiation of political, professional, and philosophical alliances, along with his publishers’ promotion of subscriptions, ensured that his project was adequately funded. It was costly to publish, consisting of two folio volumes. Together these comprised 512 pages, which included a number of double-page scientific and technical engravings. Producing a project of this size required the cooperation of a number of communities that shared a common dedication to scientific advancement and the circulation of emerging knowledge. These collectives, which have significant intersections and overlaps in membership, are traceable through the records of publication and subscription listings, alongside membership rolls of the Royal Society and the United Grand Lodge of London.

The Publishers

While many of the business records of long-standing London publishers have been destroyed, the central publishing affiliations that produced the Cyclopædia are easily traced because they are conveniently listed on the title pages of both editions, much as they are in contemporary books. In order to adequately finance the project and further diversify the considerable financial risk involved, a network of publishing houses bought shares in the property rather than leave a single house to shoulder the full cost which would have posed an impossible financial burden. This consortium was likely an early association of the publishing investment group known as the Conger, formed in 1719 at the Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row for such purposes.⁵ Plomer noted that the name was “ingeniously said to be derived from the eel, meaning that the association, collectively, would swallow all smaller fry” (19). Many of the Cyclopædia publishers were notable scientific and educational publishers, as well as publishers of classic and popular books.⁶ A few of the houses have been particularly long-standing (such as Longmans, which is to this day a noted textbook and reference publishing house.) The seventeen publishers that invested included such prominent names as James and John Knapton, John Darby, Daniel Midwinter, John Senex, Arthur Bettesworth, Robert Gosling, John Pemberton, William and John Innys, John Osborn and Thomas Longman, Charles Rivington, John Hooke, Ranew Robinson, Francis Clay, Aaron Ward, Edward Symon, Daniel Browne, Andre Johnston, Aaron Ward, and Thomas Osborn. Nearly half of these houses were members of the Conger of 1742 recorded by Rivington. These publishing houses lent the ethos of their brands to the project, relying on the rhetorical power of attaching this text to an established, esteemed network. E. Johanna Hartelius has argued that this sort of identification plays a formative role in the establishment of expertise,⁷ especially the sort of foundational expertise that a successful encyclopedia requires for sufficient circulation. By tying the book to not one but seventeen prominent publishers on the title page, the houses not only acknowledged their investment but also signaled association between established brands committed to distribution of the latest scientific information. The collective ethos constructed by this cooperative performance transferred to the encyclopedic text, conveying expertise on the first edition when it was yet unread. When the text’s authority and value were quickly established through heavy circulation and awards, it in turn repaid the original publishers’ investment by contributing to their ethos as astute distributors of an authoritative, reliable text.

Business concerns facing this community also shaped some aspects of the Cyclopædia and Chambers’s arguments for it. In addition to his work on this ongoing encyclopedic project, Chambers’s various editing and translation projects ensured that he was deeply engaged with this network. Most of his closest recorded associations were with his publishers: Thomas Longman arranged for Chambers to be cared for in the Longman family home during his periods of sickness and is recorded as making sure that food would be left around the house for him to find.⁸ One of the most obvious issues facing this community was the relatively new codification of copyright. The long shadow of the Statute of Anne, passed eighteen years before in 1710, was an ongoing issue that may have pushed Chambers to consider the complexities of textual ownership. Concerns about ownership and intellectual property were certainly not uncommon along Fleet Street and Paternoster Row (both of which were within a short walk from his apartment), and the statute posed implications that were not immediately clear.⁹ It was an issue that would remain ongoing for decades, until the statute was interpreted in Donaldson v. Beckett in 1774.¹⁰ The investors and curator also faced a substantial delay on publication of the second edition that was caused by a proposed bill before Parliament that would have required publishers to publish additions or changes to reference texts in separate addendums rather than in a new consolidated edition of the primary text itself. Undeterred, Chambers and his supporters devoted these years of delay to continued expansion of the text. These juridical factors impacted not just the text itself, but also the material costs and logistics of printing either a separate or expanded edition—and, by extension, the demands of being a shareholder in this sort of publication.

This network of initial investors shaped the encyclopedia by providing financial support and negotiation of the material factors necessary for physically producing an encyclopedia. They also set in motion a crucial process of widening the potential audience and funding for the project by soliciting subscriptions that further shaped production in important ways. The 1728 subscription list provides crucial clues about other networks that influenced the project through their philosophical commitments and tied it even more closely to the concerns of early eighteenth-century London.

The Subscribers

The subscription listings document advance public interest and investment in the work. It is important to understand, though, that they do not offer a full picture of the text’s audience, since many other audience members accessed the text through serialization, lending, and the popular tradition of reading aloud. Publishing houses commonly pursued advance subscriptions to more accurately gauge the public reception of and investment in a proposed work. Unless the publication attracted a minimum number of subscribers—usually two hundred—projects did not move forward. If sufficient interest was apparent, the publishers distributed a prospectus for the work that included the names of the subscribers to date, hoping to attract new income through the persuasiveness of not just the project description but also the stature or familiarity of the individuals who supported it.¹¹ In the smaller, tightly knit communities of early eighteenth-century London, these names lent ethos by association through appeals to a potential reader or investor’s social connection to individuals, as well as to the social capital of family names, titles, and memberships in exclusive private societies. These names invited identification with a number of shifting networks associated with commitments to natural philosophy and to informal, egalitarian education.

The Cyclopædia subscription list documents the 375 readers—among them four women and the first Jewish member of the Royal Society—who were willing and able to pay four guineas to demonstrate their interest in its eventual publication. This was not an inconsiderable amount of money at the time, representing approximately a month’s budget for the average family. As Yeo explains, subscription was a way that members of the professional class could affordably demonstrate patronage of projects they particularly supported: “Subscriptions were a public sign of interest from a wide range of social groups and occupations, including not just aristocrats, academics, clergy, and gentlemen, but also lawyers, doctors, surgeons, teachers, merchants, watchmakers, brewers, and, of course, printers and booksellers.”¹² All are represented in the Cyclopædia’s subscription list.

Association with two societies, one public and one secretive, lent rhetorical authority and material support to this publication. Two significant networks that coalesce within the subscriber listing when it is cross-referenced with society membership rosters are the Royal Society and the city’s Freemasons, who were then organizing the United Grand Lodge of England. The broader membership of these groups intersected significantly, which is not a surprise given the substantial overlap that both societies have documented and celebrated.¹³ At least forty-three fellows of the Royal Society subscribed, making up 11 percent of its subscription base, as can be expected given the Royal Society’s pursuit of scientific advancement and the Enlightenment project. Fifty-three of the subscribers (14 percent) were registered Masons whose names appeared on the United Grand Lodge of England lodge minutes for 1723–29.

While the Royal Society was quite well established by the late 1720s, being approximately sixty years old, the Freemasons were just beginning to significantly establish themselves in London. Interest in Freemasonry had been quietly growing across England for decades and had from the beginning been intertwined with devotion to scientific progress and public communication of science. Individual lodges were well established during Chambers’s early life, but it was not until June 1717 that the four London lodges declared themselves to be the first Grand Lodge in the world. Freemasonry was increasingly popular during the period in which the first edition was completed and published: between 1717 and 1730 the number of Lodges in London increased from the founding four to more than one hundred.¹⁴

Although the organization has always been associated in the notions of inebriated gentlemen’s supper clubs and mystical aspects of secret societies, it has also from its inception been dedicated to self-improvement and educational advancement. In England this work began with its founder, Elias Ashmole, who in 1677 gifted his extensive collection of natural philosophy artifacts to what became the first public museum of science in England, the Ashmolean.¹⁵ Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, lodges frequently held lecture series “designed to educate, inform, and entertain,” covering subjects “from anatomy, chemistry, education, and experimental science, to architecture and the liberal arts.”¹⁶ The early grand masters “had the vision [of Freemasonry] as a vehicle for the transmission of new ideas, and the discipline and determination to pursue their objectives.”¹⁷ This interest in research that was emerging from observational natural philosophy was so strong that there was heavy cross recruitment at this time between the Royal Society of London and the United Grand Lodge, and Masons occupied a number of key positions in the Royal Society throughout the eighteenth century. Peter Clark has estimated that nearly half the fellows of the Royal Society were Freemasons; Trevor Stewart’s more conservative interpretation of the evidence suggested a figure of around 30 percent.¹⁸ Berman suggests that “the only senior Fellows of the Royal Society not acknowledged as Freemasons and who served as President were Newton and Sloane.”¹⁹

Chambers’s master, John Senex, was a central point of articulation in a vital network that led full circle between the Royal Society, the United Grand Lodge, and the publishing community. Senex was a prominent scientific publisher,²⁰ and his house made important contributions to the craft of cartography, developing a portable set of John Ogilby’s road maps, An Actual Survey of All the Principal Roads of England and Wales, that remained in print for a number of years, as did his A New General Atlas, one of the most comprehensive atlases of the time. Senex did not limit himself to terrestrial cartography, pursuing a number of strategic projects with Edmund Halley. Laurence Worms wrote, “Individual maps of particular note included Halley’s ‘A description of the passage of the shadow of the moon over England’ of 1715, the first printed solar eclipse map and one of the earliest scientific thematic maps. Senex produced special ‘smoak’d glasses’ for observing this eclipse.”²¹ He and Halley collaborated on additional projects, among them a limited series of paired globes, one terrestrial and one celestial, based on Halley’s observations.

Senex’s house also produced more common textual formats, including the first galleys for the 1726 edition of the Principia as well as Newton’s Universal Arithmetic, among many other works on mathematics, optics, chemistry, anatomy, and architecture by prominent scientists of the day.²² Crucially Senex also served for a time as the primary publisher for the nascent Grand Lodge, publishing the first edition of the Constitutions of the Freemasons with John Hooke in 1723, while Chambers was still his apprentice. His edition of the Principia was central among other important scientific texts that were published and distributed by the Masons.²³ And, of course, he served as the original investor in the Cyclopædia’s early project development and remained connected to the project as an investing publisher.

While it is not possible to conclusively demonstrate that Chambers himself was a Mason,²⁴ he certainly associated with Masons through Senex, who worked closely with many scientists who were Masons or fellows of the Royal Society or both. One of the latter was the author of the Lexicon Technicum, John Harris, who had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1696, given the Boyle Lectures in 1698, and served as the Royal Society’s secretary in 1710.²⁵ It was entirely reasonable that Senex would support and fund a revision of Harris’s project, given their mutual connection to two societies that were committed to both furthering knowledge and circulating it as widely as possible. Senex’s frequent collaborator Halley had also worked closely with Isaac Newton, who was central in the founding of both the Royal Society and the earliest English Freemasonry lodges that eventually became the United Grand Lodge of England. Senex himself is recorded in the 1723 constitutions as senior warden of Lodge XV, which met at the Greyhound at Fleet Street, and was a junior grand warden of the United Grand Lodge in 1723.²⁶ He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1728, the year the Cyclopædia’s first edition was published, and contributed occasionally to the Philosophical Transactions. Consequently Senex, his beliefs, and his texts serve as a linkage to other areas of this tightly knit network. These weak ties²⁷ were an important articulation in these intersecting communities that likely offered a locus of coordination as Senex maintained his association with the project from its earliest stages through its publication.

The support offered by members of these two groups was an important material expression of the Royal Society’s and the Masons’ philosophical dedication to scientific advancement. Chambers’s encyclopedia was not only practical and useful but also an instrument for evangelizing Newtonian science across the country and the continent. Historian Margaret Jacob argued in her foundational study of European Freemasonry and the Enlightenment that “the Cyclopædia gave considerable attention to Newtonian science and also contained one of the first accounts of British Freemasonry, which was widely cited by Continental journals. In the generation after the great Boyle lectures, it played a significant role in spreading Newtonian science to a wide and literate audience on both sides of the Channel.”²⁸ Chambers’s project can be understood as a community-supported effort on behalf of Newtonian Science, which then retained a controversial aura, especially when it came to matter theory and the principle of gravitation. This effort was one that the subscribers felt was well worth funding, and one that a significant number of Masons felt aligned with their philosophical mores sufficiently to warrant funding. Their subscriptions prefigured similar financial support later offered by French Masonic lodges to Diderot’s Encyclopédie.²⁹

The language of the Cyclopædia is deliberately plain, designed to communicate Newton’s mathematics-based scientific discourse to lay readers.³⁰ Harris had begun this work in the Lexicon Technicum, which Larry Stewart has called “his lasting contribution to the victory of Newtonianism” (110).³¹ Still, it functioned as only one early example of a concerted effort that continued for decades.³² Chambers’s extension of Harris’s work incorporated important rhetorical shifts that were meant to educate readers who could then argue in favor of Newton. Yeo describes this key difference: while the Lexicon described Newton’s contributions, it did not define them in context with other prominent schools of natural philosophy, such as Cartesianism and Leibnitzianism. Chambers, on the other hand, “consolidated a range of scientific topics under the umbrella of ‘Newtonian Philosophy’ and defined this against various opponents, especially Cartesianism. . . . Moreover, the summaries were in a form ready-made for polemical contrast” (163–64).³³ He cross-referenced relevant articles such as “gravity” and “attraction,” building paths that could be followed as what Yeo has called a “cumulative textbook” (166) on Newtonian thought. A reader of this encyclopedia would be able to gain sufficient systematic understanding of Newton’s principles to not just adopt these theories as his own viewpoint, but to argue cogently about them at the coffeehouse or pub.

In order for this effort to be successful, it was important that the text be accessible to the broadest possible audience—one that was indicated by the claims to universality in the Cyclopædia’s title. The natural philosophy community placed significant emphasis on wide discussion of new developments, which would help ensure the engagement, collaboration, and rigor necessary for the continuing development of new knowledge. Commitment to public circulation of knowledge exemplified the Enlightenment ideal of encouraging intellectual discussion that crossed boundaries of class, politics, and religion as well as national borders. The plain language that the Cyclopædia was written in was meant to facilitate this broad circulation, and the material forms that this text was produced in also functioned as important nonhuman actors in the process of circulation and subsequent development of a richer information ecology.

In addition to bound folio copies of the full text, serialized installments were made available. Serialization provided another way besides subscription for less-moneyed individuals to access the encyclopedia, purchasing three sheets weekly for sixpence rather than a complete bound volume.³⁴ This material form of the text appealed to a different network of interested readers who, despite not being able to devote a month’s budget to buying an encyclopedia or having access to the Philosophical Transactions, wanted to keep up with emerging developments and attain an informal, general education. These sheets could be kept and eventually bound, or they could circulate within networks by being passed hand to hand or read aloud. It is important to remember that reading aloud was a common practice at the time, particularly in private contexts. This form of performance offered the potential to broaden circulation once again by offering access to those who were not invited to take part in the largely male spaces of private societies or coffeehouse and pub culture, and also to the illiterate.

These intersecting networks, then, all contributed to the commitments and content of the Cyclopædia. The publishing network’s support was crucial to the early content development work performed by Chambers, which was time consuming and undertaken over a period of years. Later the coalition the publishers formed ensured that the production process would in fact take place and, by its members having lent their names, enhanced the rhetorical identification that helped give the first edition the best possible chance at success. In contrast the subscribers supported the project through investment in consumption, offering tangible support of the project concept as well as providing a concrete target audience with demonstrated interest in particular types of content. Their demographics demonstrate the range of social strata that formed this vested audience. They also reveal important affiliations with exclusive societies that were deeply involved with shaping the development of natural philosophy and the circulation of emerging scientific knowledge. The weight of their collective names contributed credibility as well as material support to the project. Together all these intersecting networks shaped the range of authorial performance that was available to Chambers.

Networks of Material Support: Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s support streams bear strong resemblance to aspects of the Cyclopædia’s support streams. The philosophies and curatorial processes of the Cyclopædia were remarkably democratic for their time, and Wikipedians have gone it one better, harnessing the advantages of an era with significantly different cultural mores as well as the affordances of socio-technological systems to develop a community of practice that is, in part, founded on radically egalitarian principles. Eighteenth-century commitments to the public circulation of information have been extended in the twenty-first century by the open access movement, which Wikipedia is an integral part of, and supporters are invited to contribute through identification with moral arguments for this type of circulation. The need to fund machinery for production and distribution persists, but this digital project negotiates obvious differences in the available affordances and requirements of twenty-first-century production technologies. Technological changes have also significantly shifted the generic forms through which donations are solicited and the presentation of donor identities.

In a striking similarity to the Cyclopædia’s development, Wikipedia also began with one man working in a back room for another man who ran a media-based business, although this arrangement was significantly more short-lived. Larry Sanger was a newly minted philosophy Ph.D. when he moved to San Diego in 2000 to begin working for Jimmy Wales.³⁵ Wales, who was then primarily a venture capitalist, had floated the idea of a free, collaborative encyclopedia on list-servs that he and Sanger both frequented in the late 1990s. The two met through those same mailing lists, and they eventually agreed that Sanger would lead the development of a new open-access encyclopedia called Nupedia. The project was underwritten by Wales’s company, Bomis, an X-rated search portal that was primarily supported by advertising. Sanger served as project manager and policy developer and very soon was leading a small community of credentialed experts who shared the responsibility and work of reviewing potential articles. Nupedia relied on expert peer review of materials through a multilevel vetting process that proved to be extraordinarily time consuming: by early winter of 2001, nearly two years into the project, only twenty-five articles had been deemed appropriate for publication. The community remained similarly limited.

When a central sever failure imposed even more extensive delays, Wales and Sanger began to reconsider alternative platforms and project missions. After discovering the WikiWikiWeb that had been developed by Ward Cunningham a number of years earlier, they realized that a wiki platform would have the potential to manage expanding amounts of information while allowing contributors direct access to edit the text. This openness is built into the platform design: Cunningham argued that wikis enable radical collaboration “because of [their] total freedom, ease of access and use, simple and uniform navigational conventions, and apparent lack of formal structure.”³⁶ The MediaWiki platform that was developed for the project affords (as do all wikis) dynamic content delivery, real-time development, and a layered interface that delivers updated versions of article content as well as preserves edit histories, editorial conversations, and previous iterations.

The platform’s openness certainly contributed to the exponential textual and community growth that drove Wikipedia’s expansion after its launch in early 2001, along with substantial investments of time and funding from contributors. From six hundred articles imported primarily from the 1911 Britannica, it grew to “1,300 [articles] in March, 2,300 in April, and 3,900 in May.”³⁷ Sanger, Wales, and Tim Shell served as the initial project managers, evangelizing the project through media outlets as well as overseeing community management and early policy development. Sanger was the only paid employee, and as the community grew, he quickly ran into a series of clashes with an increasingly egalitarian Wikipedian community that he described as being controlled by “trolls” and “anarchist-types” who rejected the idea of a centralized authority figure running the project. Tiring of extended conflict, he left the project in March 2002 and has since been an outspoken critic of Wikipedia. In the years since, the project has been developed in a more decentralized fashion by both core and extended communities.

Wikipedia famously runs on the work of this network of contributors—their contributions of time and labor, and also through essential financial contributions. This encyclopedia relies on a broad, shifting network of donors in order to continue distribution. Wales dipped into the personal fortune he had earned in the finance sector and previous Internet start-ups in order to fund the start-up and maintenance costs until 2003, when he handed financial operations over to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. While this project avoids the costs of print production that the publishers of the Cyclopædia faced, the costs of maintaining the technological infrastructure necessary to run a website that handles more than six thousand page requests per second and stores every single edit that has been made to the encyclopedia since its inception are significant.³⁸ In 2013 more than half a billion readers accessed Wikipedia each month. Facilitating this tremendous level of information development and flow cost the foundation US$35.7 million for that year.

These costs were covered by more than two million donors who raised a total of US$50 million in the foundation’s annual end-of-year fund-raising campaign.³⁹ The campaign has become exponentially more successful each year, starting from the US$28,992 in PayPal donations it saw during its first drive in 2003. Foundation grants from entities such as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the like provide significant budgetary assistance.⁴⁰ While much of the work of maintaining the project is done by volunteers, the Wikimedia Foundation retains a core staff of 125 (which is considerably leaner than other Top 10 websites) as well as legal counsel. Wikipedia has always refused to include advertising in its business model and positions the ad-free nature of its pages as an appealing and ethical feature in its campaign messages, which frequently ask readers to help keep Wikipedia free. This commitment to a nonprofit model is a significant break with the business models of prior encyclopedias, which have been profit centers for publishing houses or dedicated businesses focusing solely on their own text, as with the Britannica, which currently positions itself as a “global educational publisher.”⁴¹ While the Cyclopædia demonstrated a commitment to broad circulation and public discussion of information, it always remained a for-profit endeavor and a valuable literary property. The nature of its business model inevitably shaped the performances of its publishers and authors, just as Wikipedia’s nonprofit model invites voluntary work and donations.

Unlike Chambers and his publishers, who counted on support from geographically localized communities of practice, Wikipedia positions its appeals to a globalized audience of users and donors. As with the Cyclopædia subscription lists, a list of named, significant donors appears in the final pages of each year’s annual report, but this list does not begin to account for the hundreds of thousands of donations—some as small as US$1—offered by anonymous and pseudonymous donors around the world. The World Wide Web itself serves as a point of articulation in this scenario, exploding the possibilities of communicative speed and reach while obscuring the real-world identities of users.⁴² Wikipedians and users of Wikipedia arrive at the site from anywhere in the world that has web access, whether it be through hardwired structures or mobile networks. Their investment in the central project of Wikipedia is spurred by and evidenced through the development of more than 285 language-based forks of the project. The largest are the Spanish, Japanese, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Polish, Russian, Dutch, and Italian editions, which each contain more than one million articles.⁴³ Each of these editions addresses the information needs of specific linguistic audiences rather than assuming that all audiences must access information delivered in standard American English. This focus on disparate needs encourages worldwide investment in building and extending all Wikipedias and encourages individual donations for the version that individual users access most often. During the fund-raising campaigns donations come in through the central fund-raising site but also through donations to individual country-based chapters. This global reach enables and relies on a far more distributed audience of actors than the Cyclopædia could hope to reach in the early eighteenth-century print economy, which was further bounded by the slow reality of international travel via foot, horse, or ship.

The Wikimedia Foundation also publishes a list of donors who have contributed more than US$1,000, but the rhetorical deployment of this list is significantly different from that of the Cyclopædia. The eighteenth-century list appears in the front matter of the bound folios, with the names displayed in the same typeface and size as the body text. It is meant to be easily found and perused by those who invested, by those who care about who invested, and by more casual readers who might happen on it while flipping through the pages. In contrast the Wikipedia donors list is not part of the central site. It cannot be accessed from the encyclopedia’s front page or even from the page linked through the “Donate to Wikipedia” link that appears on the primary site’s static sidebar. It is not hidden, being publicly published in the foundation’s annual report and easy to locate with a basic Google search, but neither is it intended to be a persuasive part of the central text or to offer the same rhetorical appeal that the Cyclopædia’s list did. Appearing at the very end of the report, it lists more than five hundred donor names in six-point font. Its primary function is acknowledgment: public acknowledgment for a primary audience of donors looking for their own names. Not all the names belong to individual humans; many acknowledgments are to corporate foundations (especially in the US$25,000 and up categories) or to family foundations operating as charitable trusts. This list directs emotional appeal to its primary audience by inviting them to feel part of a community of like-minded individuals who wish to be identified as publicly committed to the material support of an open-access project. This rhetorical inclusion invites them to maintain that commitment and become repeat donors.

However, most donors are not included in this listing, since the list is limited to donations of more than US$1,000 and the bulk of project donations are made in much smaller increments. As awareness, use, and contributions have grown, the donor base has broadened and diversified to the point that it is much more difficult to speculate as to which specific communities, if any, coalesce in the annual fund-raising campaigns. In fact the donor names often remain entirely unknown to the foundation, since anonymity is offered in the donation process. This aspect is compounded by the “screen” of the Internet, which still offers the opportunity to obscure or skew identities despite the trend toward use of real names that has been driven by Google and Facebook policies. The necessity of successful appeals to this geographically and linguistically diverse audience has led Wikipedia’s fund-raising committee to rely heavily on dynamic site notices, multimodal communication, and careful usability-testing protocols to successfully develop fund-raising messages. This interactive design contrasts rather starkly with the comparatively static, unidirectional broadsheets and pamphlets that Chambers and his publishers produced in the King’s English.

The annual end-of-year donation drive messages rely heavily on appeals from kairos and logos, making an argument based on use value and the power of the crowd. The timing of the annual drive is itself persuasive, being meant to appeal to donors who need year-end tax deductions. The messages are also kairotic, appearing immediately as the visitor accesses the site or an individual page. This prompt appearance is persuasive in two ways. By catching visitors at the moment they are considering using the site’s information rather than having actually begun to use it, it both takes advantage of this interstitial moment to invite consideration of the moral responsibility of repaying this use and avoids the counterproductive annoyance of interrupting reading and information processing. This calculated interplay between human readers and the articulated nonhumans that constitute the messaging system invites readers to donate of their own accord rather than asking them to feel that they are paying for access by interrupting the reading experience in the same way that subscription-optional sites such as Slate.com solicit funding with pop-up ads.

Extended Description

“If everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. Yep, that’s about the price of buying a programmer a coffee.”

2014 banner appeal displayed at the top of articles. All highlights original. Image courtesy Wikipedia under CC BY-SA license.

These pop-up and banner messages present a low interface barrier to the act of donation by facilitating easy contributions transferred directly from several account options. Donors simply click on the amount they wish to donate (or enter an amount if they want to send more than US$100), indicate whether it will be a one-time or monthly withdrawal, and then select the payment type if they want to opt out of the default one-time donation. With a maximum of three clicks, they are then taken to the payment site of their choice and invited to enter the necessary information to complete the transaction. The full process is done in only a few minutes, and the donor moves on to the information he or she wished to access in the first place. No checks, no filling out forms with pen or pencil, no envelopes or stamps, no chance that the donor might forget to take the donation to a mailbox, and no waiting for the mail system to move the donation to its destination. No servants wending their way through cobbled streets to deliver the sealed missive or agents facilitating a transfer with bankers, as would likely have been the case for wealthy subscribers in early modern London. Instead an articulated system of nonhuman agents facilitates the transfer of funds directly into the foundation’s coffers.

These pop-up and banner messages deliver a unified, compressed argument that respects the audience’s time and accounts for the fact that readers have accessed Wikipedia to find information, not necessarily make a donation. Donors are invited to understand themselves as part of a large crowd through awareness that if everyone reading the site in that hour gave a small donation—the mundane price of a coffee that many readers probably purchased that day—then the site’s needs would be met. The small average donation is mentioned to assure readers that they need not donate much, while the donation menu invites and facilitates small donations while also encouraging readers to give at least US$3. The amounts are also made more accessible through strategic association with types of contributors who make an obvious contribution that the audience is unlikely to have disagreements with (programmers rather than editors).

The argument makes a powerful philosophical appeal based on open access to knowledge, relying on commonly deployed metaphors of the library or the public park to help readers consider the use value of free, public materials. The central impetus for development of all the Wikipedias is “an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language.”⁴⁴ This commitment has included printed copies for distribution in the developing world. Identification with the primary tenet of the larger open-access movement—that information, especially emerging research, should be available “online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”⁴⁵—has been a consistently powerful rhetorical appeal, drawing both donors and contributors. As Hartelius has suggested, this rhetorical move is a strong deployment of eunoia, positioning open encyclopedias as moral contributions to a public good. Their ostensibly inclusive policies further this appeal, suggesting that “everyone has something encyclopedia-worthy to contribute, the compilation of which comprises dialogic expertise.”⁴⁶ Donating to Wikipedia is suggested payment for services rendered (after all, are you not reading it right now? it asks), but it is also an ethical contribution to a public resource that furthers the greater good.

It also demonstrates a form of social resistance against the strictures of copyright laws, which have become extraordinarily codified and extended in the centuries since Chambers and his publishers considered the potential of the Statute of Anne. Just as discussions of textual ownership and authors’ rights were in the air then, conversations about ethical commitments to the public domain and open access to our cultural heritage have circulated over the past forty years in digital communities that were concerned with such topics. These issues became increasingly prominent at the turn of the twenty-first century and provided one impetus for development of Wikipedia as an open, free encyclopedia. In the earliest Wikipedia fund-raiser, proponents of Open Access and Creative Commons likely formed a primary percentage of the donor base. Not only were these advocates heavily disposed to support projects related to their ethical philosophies of information ownership, but as members of the digerati, they were also more likely to simply be aware of Wikipedia’s early existence. The devotion shown by this early group has clear analogous ties to Enlightenment ideals of broad circulation and the material expressions of support offered by the Cyclopædia’s subscribers, who invested partly to support distribution of a centralized resource of Enlightenment-based information to a wider group of people—albeit those who could afford to purchase a copy or had access to a friend, club, or library that had a physical copy.

In both of these encyclopedias, networks of investors have supported content they understood as urgently needed within the context of their times. Their material commitments furthered specific philosophical agendas concerning the broad circulation of emerging information, both within the English Enlightenment and the tremendously broad knowledge economy of the Internet. In the case of the Cyclopædia, a careful focus on Newtonian theories furthered the work of intersecting societies with a mutual commitment to natural philosophy and to evangelizing Newtonianism across not just England but also the Continent. Their commitment to public access to and discussion of emerging science likely influenced the very language of this encyclopedia, driving it toward plain, easily understood descriptions. The twenty-first-century effort of Wikipedia advanced an even broader vision of access, taking advantage of the potentialities offered by technological agents that made it possible to create a near-infinitely expanding text driven by direct text contributions and distributed to anyone with Internet access or the ability to reach a paper copy. Supporters have responded to this moral argument, donating in order to maintain the project’s open-access principles.

The performative and social aspects of rhetorical agency are evident as we follow these support streams. Communities’ engagement with emerging information and their ethical commitments to circulation and discussion undoubtedly drove individual donation decisions, but what is more important, these collective performances generated the conditions under which such extensive, long-term projects could be successfully developed and persuasively produced. These material streams of support also socially constrained authorial agency by creating an obligation to perform within the ethical commitments of the funded project, ultimately shaping the texts themselves. Wikipedia is obligated to remain available free of charge, to reject advertising, and to maintain an open interface that affords the continued expansion of its content. The authorial performance of curating the Cyclopædia was deeply situated within the beliefs of its earliest funders and their interests in seeing the broadest possible circulation for a consolidated resource on Newtonianism in addition to other critical information areas such as religion, law, and military defense. In both cases contributors are persuaded by the hope that their money will lead to the potential of enhanced agency for readers, who may use their new knowledge of the content as social capital and in turn extend the agency of the text by bringing it into new social contexts, whether it be a coffeehouse or a school in Somalia.

Chapter 3 Metaphors of Curation

The conceptual devices that we have historically used to talk about textual curators and curatorial practices tell us much about how this work has been understood, valued, and misconstrued. They also reveal philosophical underpinnings of ownership and intellectual property. Chambers rhetorically positioned textual curation as industrious work that serves the common good in ways that are virtuous and patriotic. Today it is cast by both Wikipedians and the media as the work of swarms with destructive and even violent potential. In both cases animals serve as the metaphor of choice: the honeybee, the daw, the piranha, and the swarm. The rhetorical effectiveness of these animal metaphors relies on the nonrational behaviors and communications of animals to make entirely rational arguments that, in these cases, concern curatorial labor, economic value, ethics, and nationalism. The persuasive potential of what Hawhee has termed zoostylistics stems from the very fact of its animality: “through their vivid, weighty, kinetic presence, and through movements that lie outside of human capacity, they help draw out the nonrational features of logos,” she has written.¹ The architectural symmetry of the hive and the regimentation of hive life are two examples of this logic when they are deployed as metaphors for information architectures and monarchical social structures. Similarly the intensely coordinated, extralinguistic performances of beehives and piranha schools allude not just to distributed curatorial production but also to our anxieties about large collectives acting in unified performances that operate in ways far different than the smaller deliberative communities that humans most often find themselves negotiating.

These metaphors are also highly contextual, and closer attention to the cultural moments that gave rise to these discussions is essential: what makes sense to us now will not necessarily be clear to historians in even one hundred years, and our appropriation of previous terms does not necessarily account for their original uses or contexts. The Cyclopædia and Chambers’s commentary in the preface provide a rich opportunity to contextualize its metaphors and arguments as a product of their time and place. What at first appears to be a common metaphor that persists to this day (“busy as a bee”) instead becomes more powerful and more rhetorically astute when considered as a product of the cultural, philosophical, and scientific conversations of its day, and within the context of Britain’s long economic relationship with honeybees. Similarly contextualizing the Wikipedian piranha metaphor within the more international open-source and open-access movements of the early twenty-first century and postmillennial conversations regarding nonhumans is revealing. The richness of these situated metaphors reminds us that, as Lakoff and Johnson contended, all metaphors rely on physical and social experience in order to be fully understood.² Recovering as many details as possible about historical metaphors is essential to developing an understanding of their deployment and reception.

Let us begin, then, with the present moment and move backward in time. In the years since the Napster decision, there has been much discussion in the fields that make up English studies and legal studies about the language we use to discuss intellectual property in digital spaces. In the highly contested landscape of contemporary copyright, words are weighted with claims to not just legitimacy but fundamental truths. Cultural property is or is not equivalent to physical property.³ It might or might not be considered part of an intellectual commons or public domain that can or cannot be owned in traditional ways.⁴ Framing the debates as pure war was a common Valenti-era rhetorical move;⁵ to this day property is ransacked by pirates or redistributed by thieves.⁶

The far-reaching implications of these arguments extend beyond scholarly analysis and the more recent courtroom arguments of Authors Guild v. Google or Patrick Cariou v. Richard Prince. At each turn the chosen terminology marks the conversation with not just ethos and emphasis but the mores of our era and culture. “Looking at the accepted truths about copyright present in contemporary discourse, a study of the rhetorical frameworks can show how these statements arise out of particular conditions of a political and cultural context in place of other possible statements,” Reyman has argued in The Rhetoric of Intellecutal Property (23). The language of piracy and theft has been naturalized in countless mundane rhetorical interactions that touch on intellectual property, Reyman has pointed out in her discussion of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) copyright warnings shown on DVDs distributed in the United States and Europe (67–72). These criminalized views of reuse permeate everyday language on college campuses and in private homes, seeping into the conversations of private citizens who drive the market for cultural goods.⁷ These metaphors of intellectual property frame the ways that we and our students understand intellectual property and, by extension, the ethics of borrowing, sharing, and creating cultural artifacts. Studying them and their historical precedents offers an opportunity to examine the ways in which these beliefs arose and became seemingly self-evident. It also reveals the ways that we have understood and valued intensive compositional work that is reliant on recomposition and the development of structural elements rather than narrative text. By extension this focus also offers us a chance to reconsider the common belief that these are new metaphors that are uniquely related to the digital age. As others have shown, concerns about originality and theft date back to, at minimum, ancient Greece⁸ and Rome.⁹ Our anxieties and theories about the sort of distributed authorship that occurs among the thousands of authors who compose Wikipedia are hardly unprecedented.

Early Modern Metaphors for Intellectual Property Ownership

In the process of these contemporary discussions, our rhetorical focus has settled almost entirely on property ownership, whether it be corporate, private, or communal. While this focus is kairotic and vital, it elides to some extent attendant issues of invention, originality, and authorial labor. Ownership and appropriation metaphors fail to help us closely examine some foundational aspects of our larger quandries about intellectual property: namely widely varied rhetorical perspectives on invention and labor, which come prior to issues of ownership in the writing and publishing process.

This was not always the case. Earlier arguments made by English writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries deployed more nuanced metaphors that worked to tie labor to ownership. By necessity these authorship theorists were most often working writers struggling to exercise some agency concerning their work, which was not infrequently produced at the behest of patrons, publishers, or subscribers and then owned and distributed by members of the Stationers’ Company. The most prominent of these arguments are still commonly referenced within contemporary intellectual property literature but rarely presented in full historical context. Historical metaphors that tie authorial labor to a careful ethics of ownership offer us some guidance regarding our current arguments but must be understood in a situated way that considers the culture within which they arose. Further, attention to less commonly cited historical arguments about intellectual property and the work of curation can provide deeper insight into the ways that authorship and ownership were being considered in the early eighteenth century, and the ways these discussions were rhetorically calibrated to be most persuasive to audiences who lived in a very specific time and place. I focus on the natural metaphors used by Chambers and contemporary critics of Wikipedia to describe curatorial work and distributed collaboration. It is telling that both then and now, we have equated textual products with living children or cherished land while relying on nonhuman animals in order to understand and explain the work of textual curation, which can seem regimented and even nonhuman to the point of being soulless.

Milton was one of the earliest British authors to write explicitly on this topic, publishing his “Areopagitica” (1644) “in angry response to the reinstitution of licensing by Parliament [and in the process defining] the figure of the autonomous author, the man whose authority is not based on public office or sanction but on personal experience, study, and deliberation.”¹⁰ Pushing against the declaration that authors could not hold the publication or distribution rights to their own work, he constructed the proprietary-author-as-topos and portrayed books as “precious lifeblood” and living progeny, comparing their burning to a kind of murder. He followed this effort with “Eikonoklastes” in 1649, musing on the “human right, which commands that every author should have the property of his own work reserved to him after death, as well as living.”¹¹ Perhaps the most often cited property-based argument is John Locke’s “sweat of the brow” doctrine described in Two Treatises of Government (1689), which argued for labor’s role in property ownership. In spite of his efforts, the writer’s individual rights remained largely unrecognized at the turn of the next century.

In the first decade of the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe became a champion of the autonomous author’s rights to ownership, publishing his Essay on the Regulation of the Press as well as a series of arguments in the Review. He continued the paternity metaphor, famously calling books “the Child of the [the Author’s] Inventions, the Brat of his Brain.”¹² Joseph Addison, in a 1709 piece for the Tatler, compared it to real property: “His Brain, which was his Estate, had as regular and different Produce as other Men’s land” (41). While these metaphors acknowledge the importance of the author’s labor and investment, they assume that all compositional processes for all genres are similar and consequently demand similar ethical stances on authorship and ownership regardless of the genre at hand. The animal metaphors attached to the Cyclopædia and Wikipedia both depart from these persistent property-based metaphors. Rather than locate the force of the argument in the products of authorial labor, the honeybee, the daw, and the piranha rely on process as the fulcrum for persuasion. Even Locke’s sweat was a product of labor already well underway; the foraging bee and daw return us to the inventional process undertaken before the transformative labor of textual curation.

The Daw and the Honeybee

In the final pages of the preface, Chambers employs nonhuman metaphors as a means of discussing the Encyclopedic Author’s function as a gatherer in an information ecology. In doing so he works toward rehabilitating the canon of arrangement as a form of composition that is distinct from but every bit as legitimate as the original invention we associate with the canonical Author. Chambers’s conceptualization of authorship through arrangement and transformation is illustrated in his use of two contrasting metaphors: the daw and the honeybee: “Call me what you will, a daw, and say I am stuck over with other peoples’ feathers, with all my heart. But it would be altogether as just to compare me to the bee, the symbol of industry, as that of pride. For though I pick up my matters in a thousand places, ’tis not to look gay my self, but to furnish you with honey. I have rifled a thousand flowers—prickly ones, many of ’em—to load your hive.”¹³

This turn in the preface provides a rich opportunity to contextualize arguments embedded in discourse that was very much informed by the natural philosophy and publishing communities of early eighteenth-century London. Carefully situating his metaphors for encyclopedic authorship and ownership, which are rather foreign to contemporary American understandings of the cultural value of bees and daws, provides an opportunity to examine not just the cultural meaning of these metaphors but also his understanding of the ways that authorship processes function within textual curation. While the meaning of his metaphors is not entirely lost to us, neither are the nuances completely clear. Far from making simple claims for industrious gathering, Chambers was making careful arguments for his own ethos as a very specific sort of writer as well as the ethos of his project, which he cast as a recomposed collection that transformed prior texts and knowledge in order to present a new product that was at the forefront of scientific thought. At various points these metaphors can be interpreted as establishing the writer’s and project’s ethos in terms of social class, economic value, moral virtue, and the mores of the Enlightenment project, as well as explaining the labor and ethics of encyclopedic authorship. Chambers claimed that the central compositional labor he performed centered on filtering and arrangement. By declaring the bee his mascot, he claimed an ethos of industry and virtue as a worker devoted to gathering and transforming an important good. It was an argument that he knew well.

The Bees in Chambers’ Library

Chambers was well read, maintaining a personal library of hundreds of volumes that likely filled much of his large apartment at Gray’s Inn.¹⁴ This collection included a number of texts that touched on both historical and contemporaneous fascinations with bees, including a thorough collection of classical texts as well as multiple volumes of Bacon’s work and commentary on them.¹⁵ While not formally educated beyond basic schooling, he was an accomplished autodidact and certainly familiar with the classical canon as it was understood in his time. His use of the bee as a metaphor for authors and authorship was hardly new, and the catalogue indicates that he was aware of much of its lineage as well as the most prominent uses of honeybees as metaphors in contemporary discourse.

Plato deployed apian imagery in his critique of poetry in the Republic,¹⁶ and the direct comparison between bees and authors dates back at least to Virgil. In his 1996 essay on Chambers, Yeo pointed out that Chambers’s comparison is remarkably similar to that Erasmus makes in De Copia.¹⁷ The structure and argument of these quotes are indeed a striking—but not unusual—example of appropriation on Chambers’s part. “The student, diligent as a little bee, will flit about through all the gardens of authors and will attack all the little flowerlets from whence he collects some honey which he carries into his own hive: and, since there is so much fertility of material in these that they are not all able to be plucked off, he will select the most excellent and adapt it to the structure of his own work.”¹⁸ Through this metaphor both Chambers and Erasmus draw on a long-standing metaphor that stretches back before Lucretius’s time and was most famously employed in the classical realm by Aesop as well as Virgil, whose bees symbolize virtuous, communal industry in the Aeneid¹⁹ and the Georgics.²⁰ John Dryden had produced a fresh and labor-intensive translation of the Georgics in the 1680s, which remained in circulation. Chambers kept two editions in his library, one plain and one with gilt leaves.²¹

Francis Bacon was another early English adopter of this metaphor, using it to explain transformative creative labor in science: “The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.”²² One of its most prominent, recent instances that Chambers was almost certainly aware of was in Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books, which included “The Fable of the Spider and the Bee.” Here Swift casts the bee as a natural transformer of found materials, morally superior to the spider, who is bloated by consumption in a house that is merely made from materials pulled from its own body. His allegory is intended as commentary on the culture of Paternoster Row and Fleet Street, casting the bee as author and the spider as critic.²³

Chambers was also likely familiar with Aesop’s Fables, which contains no fewer than six tales of a jackdaw or crow masquerading above his station.²⁴ This tale was such basic cultural knowledge in this period that the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that a secondary meaning of “daw” in the early eighteenth century referred to Aesop’s fable “The Bird with Borrowed Feathers,” which tells of a daw in peacock’s plumes. In this tale a daw gathers tail feathers that fell from peacocks as they molted. He straps them all to his own tail and impersonates a peacock in order to join their community but is soon discovered and disciplined by the real peacocks. The moral of the tale is “it is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.” This metaphor also persisted in British culture: as William St. Clair noted, “Robert Greene described his younger contemporary Shakespeare as ‘an upstart crow beautified with our feathers’” in the 1592 Groatsworth of Wit.²⁵ Chambers may well have chosen this rather déclassé bird as a metaphor for one potential perception of his own place in London society. In his case this sort of comparison would have insinuated that as someone from a farming family who had completed only a basic education, he was not learned at all and certainly not someone who could hope to gain the inherent virtues of upper-class breeding. Rather he was someone who hoped to gain a reputation for being knowledgeable by associating himself with other truly educated individuals and stealing their knowledge for his own gain. It would have been an indication of false pride in false accomplishments. Bees, on the other hand, occupied a much more respectable rank as heraldry elements and as an imperial symbol that was frequently embroidered on royal regalia. They also played a central role in the English economy and culture, and their hives were often depicted as metaphors for the monarchical system. Aligning himself with these insects cast him as industrious, valorous, and inherently respectable.

Honeybees and Transformative Authorship

Chambers’s casting of the bee as textual gatherer can be read as a commentary on curatorial processes of collection, filtering, and recomposition that are specific to the encyclopedic genre. Contrasting it with the daw provides a contextualizing counterpoint of a different sort of collecting. The daw, now more commonly known as the jackdaw, is a member of the crow family; the western jackdaw is common across Europe and particularly England. Hunted as vermin by order of Henry VIII, the bird is omnivorous and noisy and perhaps most famous for its attraction to shiny objects, which it returns to its nest, much like magpies do. Daws are intelligent thieves, but they do not attain even bricolage with their findings. While its nest is a carefully composed dwelling, the items it brings back to it are merely stashed rather than arranged. Chambers’s initial comparison to a daw can be read simply, unflatteringly implying that the author has stolen many shiny bits of information and compiled them into an encyclopedia. This comparison parallels in our contemporary metaphor of piracy, which implies random collection rather than arrangement, as well as moral corruption demonstrated through the act of theft.

By casting the encyclopedist as a bee, Chambers makes a distinction between poetic authorship associated with original genius and the curatorial composition process undertaken by the encyclopedist. An encyclopedist, then, is a selective textual harvester who transforms gathered materials into a contribution to human knowledge and education. This composer explicitly relies on external materials and his or her knowledge of where they may be found, devoting a substantial portion of labor to the gathering or collection process, followed by a period of filtering and transforming the gathered materials. This aspect then also reinforces the idea of the encyclopedic author as assessor and recomposer: where daws gather objects at random for the purposes of mere collection, the bee focuses on gathering a specific substance and then working collaboratively to transform it into a derivative product by adding enzymes in the course of exchanging the nectar with other bees through their proboscises and using their wings to evaporate the water content.²⁶

The finished product enters into the economy of the hive, which is itself a precisely arranged structure built with standardized cells that support life through functioning as both nursery and storehouse. The daw’s tendency to gather random objects into assemblages develops a palpable rhetorical tension when contrasted with the orderly structure of the hive. Daws build rather messy nests that consist largely of piles of sticks, decorating them with irregularly placed found objects. In other words they are hardly renowned for strict architectural design. The geometric perfection of bee-built cells and the symmetry of hive boxes and skeps are a stark contrast to these twig piles and denote a more careful and certainly replicable composition process.

This core structure is highly adaptable to spatial situations, and bees build on limbs, in trees, and even in the ground. “In insects, the mathematical precision of architecture, planning, adjusting is confined not to the intelligence of imposing form on matter,” explained Jussi Parikka, “but to primitive life (self)organizing itself into a habitat. Bees are an apt example used by various writers. . . . in that they are seen as inherently geometric architects.”²⁷ The abilities of the architects to adapt to available space is similar the flexibility of successful information architectures built by textual curators. As Parikka put it, “Instead of a representational approach to building and technology, insects suggest a mode of inhabiting and creating space by which they seem to track the contours and tendencies of the matter at hand and in order to push it toward certain key forms, singularities.”²⁸ This flexibility also extends to the material of the hive: “The combs and the building breathe, live with their surroundings and form only a transductive membrane instead of a closed space.”²⁹ Curatorial work is highly contextual, and successful texts are products of many vested interests which in turn influence information collection and architecture at both macro and micro levels. Reference texts live and breathe within their cultural moment, responding to the interests and pressures of their time. They expand with new information and contract through acts of textual deletion, vandalism, and censorship. In order to not only survive but consistently present usable, findable information, they depend on standardized architectures and interface conventions that can account for necessary fluctuations.

Bees as an Economic Good

In making this comparison, Chambers was not appealing just to cultural associations of the day, but also to the bee’s long history in England as an important farm animal, a vital economic good and property, and to bee products as essential, everyday materials that crossed social classes and occupations.³⁰ Bees, honey, and beeswax were both mundane and sacred, valued within the home and within the rituals of the church. Consequently they were also a central economic good and had been for centuries. A general understanding of the ways honeybees were prized in English culture from the medieval period through the late eighteenth century allows us to attend to the considerable claims to ethos and value that Chambers made through this metaphor.

In the centuries before electricity, beeswax was prized for its clear, warm light and sweet smell. Beeswax candles burned cleaner and were far more convenient to manage than more affordable light sources such as rush lights.³¹ The candles were needed to light both the rooms of small homes and the candelabras of aristocratic great halls. Candles were so valued that they were frequently offered as allowances for members of the castles and great houses and collected as taxes or used to pay fines.³² Candle making, or chandlery, was an essential and venerated craft. The still-operational Worshipful Company of Wax Chandlers, who trace their lineage to a twelfth-century royal decree governing “German merchants trading in beeswax in London,” gained ordinances in 1371 and were granted a royal charter in 1484.³³ The chandlers sold wax not just for candles, but also for images, figurines, and other religious objects.

The market value and virtuous associations of beeswax were further driven by the church, since candles were required for a wide variety of religious services. Beeswax was so valuable that Henry III gifted one thousand pounds of beeswax to Westminster Abbey in 1247 for “the making of a giant taper for Candlemas.”³⁴ Monasteries also kept commonly kept bees, “and rents and tithes from their substantial lands could be paid by their tenants in wax,” as Hattie Ellis noted in her cultural history of honeybees. The monks produced candles for religious use, and many also became purveyors of honey and mead, bringing substantial money into the monasteries’ coffers. Honey was the central sweetening agent in England for centuries since sugar was not imported to Britain until the fifteenth century and was not relatively common until the colonization of the West Indies in the seventeenth century.³⁵ As a result beehives themselves had significant market value. Wild beehives were as valuable as domestic ones, and both were considered taxable property of the landowner. Beekeeping and the processing of bee products was, until the late medieval period, an important and active profession practiced throughout the kingdom by individuals and communities.

The economic value of apiaries fell after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s, which included an injunction against the use of beeswax candles for religious purposes.³⁶ However, while the number of England’s hives declined, the honeybee’s status did not. Beekeeping remained an important craft throughout the United Kingdom, and a number of significant technical texts were devoted to it. As late as 1768 Thomas Wildman began his Treatise on the Management of Bees by writing, “As the value of honey has however lessened [owing to the West Indian possession], luxury has increased the price of wax, which is now become the greatest supply of light in all polite assemblies.”³⁷ Hives were so essential in everyday life that schoolchildren were routinely trained in their care and housewives were encouraged to profitably include hives in their gardens, as William Lawson did in The Country Housewife’s Garden (1631).³⁸

In comparing the encyclopedist to a honeybee, Chambers made a claim for the pervasive, mundane virtues of reference texts. The Cyclopædia included information on military, legal, and religious topics and grew to include some craft knowledge in its subsequent editions—all areas of information that were relevant to daily life. Bees’ connection to the church through the sacramental candles and as an income source for monasteries reinforced Chambers’s claim to an ethos of moral virtue that spoke to the overall value and propriety of his project as well as the transformative labor of the encyclopedic authorship process. This foundation of moral virtue may have rhetorically ameliorated the heretical alphabetical arrangement of the text, which imposed man’s order on God’s creation. It also put in place a counterpoint to another claim made through this metaphor: an alignment with the British Enlightenment.

Bees and the Ethos of Scientific Enlightenment

The problem of constructing an optimal hive became a topic of scientific inquiry in the mid-seventeenth century. Up until then, domestic beehives were most often kept in either hollowed logs or woven skeps, neither of which provided a clear means of extracting the honey and comb or a way of observing the bees at their work. It was necessary, then, to destroy the hive during the honey harvest and for both bees and beekeeper to begin again each year. As the British Enlightenment dawned, gentlemen scientists turned their heads toward this problem.

Their work on what was known as “rational beekeeping” began with the Reverend William Mew’s construction in 1649 of an octagonal wooden hive with glass observation windows. With it he planned to make notes on the bee’s activities as well as on meteorological events by means of the observational ornaments he placed on top of the hive.³⁹ After commencing his observations in 1652, he gave the plans to Dr. John Wilkins at Wadham College, University of Oxford, who built one and in turn gave the plans to John Evelyn in 1654. This transfer proved precipitous, as Eva Crane has pointed out in her comprehensive history of beekeeping: “When the Royal Society was founded in 1660, Wilkins became its joint first Secretary. Christopher Wren was also a Founder Fellow.”⁴⁰ It was the famed architect Wren who created the first stacked (or tiered) hive, also with observation windows, and made the problem of building a better beehive one of the Royal Society’s problems of interest. Advances in beehive construction and beekeeping continued throughout Chambers’s life and the production life of the Cyclopædia, from John Gedde’s original patent on the octagonal, tiered hives that were eventually set up in the king’s gardens at Windsor, Whitehall, and the Falkland Palace to Thomas Wildman’s public bee displays and publication of A Treatise on the Management of Bees in 1768.

By aligning himself with the bee, Chambers located himself and his encyclopedia at the cutting edge of science. This was a strategic construction of ethos in a project that purported to include “the figures, kinds, properties, productions, preparations, and uses of things natural and artificial.” In making such a claim he aligned the Cyclopædia with one of the central projects of the preeminent scientific society in London and with a utilitarian area of science that most people of the time would identify as valuable. The text’s content bore this ethos out, as he relentlessly grounded the articles in canonical scientific texts and the most recent advancements of the day.

Bees and Distributed Labor

The hive is also, as the Royal Society was documenting through its studies, a social structure reliant on the cooperation of its community for wealth and survival.⁴¹ A single bee cannot supply enough honey or heat to fuel a hive or even just itself through a winter. Rather the survival of the hive depends on the full collective that is the hive, much as the success of an encyclopedia depends on a communal store of knowledge developed by many scholars and thinkers. In the first edition preface, Chambers is explicit about his reliance on numerous previously published resources. But as he prepared the second edition over the next decade, he went himself one better by proactively working to develop a wide collective of contributors. By 1734 he was no longer so concerned about justifying the social process of building an encyclopedia. During the revision process he placed the previously mentioned magazine advertisements soliciting article submissions from the reading public, thus creating an early analogue version of a publicly authored encyclopedia.

The Hive as Commonwealth

The honeybee metaphor’s collective aspects also bridged a unique view of the hive as a way of understanding and discussing England itself. The prevalence of honeybees and their hive as a metaphor for the commonwealth⁴² and model society is a striking example of the differences between the ways that early eighteenth century English culture understood and deployed honeybees in everyday discourse and the ways that our own twenty-first-century American society approaches them with suspicion of being “wild” and “killer.” Chambers was making a comfortable comparison to an agricultural animal that humans had worked alongside and, as apiary science improved, domesticated. Bees were such an integral aspect of everyday household life in the British Isles that there developed the tradition of “telling the bees,” or visiting the hives daily to recount the household gossip and keep the bees informed.⁴³ We retain some vestiges of positive tropes related to bees: the intense collaborative productivity of transforming raw materials into a finished product was frequently understood as a metaphor for both virtuous industriousness and an aspirational model of a perfect society. Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs for Children, first published in 1720, contains the familiar verse

How doth the little busy bee

Improve each shining hour

And gather honey all the day

From every opening flower.⁴⁴

While contemporary interpretations arguably had a decidedly moral aspect that was grounded in Christian notions of proper conduct and industry, during the two centuries surrounding Chambers’s life and work, the trope of the hive-as-ideal-society appeared again and again in heavily circulated texts, including William Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie, still considered a central text by honeybee historians, and John Daye’s The Parliament of Bees.⁴⁵ This valorization of industrious, docile bodies with fierce dedication to their hive invited rhetorical identification by the populace that was immensely useful for an empire with a fervent, expanding economy that was on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution. As workers began to transition from farm to factory in the later decades of the eighteenth century, the factories themselves could be figured as buzzing hives. Increasingly docile workers reported daily, performing discrete, skilled work that built corporations and contributed to the collective economy rather than to their own farmsteads.

The Swarm

Darker connotations for the hive were also developing. Bernard de Mandeville’s notorious 1705 pamphlet The Grumbling Hive or Knaves turn’d Honest was a remarkably successful publishing property, republished with an essay and remarks in 1714 as The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits. After a slow early reception, it eventually became one of the most widely read books of the time, and Chambers kept a two-volume 1732 edition in his library.⁴⁶ Far from the virtuous connections drawn from the honeybee’s association with the church and with literal sweetness, Mandeville’s tale portrays England as a flourishing hive whose wealth is dependent on the wickedness of its recalcitrant citizens. “Most writers are always teaching men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they really are,” he wrote.⁴⁷ The perfection of vice is as vital as the perfection of virtue, the writer argued: vanity, pride, and envy are surely among man’s sins, but they also create industry and wealth. His bees are “Sharpers, Parasites, Pimps, Players, Pick-pockets, Coiners, Quacks, Sooth-Sayers” whose transgressions further create employment through the justice system as well as for locksmiths, guards, and the like (3). He also targeted clerical hypocrisy and acknowledged prostitution as a trade.

As the British empire continued to extend its reach, attention to the social order of the hive increasingly focused on the drone as a worthless citizen who deserved banishment.⁴⁸ This metaphor also persisted in the publishing world, which railed against plagiarists and copyright infringers.⁴⁹ Drones’ only contributions to the colony are to mate with the queen; they neither gather pollen nor tend the hive nursery. Because of their lack of contribution to the collective, they are banished by the workers at the end of the summer as the hive begins its final preparations for winter. On the first cold day, the drones perish. As the century progressed, the poor, with their perceived failure to contribute to the English hive, were increasingly labeled as drones. This metaphoric degradation of the poor had precedent in Bacon’s “An Advertisement Touching upon a Holy War,” in which he referred to rebellious masses as a bee swarm. “Bacon’s essay best reflects the English mind-set regarding poor people, but many English writers found this drone image a convenient analogy to convince poor people to go to the newly emerging colonies in America,” historian Tammy Horn has written, adding that the metaphor was also taken up by John Cotton when he encouraged the tradesmen to “hive off” as swarms do when a hive divides itself in two (11). The bee, then, came to signify the natural and divine order of British social stratification as well as social engineering.

In contemporary American discourse, bees no longer occupy the central, familiar role that they most often did in Chambers’s England. We retained positive vestiges while our ties to England were stronger and garden hives more common. These associations were intertwined with Protestant work ethics: industriously transforming raw materials as the colonies were settled was frequently understood as virtuous aspiration to a more perfect society than had been available in the old country. This moral aspect was grounded in Christian notions of propriety, industry, and logic. In this view, as in the earlier English perspective, bees retained a semblance to the unfallen natural world, wild and mysterious, but also knowable.

During the twentieth century apian metaphor shifted considerably. The hive, built on logical, flexible social order and the collective performances of its individual actors, was transmuted into the swarm, a locus of anxiety. With its unintelligible relationality, the swarm exemplifies and expands fears of the crowd that were previously manifested as disdain for unwashed, impoverished masses that might revolt. It simultaneously reveals fears of being subsumed by the crowd, carried along by distributed performance against one’s individual will. As J. Kennedy and Eberhart point out in their work on swarm intelligence, “social is the primary aspect of swarm.”⁵⁰ By nature swarms disrupt ideals of individualism, posing tremendous anxiety for a culture that cherishes its self-image of being composed of rugged individuals who engage in exceptional performances of individual agency. In contrast to the individual bee as a discrete, taxonomized member of a hive, the swarm exists outside of any perceived structure, acting as a unified, adaptable organism. This collective is greater than the sum of its parts, engaging in distributed work and collective intelligence, “especially by providing individuals with more information than their own sense can gather.”⁵¹ The swarm is the ultimate egalitarian society, disrupting any stable notion of hierarchy that observers might wish to impose. Instead, this collective coordinates action in ways that our present-day popular consciousness casts as indiscernible and, in contrast to the Enlightenment advances in logical beekeeping, largely unintelligible.

This unintelligible, distributed performance became a central 20th century trope in media depictions of swarms. Parikka observed that “seemingly automated behavior is described by Maeterlinck as a ‘strange emotion.’ Here the emotion acts as a trigger of a kind that points to the way bodies are affectively coordinated in the organizational form. The swarm is a becoming that expresses potentialities that are always situated and yet moving.”⁵² The swarm is necessarily contingent and contextual, then, responding to its environment. We anticipate these unintelligible, agile responses with fear, assuming that their purposeful actions will result in harm. Since the killer bee scares of 1970s and 1980s, bees have been popularly imagined as unpredictable, as less solitary and more likely to swarm, as progenitors of painful, bodily harm. The garden bee skep is a rare object these days, and we approach hives not with the expectation of honey but with the fear of finding “killer” or “Africanized” bees.

These fears are made manifest in twentieth-century cinema and television productions. As the world rested between the World Wars and then entered the terrible years of World War II, swarms pursued various deserving Hanna Barbera⁵³ and Disney⁵⁴ cartoon characters. Swarm behavior in Springtime for Pluto (1944) is particularly striking, depicted as both agile and contextualized within the ongoing war: the swarm takes on the shape of military technology, alternately becoming a rocket or bomber plane and firing “missiles” of bees. Decades later Saturday Night Live’s recurring Killer Bees sketch (1975–78) would also speak to wartime anxieties, albeit in a very different fashion. Using the tabloid trope of Africanized killer bees that then appeared every American checkout stand, the Killer Bees depicted the Other, functioning as comedic commentary on revolutionary immigrants from Mexico as well as clandestine U.S. involvement in South American civil wars.

The 1970s also saw substantial string of horror movies devoted to bees and swarms. These monstrous collectives began to replace the postatomic denizens of 1950s and 1960s Creature Features, which were frequently represented as individual agents, even when they functioned within crowds: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the ants of Them! (1954), or the heroic daikaiju⁵⁵ that have populated Godzilla movies from 1954’s Gojira to the present. Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) was a startling departure from these monsters, relying on natural rather than mutant creatures and portraying coordinated swarm behavior as a malevolent force that stems from unintelligible motives. The birds’ apparent lack of motive is an important horrific element, serving as Hitchcock’s MacGuffin, or plot device, that drives the narrative and his characters in their heroic resistance to the birds. This theme proliferated throughout the 1970s in films such as The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), Killer Bees (1974), Phase IV (1974), The Bees (1978), and The Swarm (1978). In the following decade swarms diversified into cockroaches in Creepshow (1982), alien parasites in Night of the Creeps (1986), and spiders in 1990’s Arachnophobia.

At the turn of the millennium, heavy integration of two other recurring elements invigorated what was becoming a tired, albeit nostalgic, trope: technofears concerning automation and human/machine integration began to replace the unintelligible natural agent, and crowds comprising individual actors were augmented by the swarm. Horror of automation and cyborgs had circulated for thousands of years, beginning with classical tales of Greek automaton warriors and extending into the early twentieth century through the heavy circulation of Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) and Metropolis (1927), among other artifacts. Integration of this trope with the fear of the swarm reveals uniquely modern concerns about the potential of technologies to subsume and dominate humanity. These anxieties are perhaps best exemplified by the Borg of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Voyager, who first appeared in 1989.⁵⁶ Cybernetic drones composed this collective society, known as the Hive, in a nod to the films that came before it, or alternately as the Collective. Collective members are made, not born, having been abducted from their home planets and assimilated by being injected with a swarm of nanobots. All targeted life forms receive the Borg’s famous warning: “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!” No agency is possible for individuals within the Hive, controlled by their internal nanobots and external prosthetic technologies. Members of the collective are stripped of their ability to perform in any way except as part of the swarm’s coordinated action, or to even consider other possibilities. This unthinkingness and inability to conceive of exerting individual agency is a dramatic depiction of the hive mind.

As the Internet increasingly became a part of daily life for most first-world users, the idea of hive mind appeared frequently in discussions of distributed collaboration and the potential of collective intelligence in digital environments. While some of the connotations attached to it were hopeful, including a sense of global community and shared purpose, it also conveyed contemporary anxieties about the potential cruelty of swarms and the possibilities of assimilation into borg-like digital communities. Distributed work processes within closed groups such as Anonymous can appear to be inhuman and even near-automatic to external observers, sometimes leading to comparisons between the living, organic hive and networked machinery. “Just as a beehive functions as if it were a single sentient organism, so does an electronic hive, made up of millions of buzzing, dim-witted personal computers, behave like a single organism. Out of networked parts—whether of insects, neurons, or chips—come learning, evolution, and life,” wrote Kevin Kelly.⁵⁷

The notion of hive mind emerged in the 1990s alongside chaos and complexity theory. Joseph Reagle traced its evolution from those earlier inquiries into the ways that order can spontaneously emerge from chaos, noting that former Wired editor Kevin Kelly posited hive mind as “a theory in understanding social organization and intelligence.”⁵⁸ Just after the turn of the century, prominent publications on emergent distributed collaboration focused further attention on this topic area: Rheingold’s Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, S. Johnson’s Emergence, and Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.⁵⁹ Each of these scholars explores issues related to coordination and cooperation in decentralized crowds. Collectively their work drew the attention of technologists, activists, and others who were interested in understanding the ways that large groups of people accomplish a central goal with minimal communication or direction. Much of the conversations surrounding this phenomenon were positive, focusing on the scalability of work and the potential for evading surveillance as well as the quasi-mystical qualities of something like collective intelligence.

But the metaphor of the hive also carried with it connotations of assimilation into communities that discourage individual, rational thought or wisdom. As Reagle put it this criticism contends “that the fanatical mob producing Wikipedia exhibits little wisdom and is more like a Maoist cult of monkeys banging away at the keyboards and thumb pads of their gadgets, disturbing the noble repose of scholars and displacing high-quality content from the market-place.”⁶⁰ The hive, critics have written, was dehumanizing, an assault on individualism and rationality that was evidenced in many ways, not the least of which was Wikipedia’s rejection of expertise and insistence on consensus. Jaron Lanier waged the most extended assault on what he understood as the hive aspects of Wikipedia, arguing that its collectivism created an aura of superhuman authorship: “Wikipedia . . . works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present many of the same problems.”⁶¹ Throughout his arguments he returns to what he understands as the erasure of the individual Author’s signature, visibility, expertise, and style. Lanier sees the common voice and signature of the Wikipedian hive as a decontextualization of information that consequently impoverishes both the source and the reader.⁶²

The perceived anonymity and decontextualization of Wikipedian authorship has often been constructed metaphorically as piranha-like schooling behavior, largely dependent on episodes of violent swarming behavior. Pirhanas are popularly imagined as vicious predators in recent made-for-TV movies like Mega Pirhana and Pirhanaconda but in reality are simply schooling fish who prefer to live and work in groups, functioning communally to scavenge food and defend themselves from threats.⁶³ “The Piranha Effect” refers to the swarms of editors who descend on articles related to timely news topics, building out and negotiating revision of extensive articles in real time as events unfold. Similarly a community of editors may be drawn to an article whose topic is suddenly in the news, being prepared for a Featured status review that may lead to possible inclusion on Wikipedia’s front page, or experiencing an influx of vandalism. During review periods for articles that have been marked for deletion, concerned editors engage in a relatively rapid debate about whether an article should stay or go, moving quickly to generate consensus for their viewpoint. The term originated in the French Wikipedia community and entered English with Jimmy Wales’s description of it: “You start with a little tiny article and it’s not quite good enough, so people are picking at it and sort of a feeding frenzy and articles grow.”⁶⁴ This practice of building full articles from “little tiny” article stubs has been the foundation of textual development within the project. Andrew Lih examines the phenomena at length in his project history The Wikipedia Revolution, relating its influence on the development of not just article text but also the ubiquitous dot maps that appear on every town article.⁶⁵

Strangely enough, the piranhas are a utopian metaphor for Wikipedia, offering a misleading impression of the ways that authorial agency develops within the community and its processes. The swarm is an inclusive collective that assimilates but rarely rejects actors. In the popular imagination, all piranhas in a school look the same and recognize each other as collaborators in the process of, say, stripping a cow carcass down to the bones. Their coordinated frenzy moves relentlessly forward toward the goal, never stopping for negotiations or resistance to central policies. Piranhas do not revert each other’s contributions. No piranha is discouraged from participation, and none foment revolution or quietly leave the school. The school does not develop incommensurable philosophical differences. All these things are true and even encouraged within the ontology of Wikipedia, resulting in complex curatorial performances that are heavily shaped by policy and surveillance.

Chapter 4 Content Contributors, Vandals,
and the Ontology of Curation

Content in Wikipedia is curated through the application of policy rather than through the stereotypical composition processes of brainstorming, drafting, reviewing, and revising. In contrast with the material contributors who shape encyclopedias through external, material support, the hands-on work of textual curation is performed by smaller, contingent networks formed by curators who share interests and areas of expertise. As a result of policy, philosophy, and material affordances, Wikipedia articles are built incrementally and over a period of years, a process that is very different from the fully formed articles that appeared in the print editions of the Cyclopædia. Over time Wikipedia has developed an ethos of openness built squarely on a complex policy structure that it simultaneously subverts through conflicting interpretations and core curatorial philosophies. To put it simply, policy dictates content, and it does so in ways that shape not only the text but also the contributing collective.

Authorial agency is not always generative in these contexts: while many positive contributions have been made to these continuously expanding texts, there are also many instances in which performances have undermined or destroyed texts—a problem exemplified by vandalism. Wikipedia’s egalitarianism and low interface barriers invite these performances by providing both textual potential and tools for destructive authorship. Vandalism is typically discussed as a primarily digital problem caused by actors who are outside of the collective, but it has also historically been an issue for print texts, committed by publishers and editors who were very much central actors within those projects. It is also undertaken with rhetorical intent by actors who understand the collective and its social constraints very well, but who seize the technological affordances of one of the most visited websites in the world in order to broadcast a message.

Throughout the development and production processes, Chambers and his publishers sought to create the broadest possible network of content contributors. These contributors included the passionate subject-matter experts we associate with Wikipedia, but also actors who were considered content contributors during this era in print history, such as craftsmen of the printing houses.

Content Contributors to the Cyclopædia

In the first edition preface, Chambers is explicit about his reliance on numerous previously published resources. But as he prepared the second edition over the next decade, he went himself one better by proactively working to develop the wide collective of contributors that he described in his preparatory considerations. By soliciting information from the working class and the poor, he hoped to considerably expand the craft knowledge contained in the Cyclopædia. Doing so would fulfill a longtime goal that the natural philosophy community had not yet been able to satisfy because of the care that craftspeople necessarily took to protect proprietary “mysteries,” or craft techniques that were passed from master to apprentice orally or through physical demonstration.¹

Besides being imminently practical, the practice of crowdsourcing material aligned with the ideals of the Freemasons who materially supported the project. The Masons had early on adopted a proletarian policy toward membership and contributions of knowledge. Because the society developed from the guild system and was initially composed of working masons and architects, they retained a commitment to including craftsmen. As early as 1663 their orders and constitutions decreed “that no person, of what degree whatsoever, be accepted a Freemason, unless he shall have a Lodge of five Freemasons at least, whereof one must be a Master or Warden of that Limit or Division where such Lodge shall be kept, and another to be a workman of the trade of Freemasonry.” While they actively recruited “affluent, fashionable, and influential aristocrats,” Berman has noted that the inclusion of working stonemasons remained “a practice current through to the second and third decades of the eighteenth century.”² Chambers’s call for contributions of craft knowledge and contributions from craftspeople who had first-hand expertise in “mysteries” reflects a similar dedication to including the working class and respecting their expertise as equivalent to and at times integrated with scientific knowledge.

Serialization provided another means of gathering new material and corrections from the reading public. Since this particular audience was receiving and ostensibly reading three fresh pages of the text each week as it was being produced, they were in position to offer potential additions and corrections. If a large text was being produced over multiple years, it was possible to incorporate this feedback, especially in topics that had not yet been typeset. Chambers very likely included this audience as he wrote the text for this pamphlet, since the working class and craftsmen whom he explicitly invited to contribute would have been just the sort of readers who were in a position to benefit most from access through serialization. These contributors would have remained heavily male and privileged as a group, though, given the fact that contributing required leisure time and literacy that were not always available to women and servants whose primary duties were limited to the private sphere.

This type of distributed work was best suited to being undertaken by a unified community, Chambers suggested in the Considerations, but none was to be found at the time owing to the lack of monastic communities and the “Royal Academies and Institutions” having focused their attentions elsewhere. Besides, in his estimation, these dedicated communities required too many meetings in order to tackle this sort of project, too much ceremony and negotiation of feelings, and too much ado. Better to establish a system of “voluntary, or occasional communications, where public-spirited persons, at their leisure and liberty, furnish materials and intelligences to the undertakers of useful designs. . . . This method seems no where more practicable to better advantage than in the work before us.”³ Bringing together contributions from such a vast array of contributors would result in “the best book in the universe,” he argued, successfully appealing to national identity and pride in this invitation: “Many of our private clubs might vie with [other countries’] academies, and much of the conversation at certain coffeehouse tables, with their conferences in form.”⁴ This invitation implied, specifically, that the English could do better than the more formal French intellectual society and thus suggested that contributors should devote their energies to his project if for no other reason than competitiveness.

The lack of surviving records obscures the extent to which the public took up this egalitarian invitation, which was a remarkable precursor to the invitation extended by Wikipedia (and demonstrates the extent to which nonhuman agents shape even our reconstruction of this story), but it is possible to track changes across a limited sample. The result seems to have been that the breadth of the entire project was extended more than the scope of individual articles.⁵ The articles sampled show little content revision or substantive editing between the first and second editions. The few content changes that occurred in the articles sampled consisted primarily of occasional edits for technical clarity and improved cross-indexing. However, there were significant typographic changes. These small, consistent alterations result in a high incidence of edits in texts while size and breadth remains relatively static (see table 1).

One of the most striking differences between composing processes in the Cyclopædia and Wikipedia is the way that articles begin their lives. Each of the Chambers articles sampled appears in the first edition as a recognizable, fully fledged article rather than as a briefer text that was clearly meant to be expanded. Some other articles in the 1728 edition are appreciably short, but nearly all of them consist of at least a tidy paragraph. This approach is significantly different than that in Wikipedia, which relies on many small changes over time for expansion of its articles. This difference is driven in part by the technological actors available to each project. A bound, print encyclopedia that is published in a new edition once each decade (or less) depends on a unified, substantive revision that is not extendable or correctable after publication. Correcting the text and broadening its scope in successive editions was also a philosophical and economic decision that made sense both in terms of documenting findings emerging from observational natural philosophy and selling that information to a public who required the incorporation of significant new information in order to be persuaded to purchase an expensive text.

Table 1Comparison showing stability of article word count (length), along with total edits. A high proportion of those edits are typographical changes.

Article Title

1728 length

1738 length

Total Edits

Typographical Changes

Falconry

168

166

35

33

Fortification

2134

2039

419

365

Garden

970

970

205

200

Mineral

800

802

144

137

Trigonometry

1636

1607

365

352

Incorporating necessary corrections and working toward “universality” were primary concerns for Chambers, particularly in light of his desire for an encyclopedia that presented a coherent, comprehensive view of the world. In the Considerations he wrote, “Indeed, much remains to be done in order to answer the design of a Cyclopædia, or Universal Dictionary, in its just latitude. . . . Our universal works are generally so scanty that they leave room for other universals of the same kind without interfering. Thus Universal Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, and those others called Universal Historical Dictionaries, have long reigned as collateral and independent things, as if history and geography were not one of the number of sciences, or as if any science could be given to advantage without its history. . . . ’Tis evident the treaty of partition is but ill concerted, where generals are torn from the particulars belonging to them and reason and rules are thrown into one book, and facts and instances on which they are built, into another. This makes them both lame of necessity.”⁶ By continuing to broaden the scope of the text in each edition, he and his publishers hoped to present a more unified collection of knowledge and course of study for their readers, facilitating a comprehensive view of a logically ordered, Newtonian world. Wikipedia, with its very different material aspects, which afford tremendous expansion and open vandalism, has a more far dynamic set of performances to shape and control.

The ontology of Wikipedia is found in central policies that are applied across the community and text. These policies, known as the Five Pillars, are open to interpretations that are in turn shaped by conflicting primary philosophies about what sort of information an encyclopedia with the potential for nearly infinite expansion should contain. They are also shaped by disagreements about the public nature of articles’ lives as they are incrementally drafted and polished. Performances of authorial agency in these negotiated process are contingent and variable, moving the community and its project forward but also backward. Positive constructions of affiliation and production occur, but just as often the destructive potential of a text and community that are too big to control come to the fore in instances of alienation, discord, and vandalism.

Wikipedia: Content Contributors

Wikipedia is frequently rhetorically positioned as “an encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” and in its early days this was unequivocally true: while Wales and Sanger were overseers of the site, all contributors were considered more or less equal, and contributions to all pages were immediately visible on the web.⁷ These days editors are encouraged to log in with an account, and most, but not all, pages remain open and available for editing by anyone. Access to articles on contentious topics or topics that are at the top of the news cycle may be restricted, as are articles that are currently designated as Featured and spotlighted on the front page of language-specific versions.⁸ (As I write, the Featured Article is on the majungasaurus, a dinosaur that lived in Madagascar sixty-six to seventy million years ago.) Access to the front page of the site is heavily restricted, along with some policy pages. Still the majority of the encyclopedia remains open for editing by the public, and the project depends entirely on volunteer contributions.

This underscores one of the ways that technological affordances influence the labor of composition. Because of the centralization of performances necessary to compose a print text, primary authorial agency is ultimately localized to the project editors. As a result public contributions are not readily apparent at the interface level, and unless the curator takes explicit measures in offering acknowledgment to contributors, he or she will almost always be pointed to as the central composer of the text. If Chambers did indeed perform the bulk of this work in composing full articles for the initial edition, as he says he did, then the considerable labor and skill involved rightfully earn him that recognition. But this does not render him the sole author of that text, which was curated through careful integration of previously published and freshly contributed information. In Wikipedia the community—especially the central committees—conducts the distributed work of curation through incremental, contingent performances.

Despite the hundreds of thousands of registered editors, only a relative handful contribute significantly to the project. Over the years the estimation has fluctuated: in 2005 Wales estimated that “2% of the users do 75% of the work,”⁹ while a 2007 empirical study suggested even more startlingly that one-tenth of 1 percent of editors—approximately forty-two hundred people—contribute nearly half of the site’s content.¹⁰ The dedication demonstrated by relatively few editors is one of the elements that render the distributed work of composing Wikipedia curation rather than random composition by individuals dropping in out of the digital skies, making changes, and then never returning. This cohesive, central group of editors has both understanding of and commitment to the pillars of Wikipedia. They also closely monitor contributions in order to curate the project as an encyclopedia rather than a loose collection of links and opinions. Over time, this group has accrued ethos through long service, forming a cabal of long-timers that controls central policy and arbitration decisions. Their performances are exponentially dominant in the system by virtue of setting the rules for other actors and shaping decisions about content and interface that influence both the curated text and the actions of both human and nonhuman curators.

As a group Wikipedia editors comprise a heavily male demographic, with only approximately 10 percent of the group estimated to be female.¹¹ In an effort to encourage women to become involved as editors and to build articles on notable women, the community launched a Gender Gap Task Force to address systemic issues. A number of reasons for this imbalance have been suggested, with the most prominent reason being the uninviting ethos of the central community, which has been characterized on a spectrum from simply “unwelcoming” to a “crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere”¹² to “a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess.”¹³ New users with few edits associated with their names are automatically flagged and frequently subject to having their contributions reverted or marked for deletion either because they do not understand the guidelines for contributions or because their newly-registered identities are not recognized and hailed by established Wikipedians. Challenges to content are semiautomated and abrupt, dispensed in boilerplate language that many newcomers find alienating. Women editors who prefer more personal communication styles may feel particularly unwelcome. In theory anyone can edit Wikipedia; in practice all actors are not equal within the system, and neither are their performances or contributions. Identifying as male within the system and having a very thick skin are considerable advantages.

As a result of this imbalance within the community demographic, Wikipedia’s content tends to be more developed around topics that are understood as sterotypically male, resulting in a systemic bias in content coverage. One often-cited example concerns the many extensive articles devoted to each episode of The Sopranos as well as each of its recurring characters, as opposed to the single article that covers Sex and the City. A number of universities and organizations have also worked to address this systemic problem by holding edit-a-thons on or near the date of Ada Lovelace Day, honoring the first woman computer programmer. The Royal Society has been one such sponsor, working to build articles on every female society fellow.¹⁴ Other edit-a-thons have helped build participation from other underrepresented demographics. While these efforts have improved the scope of the text to some extent, they have not fundamentally changed the demographic of the community. Another factor, which Adam Klein¹⁵ has devoted attention to, is the inevitable inclusion of racist propaganda in Wikipedia and other online resources in a coordinated effort at “information laundering” by racist communities. These contributions work to legitimize hate and also create a hostile environment for potential editors who identify as members of the targeted ethnic groups even as other Wikipedians work to revert racist edits. Systemic bias in various forms extends throughout the text and, combined with a prominent community culture that understands Wikipedia as a “battlefield of ideas” that benefit from being fought out, powerfully limits curatorial contributions by women and other underrepresented demographics.

These cultural mores have shaped the size of the contributing community and, by extension, the rate of production. Wikipedia saw robust growth of its community in its first half decade, with exponential expansion of both registered users and text each year. By mid-2007 journalism professor and Wikipedia historian Andrew Lih was among many who pointed out that casual contributors were leaving the project, feeling that they and their work on minor topics (that is, those deemed not notable) had been rejected.¹⁶ The total number of active editors has declined by half since then, hitting a low of thirty-one hundred in 2013.¹⁷ As Priedhorsky and coauthors have indicated, the contributors who do stay tend to be invested and committed to topics they are passionate about and have subject-area expertise in. Unsurprisingly communities form around common curatorial projects and interests. These smaller communities provide space for editors to have a better chance of forming closer social ties that in turn help bind them to the distributed project of improving information on their mutual interests. Thousands of WikiProjects curate topics in diverse umbrella categories such as “human rights” “games and toys,” “arts and culture,” or “cephalopods,” and geographically specific umbrellas such as “Africa” or “the Americas.” Subcategories further direct contributors to more specific areas of interest, so that a Lego enthusiast drilling down from “games and toys” may choose to work specifically on the Lego project, which focuses on all Lego-related articles on Wikipedia, but not on the Bionicles Taskforce, which is categorized as a related but entirely different concern. These fine distinctions in taxonomy guide content findability, of course, but also drive community formation and expansion by providing editors with a means of finding the communities they can best contribute to.

Managing Content Contributions

The curatorial work undertaken throughout the encyclopedia is defined by a long-standing, collaboratively developed philosophy about what Wikipedia should be, and also splintered through varying viewpoints on just what such an encyclopedia should include. Wikipedia’s Five Pillars delineate its core principles:

•Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.

•Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view.

•Wikipedia is free content that anyone can edit, use, modify, and distribute.

•Editors should treat each other with respect and civility.

•Wikipedia does not have firm rules.¹⁸

Here we see a concrete conceptualization of this crowdsourced encyclopedia as a curated project with centralized, specific guidelines for acceptable material that results in a filtered and ordered reference text. This and myriad other policy pages also constitute a rhetorical means of explicating its expert methodology, as Hartelius has noted.¹⁹ These pages explicate and encourage a centrally defined commitment to responsible curation and ethical community relations, shaping the performances of both human and nonhuman agents by defining tasks and behaviors. This foundational philosophy anchors the community, providing a basis from which they actively reject other descriptions that are often applied by outsiders, such as accusations of providing a soapbox, “being an experiment in anarchy or democracy,” or, most importantly, being “an indiscriminate collection of information.”²⁰ An earlier version of the first pillar was even more explicit about its emphasis on nonoriginal contributions that could be sourced to carefully selected, previously published material: “All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy: unreferenced material may be removed, so please provide references. Wikipedia is not the place to insert personal opinions, experiences, or arguments. Original ideas, interpretations, or research cannot be verified, and are thus inappropriate.”²¹

Remarkably the Five Pillars contain no references to truth, fact, or rigor. Instead they delineate a commitment to providing unbiased information curated by an open, civil, flexible community. In theory (although not necessarily in practice), truth and fact are not negotiated within the purview of Wikipedia. Rather the encyclopedia consolidates and reports what the larger culture it functions within has deemed to be true or factual by virtue of citable publications, and it works to do so without bias. Neutrality has become a stand-in for factuality, on the assumption that an unbiased report that avoids opinion also by nature avoids censorship, promotion of vested interests, and other rhetorical means of skewing reality. This is a substantial difference from the Cyclopædia, which did not pretend to anything approaching neutrality in its advancement of a Newtonian worldview.

The neutral point of view (NPOV) pillar shapes other aspects of contributions that might influence neutrality. Originality is explicitly banned, to the point of specifying which possible peripheral forms of originality are not allowed: not only original ideas, but also interpretations, research, opinions, experiences, or arguments. All information must be traceable to previously published external sources and cited as such, and in fact such dense citation is part of the basic criteria for Good or Featured Article status. Editors who devote their energies to building rigor within the project contribute by tagging entries that require verification and/or citation. The Fact tag, which inserts a [citation needed] hyperlink after sentences that need citation, is one such tag. In one instance an editor inserted this tag liberally in sections of the Minerals article, noting that this was meant as a helpful gesture: “large-scale fact tagging, typo-fixing, etc.” Six minutes later, the same editor added, “another fact tag-will remove the material if not fixed in the next day or so, but don’t want to disrupt authors ‘work in progress.’” In doing so this editor was demonstrating one aspect of the social, participatory nature of encyclopedic authorship, particularly within Wikipedia: constantly working with collaborative writing and thus frequently negotiating changes rather than just making them autonomously.

Privileging external sources as “facts” over the original contributions of editors who may be credentialed or subject-matter experts is sometimes interpreted as antielitism and has remained a point of contention among contributors to the text, as Sanger, Lih, Hartelius, and many others have noted.²² One of the more famous incidents resulted from the author Philip Roth’s attempt to correct the Wikipedia article on his novel The Human Stain.²³ Roth was astonished to find that his request to correct misinformation about the basis of the novel was rejected: “‘I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,’ [wrote] the Wikipedia administrator—‘but we require secondary sources.’”²⁴ Roth rather correctly felt that he had no recourse but to write an open letter to Wikipedia, which the New Yorker promptly published. The published letter was then considered a valid secondary resource by the Wikipedian community and the correction was made.

Many researchers, scientists, and subject-matter experts have found themselves in the same position over the years, leading to popular charges of antielitism within the project by Larry Sanger as well as media commentators.²⁵ The community, buttressed by the pillar tenet that “anyone can edit, use, or modify” Wikipedia, rejects any formal qualifications or earned expertise in favor of sourced citations and neutral point of view. Any valuation of expertise lies in shaping and becoming expert in Wikipedian policy as well as contributing to the text through rigorous policy applications. As Jemielniak observed in his ethnographic study of the Wikipedian community, “In the Wikimedia movement, perfecting the procedural rationality can be observed in the concentration of debates on egalitarianism, inclusivity, freedom of information, and respect for significant minorities (all related to how collaboration is conducted) and not reaching the goal of a moment when every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge (which is the movement’s purpose, but the amount of time spent discussing how to reach it is significantly less.)”²⁶ Elucidating the ways that curatorial performances are ideally constrained is a high-priority task for the community—higher priority than composing text, it often seems. Any editor who hopes to make a persuasive contribution that will stand over time or to argue for any substantive change must account for myriad policies in the process.

However, the Fifth Pillar—Wikipedia has does not have firm rules—complicates these matters. Policies drive a clear consolidation of power by central communities, but the instruction to “ignore all rules” performs a more complex, multilayered rhetorical function. Paradoxically it is itself a rule. The original, public intent behind this pillar and its relevant injunction, “Be bold!” was to create a digital space and community that welcomed users without requiring them to learn a host of rules and to foster innovation by welcoming a variety of editorial performances. Officially this pillar always and ever keeps the community’s focus on its central purpose: creation of a free encyclopedia.²⁷ It renders all policies contingent, which can indeed drive open growth by relaxing constraints. In practice its application often subverts its rhetorical intent and accrues additional power to members of core communities, who use it as a last resort during protracted arguments. If threading the needle of project policies fails to persuade an actor who makes equally persuasive policy-based arguments, then it is always possible to fall back on the argument that there are no rules and that core consensus has been reached, thus vehemently discouraging further dialogue.

One example of these policy-based negotiations is the question of whether or not to include an image of the prophet Muhammad in the article devoted to Muhammad, which has concerned the community for years, resulting in extended discussion about how neutrality might be defined in this case. Insistence on maintaining a neutral point of view (NPOV) in article texts has remained an abiding concern over the life of the project. Avoiding bias is a seemingly clear criteria, but its ethical application is not always at all clear. Islam traditionally forbids depiction of the prophet in any context, including reference texts. Wikipedia conventions require the inclusion of relevant images on each article in order to enhance educational value and account for multiple modalities of learning. Consequently a number of revert wars that removed and reinserted depictions of the prophet have led to heated discussions. At the moment the lead image is a calligraphic representation of Muhammad’s name, but images of the prophet’s face appear in article subsections. Offended readers are offered instructions on how to run a script that hides the images from their view, but the depictions remain on the page. Muslims requested removal of the images based on religious respect, while editors argued that to do so would violate the NPOV rule and constitute censorship. The core English Wikipedian community’s vigilance against censorship stems from the community commitment to openness and from a particularly American ideal of free speech and open circulation of information. It also exemplifies the contemporary, Western expectation that reference texts will remain uncensored—an expectation that is not always reflective of the actual state of reference texts.

Other requesters have argued that the images should be removed because they were inaccurate based on scriptural descriptions of Muhammad’s appearance. Editor Hasim221990 wrote an impassioned argument from this perspective, referencing specific quotes in the Islamic Hadiths. The inaccurate images held no historical value, he added.²⁸ This argument based on received religious truth was met with policy-based rebuttals by editor Amatulić: “The fact remains that you are engaging in original research. No one has ever claimed that the images are representative of how Muhammad really looked. Your implication of this is a straw man argument, as is ‘reliable’ versus ‘holy,’ which is a point no one brought up but yourself (and false, too, since not all Hadith are considered reliable by mainstream Muslims). In addition, there is no editorial policy that states a representation of an historical figure must be completely accurate. It is a well-understood and uncontroversial fact that artistic license is employed by artists, and it is obvious for these images considering when they were painted. That does not invalidate their use to illustrate the article.” Truth or factuality is explicitly not a criteria in Amatulić’s interpretation of NPOV, and neither is accuracy. Neither is historical significance, he goes on to say, since that is also a matter of opinion. Rather what matters most is citation of valid external resources and reaching consensus: “What matters most is community consensus and reliable sources. You have failed to present a single reliable source that disputes anything about any specific image presented in the article, we have only your WP:SYNTHESIS²⁹ (a policy violation, read about it) saying that sources accepted by Muslims describe Muhammad a certain way, therefore the images must be removed. All we have are your opinions about how we should apply the sources you espouse, which are religious sources, in spite of your protestations that they are not.”

A number of appeals to pathos have been made in the discussion, asking Wikipedians to consider the ways in which this decision makes Muslims feel unwelcome as readers or contributors, and hinting that blatant disrespect for religion foments conflict that can only lead to further attacks like the Charlie Hebdo shooting. “It sounds more logical that a website which focuses on making articles from a neutral point should know that having a successful policy requires a certain amount of respect towards religious, social and similar traditions,” wrote editor Emin Čamo. “Also considering that these depictions have caused a lot of riots within the Muslim World, do you not think that this is violent propaganda? Since it, consciously, is hurting the adherents of Islam.” Altering the content based on these perceived slights would be not only a violation of policy, editor Alanscottwalker replied, but also a negation of the educational mission of an encyclopedia: “Beyond ‘offense,’ a fundamental issue is ‘educational value,’ and that’s not an NPOV issue, it is an issue of educational mission, and Wikipedia does editorially agree that there are multiple modalities of learning, and that therefore Wikipedia aims to present ‘multimedia learning’ including verbal, and visual (and even sometimes audio). (See eg., WP:IMAGE RELEVANCE. [sic]) Couple that with the fact that Wikipedia is relating biography of a man in this article, and that the target audience for Wikipedia is more or less, the words of the boards ‘offensive images’ consultant, modern secular societies.”

The informative mission of the encyclopedic genre is paramount in this counterargument. Textual forms have agency, as Campbell reminds us, and the educational performance inherent in this type of text shapes not only content but also the performances available to contributors. The educational mission of encyclopedias as has been interpreted for centuries demands the use of images, and the WP:IMAGE RELEVANCE policy that Alanscottwalker cites institutionalizes this generic convention within the purview of Wikipedia. “Images must be relevant to the article that they appear in and be significantly and directly related to the article’s topic. Because the Wikipedia project is in a position to offer multimedia learning to its audience, images are an important part of any article’s presentation. . . . Images are primarily meant to inform readers by providing visual information. Consequently, images should look like what they are meant to illustrate, even if they are not provably authentic images. For example, a photograph of a trompe-l’œil painting of a cupcake may be an acceptable image for [the article titled] Cupcake, but a real cupcake that has been decorated to look like something else entirely is less appropriate.”³⁰ Verisimilitude counts, but authentic truth is unnecessary in this definition. More important is the educational mission and making that education inviting and available to readers with a spectrum of learning styles.

Less important is making the project welcome to a variety of contributors who may be offended by content or accommodating a non-Western viewpoint in this Enlightenment based encyclopedia. In this exchange I have located only one participant who has suggested that including depictions of Muhammad constitutes a lack of neutrality in the form of anti-Muslim bias. A Western, presumably non-Muslim perspective is the perspective from which bias is institutionally detected and subjected to policy. This dialogue remains unresolved at this writing, having intensified in the wake of the January 2015 shootings at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a Parisian magazine that had repeatedly published cartoon depictions of Muhammad. Nearly sixty-five thousand Muslims and their supporters signed a petition asking the editors of Wikipedia to remove all images of Muhammad on the grounds of religious respect.³¹

Managing Scope: Deletionism and Inclusionism

Conflicting philosophies about most optimal and ethical scope of Wikipedia loom large in the curatorial consciousness of the community. These conflicts again reveal the potential for both constructive and destructive authorship. The contingent nature of Wikipedian policy is also evident in WikiPhilosophies, which are positions that vested community members adopt regarding how the content of the encyclopedia should be ethically managed at the macro level. A number of conflicting stances are available to community members who are invested in the broad curation of encyclopedic content in terms of scope, collaborative practice, structure, and standards.³² The two most prominent debates that have reverberated through the community over many years and reached the mainstream media are deletionism/inclusionism and eventualism/immediatism.

With sufficient curatorial contributions, platform maintenance, and server space, Wikipedia can potential expand to include articles on almost any topic that an editor is willing to write up. In many ways doing so would be the logical conclusion of the eighteenth-century quest for a universal compendium. But would an infinite resource still be a rigorously curated one? Wikipedians wrestle with this question daily, and as befits a broad community of practice, they do not always agree on what constitutes fulfillment of the pillars or how the central curatorial tenets inform the goals of the project. These differences result in the articulation of differing “WikiPhilosophies,” or beliefs about what is best for the project. For some editors public affiliation with such beliefs are central to their Wikipedian identities and thus warrant visual codification through badges that are prominently displayed on the Userboxes on the sidebar of their User page.³³ Among the most prominent of these differences are the organizing philosophies known as deletionism and inclusionism.

This fundamental conflict over what constitutes appropriately curated content has come to be known as the deletionism/inclusionism debates, which have been covered by prominent media outlets such as the New York Times. Inclusionism is “the philosophy that as much of the material submitted to the site should be kept as possible.”³⁴ Inclusionists’ rallying cry, “wiki is not paper,” refers to the nearly infinitely expandable capabilities of wikis. Because limitless growth is possible in Wikipedia (provided there is sufficient server space and power), the inclusionist philosophy dictates that the editors’ moral responsibility is to foster all potential expansion and thus provide as much information as possible across a potentially universal array of topics. Minor topics and article stubs are acceptable contributions that should remain published, in their view.

Conversely deletionists “feel that an article should be in reasonable shape and about a clearly notable topic before being included; questionable material should be deleted more rigorously.”³⁵ Their reply to “wiki is not paper” is “wiki is [indeed] not paper, but neither is it an attic.”³⁶ The somewhat ambiguous curatorial criteria of notability is generally understood as “notable to an outside observer”³⁷ and can be “determined by coverage of the topic in upstanding, independent sources.”³⁸ From the viewpoint of deletionists, a more tightly curated encyclopedia results in higher quality and consequently more authority, since labor is necessarily concentrated over a smaller number of articles. Inclusionists assert in turn that “the process of deletion carries a ‘systemic bias’ or ‘process bias’ by which the process itself becomes a haven for those who wish to use it—emphasizing deletion rather than offering reasonable alternatives for keeping or redirection.”³⁹ Deletionists’ commitments are to a more tightly curated encyclopedia that offers the best information on topics that they understand as prominent or noteworthy within the context of their worldview. They face accusations of excluding minority voices and topics on a number of levels and of destroying swaths of encyclopedic text.

While these opposing curatorial viewpoints are easily stated, they are not easily enacted. “Notability” is a primary requirement for a topic to warrant its own article and remain included in Wikipedia. The guidelines define notable topics as “those that have gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time, and are not outside the scope of Wikipedia. We consider evidence from reliable independent sources to gauge this attention.”⁴⁰ While seemingly straightforward enough, notability is a concept open to broad interpretation by users according to their own worldviews and experiences of what is important. Consequently the concept and its possible interpretations receive heavy discussion on the daily lists of articles flagged for deletion.

A number of researchers have argued that deletionism has become more prevalent throughout the project for years, and occasional categorical purges have continued. Among these are “notability purges,” such as the mass deletion of all web comic artists in the fall of 2006.⁴¹ The conflict has been sufficiently intense to spur the formation of the Association for Inclusionist Wikipedians and the Association for Deletionist Wikipedians, each with a formal WikiProject that enrolls members to patrol the site as a team for articles flagged for deletion or moved to arbitration.⁴² Not every Wikipedian has adopted a side; there also exists the Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments about the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn’t Mean They Are Deletionists. Active editors from all sides of this debate roam the text, using watch-lists for automatic notification of new edits and advocating for their side in the daily Articles for Deletion discussions. Effective rhetorical choices are vital in this forum; the deletion process guidelines note that “justification and evidence for a response carries far more weight than the response itself.”⁴³ Many pages flagged involve topics related to public entertainment: authors, forthcoming movies or video games, band reunions, less-known cultural figures, and the like. But others involve civic issues or questions concerning public memory. The outcome of these discussions is necessarily dependent to some extent on what the majority of participants find notable based on their own perspective or community identifications. A number of researchers have argued that given the heavily male and white makeup of the Wikipedian community, systemic bias is an inevitable outcome of these negotiations.

An early example of these debates is the no-longer-published page on Biloxi resident Harvey Jackson, who became the face of Hurricane Katrina for several days when, in an interview with the television network ABC, he described the hours that he hung onto his wife’s hand as they clung to a roof in the floodwaters. She was swept away from him, and, at the time of his interview, her body had not been recovered. His face and story appeared frequently in both mainstream media and citizen journalism reports on the hurricane devastation, with CNN calling him “the face of the disaster.” As the Wikipedia articles on Katrina were built in real time during the event, an article covering Jackson’s tale was created as a stub and then built out. However no such page is found in Wikipedia today; it was marked for deletion not long after its creation on the grounds that Jackson was insufficiently notable.⁴⁴ The discussion that led to this decision illustrates the messy work of textual curation in encyclopedic projects, especially one that addresses current significant events involving living people as subjects. Following are excerpted votes from the more than seventy-four cast on the deletion review for this article.

Weak delete or transwiki. Wrong project. There’s nothing wrong with the content except that it’s not encyclopedic, because nobody is going to remember Mr. Jackson in a year or two. The fact that people are voting “keep for the moment” is a perfect indication that this is transitory content: interesting now, but not for long. That makes it news, so it belongs on Wikinews. Isomorphic 04:31, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Delete. Perhaps when the Harvey Jackson Trust opens, but at the moment he’s no more notable than any other named or photographed interviewee in a disaster report, i.e. he isn’t notable. Besides, how do we know he isn’t lying?-Ashley Pomeroy 04:57, 31 August 2005 (UTC).

Merge into Effect of Hurricane Katrina on Mississippi or Effect of Hurricane Katrina on Biloxi, after Effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. Samaritan 08:00, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Delete per Nandesuka. Getting your 15 minutes of fame does not make for encyclopedic notability. Fernando Rizo T/C 16:25, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Merge into effects/media coverage. I’ve seen the clip featuring Jackson on CNN, Vesti, and ZDF, so it seems to have been one most widespread clips of early coverage, and is therefore noteworthy, but probably not noteworthy enough to deserve its own article. 66.177.132.73 08:57, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

Delete. Millions of people lose loved ones in tragic circumstances every day. The fact that a TV crew happened to stumble upon Mr. Jackson does not make him notable. Similarly, every day the news media reports on non-notable people whose lives are momentarily thrust into the spotlight. If Jackson gains notability, then we can add an article.-Cn2b 06:03, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Delete. Would Wikipedia keep an article about a Bangladeshi Harvey Jackson? We need to, constantly, be aware of the problems with Ethnocentrism and Systemic bias. -Tsaddik Dervish 13:40, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

Keep, in some way, shape, or form. When people remember events, they remember emotions. This is the most notable interview, and will likely be the best remembered, in 10, 20 years from now. -user:zanimum [no time stamp]

Eventually the article was deleted, and its removal has stood over the years since Katrina. This deletion occurred as part of the daily curatorial business of Wikipedia, which is dependent not just on gathering and filtering information before composing texts, but also negotiating cultural tenets and standards.

Another component of these discussions is article quality. The pillars make no mention of truth or facts as foundational aspects of Wikipedia. Rather they imply rigor by stating that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and the community supports expectations of rigor associated with the genre through adherence to the Neutral Point of View pillar, by insisting on notability, and by associating dense citation with quality through fact-tagging patrols. Through consistent negotiations over the parameters of content and consistent fact tagging, the community works to curate a rigorously contained and referenced encyclopedia. Given the distributed and open nature of the building process, community members are constantly asked to confront practical complications of the basic composition process. As in classroom writing, article composition on Wikipedia proceeds from drafting to revision. When, then, should an article be made public within an open encyclopedia that hopes for rigor? The affordances of the system dictate that it is immediately and always available for both editing and reference. These complications led to another ontological conflict within among Wikipedians: eventualism versus immediatism.

Eventualism, Immediatism, and the Compositional Life of Articles

The Cyclopædia articles were published fully formed. While the codex writer must submit a finished text to the publisher with confidence that it is sufficiently complete and accurate enough to stand for several years, the wiki writer plainly does not. Rather they can choose to contribute or delete as much or as little as they like to a wiki page, demonstrating an ambiguous and at times unambitious writerly agency. The low interface barrier and ethos of openness make it easy to surf into an article on a topic of interest, read through it, and think, “Oh, but I know this other fact!” Depending on available leisure time, access, abilities, and energies, contributors can click over to the page editor, add their small fact, save the page, and never come back again. Or they can spend an evening tightening the text and adding citations. They can go further and develop a more formal attachment to this page, adding it to their user account’s watch list, monitoring every change made to it and immediately swooping in to revert vandalism. They can also join a task force dedicated to strengthening the content of the broader topic area, such as the Military History WikiProject that has included the Fortification article in its purview. Any of these performances is entirely feasible, and involvement is left to individual discretion.⁴⁵ That discretion, though, is always shaped by other human and nonhuman actors.

At each level individual agency is constrained by intrinsic connections to broader project parameters and community constraints. Together individual writers are linked to the other writers, texts, social conventions, project philosophies, and technological affordances that make up the distributed model of Wikipedia. This organic network changes the composition process in significant ways from the print production model. The wide and intense collaborative performances by human and nonhuman agents mean that it is truly impossible to point to a central curator like Chambers, even if one editor did more work than some of the others. It also means that there is no unified “edition” and rarely even an obvious “draft” of an article, but rather time stamped iterations that can be changed slightly at any moment—or in the seconds that make up a moment. While individual editors perform these changes, the article is effectively written by an asynchronous swarm of agents. Wikipedia is, as both Shirky and boyd have proposed separately, a process rather than a static product. The byline that attributes each article to “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia” rather than any individual editor or WikiProject is appropriate because the articles are in fact generated by the compositional process of Wikipedia. This process includes negotiation, reversion, and vandalism—a range of performances that remind us that distributed agency is not always linear, progressive, or even generative. Because of the multilevel, structural freedom that is built into the system, the development community must constantly negotiate not just content and editing issues, but issues concerning architecture, taxonomies, metadata, and the undergirding philosophies of the project. In other words the central tasks of curation are always being socially negotiated, even though the Five Pillars provide a philosophical basis for this work.⁴⁶

While each of the Chambers articles sampled appears in the first edition as a recognizable, fully fledged article, many Wikipedia articles begin life as “stubs” that consist of only a sentence or three. A stub is a very brief summary, posted as a way of getting an article started and thus creating a page others can add to. “Stubs are incomplete—by definition, they lack something vital—but they are often useful and well written. Wikipedia disrupts accepted compositional practice by publishing what are essentially rough drafts that can consist of limited, rough text that writing teachers would consider to be freewriting or outlining. It also publishes more polished work, of course, but this incremental process of drafting and polishing very frequently happens in public and over the course of a number of years. Approximately 70 percent of Wikipedia articles are still classified as stubs.”⁴⁷ Unlike print the iterative potential of wikis allows multiple editors to make small, incremental changes to a text that add up over the life of the article. Since these incomplete pages provide spaces for continued expansion, they are officially viewed by the community as open invitations for contribution, especially by casual contributors who may happen on the page via a Google search and find that they have something to add. This sedimentary accretion of words and facts illustrates a central philosophy of Wikipedia: eventualism, “the idea that things will eventually improve if you leave them around long enough.”⁴⁸ When early detractors argued that article stubs were worthless and that errors immediately rendered the project suspect, Wikipedians argued in turn that the project was designed for long-term growth, and that slowly articles would grow and errors be corrected, leading to eventual value. The conflicting philosophy of immediatism argues that immediate value is a primary concern of any reputable encyclopedia. In this view any poorly written or insignificant articles should be immediately removed in order to protect the overall quality of the project. Immediatism is not necessarily incompatible with inclusionism; rather it holds that any contributions should be complete and properly formatted before being posted to the site.⁴⁹ Adherents argue that edits do not just affect texts but drive education and policy: “Good edits inform the public and clarify policy, leading to good editors and therefore good articles. Bad edits misinform the public and confuse policy, leading to bad editors and therefore bad articles.”⁵⁰ Texts demonstrate agency, as Campbell has argued. In the view of immediatism, each edit has suasive influence beyond the immediate argument of the article, shaping community constraints and individual performances.

Article growth since creation, sampled at two-year intervals. With the exception of the Minerals article, all articles experienced incremental growth over their life spans. The full data chart can be found in the appendix.

Despite this insistence stubs have been and remain an extraordinarily common way of starting articles. The Wikipedia articles in my sample are just such an example. Each began life as a stub, and three began with typically minuscule word counts. At this writing the articles are nearly fifteen years old—quite old in terms of Internet time—and have all grown exponentially. The first creation of the Garden article began with a single word on a page: Garden. That brief article was quickly deleted by another editor who thought it was a possible duplicate of the Gardening page, but the creator swiftly clarified the intention to create a distinct page. Both the Minerals and Trigonometry articles began with more substantial word counts, although the Trigonometry stub was immediately flagged for plagiarism, and the offending second paragraph was removed, bringing the stub start length to sixty-nine words at the second edit.

Only rarely has text growth been due to additions of large chunks of text. Rather text growth is the result of thousands of small edits: analysis of the Trigonometry article included more than 3,552 edits,⁵¹ and other edit histories are of similar length. Not all are generative, since some involve performances of vandalism that were then reverted by either human or nonhuman editors, but many contributed to the length and quality of the articles. Championing eventualism by allowing stubs to remain part of the larger text denotes an implicit trust in the power of distributed collaboration to produce textual products that improve rather than degrade over time. The “many eyes” theory developed by open-source software communities argues that open code that is made available for scrutiny by as many pairs of eyes as possible will inevitably be debugged and extended. The same is true in Wikipedia, whose open text and accessible interface makes it easy for the many eyes passing over each page to improve texts over time. Potential for these distributed performances are built into the system on both the textual and technological levels, forming the foundation of eventualism as a philosophy. This trust in the veracity of distributed compositional work and distributed agency challenges the centralized authority that has traditionally been accrued to the single, unified authorial signature that Foucault describes as an essential element of the Author function. Instead it expects textual contributions to be distributed, somewhat anonymous, and largely valid and validated. Largely but not entirely, that is, since not all performances push the project forward. Performances of rhetorical agency are not linear or necessarily generative, and the problem of vandalism has long been an area of focus for the community.

Vandalism

Vandalism is to be expected in digital texts that are open to editing without any login requirements. These days it is a simple fact of life on the web, along with the inevitability of spam. But textual vandalism is not limited to easily changed digital artifacts. It also occurred in print encyclopedias, often as intentional performances by publishers and editors who found that vandalism served their own ends. One might suppose that curators who are committed to maintaining quality and material contributors who invested in expensive projects would never have good reason to vandalize these texts, but one would be wrong. Stakeholders in print encyclopedias have not only performed strategic vandalism but also included it as a matter of project policy.

While the material production of the Cyclopædia appears to have moved forward without undue drama, it is important to note that not all possible contributions are what we would recognize as generative or necessarily even within the mission or scope of an encyclopedia that consolidates factual information. While vandalism is exponentially more prevalent in Wikipedia, it was also a possibility in the print production process. Somewhat limited opportunities for vandalism are available to both the curator and printer, should they choose to exercise them, but few professionals besmirch texts they have invested considerable effort in creating. Still some contributions are strategically mischievous, and some are strategically malign. Some are economically motivated, others produced through political or religious influence.

One common bit of mischief perpetrated by producers of encyclopedias is known as the Mountweazel, which describes a long tradition of including a false article in an encyclopedia in order to catch other encyclopedists who might pilfer the text wholesale.⁵² I have thus far found no evidence of this type of article in the Chambers, but it would not have been unlike him or his publishers to include such an item. This mischievous act is similar to common vandalism in Wikipedia involving the insertion of “misinformation” but differs significantly in its intent, which is driven by economic interests and meant to entrap unscrupulous competitors rather than purposefully mislead audiences.

A more insidious form of vandalism is censorship, which can be conveniently enacted during the production process, especially when the encyclopedist’s first view of a finished text that incorporates last-minute additions from public contributors is at the proof stage. The Encyclopédie’s fraught production process, undertaken during the French Revolution and its culture of religious and political censorship, saw one of the most famous instances of encyclopedic vandalism when the publisher, André le Breton, censored the text while the writers and editors were still working. Collison explained the ease of such censorship, given the production process:

When the galleys were returned to the printer the chief proof-reader, under secret instructions from [primary investor] le Breton, read through the text and marked “doubtful” passages for le Breton’s attention. These passages were any which in the proof-reader’s opinion laid the publisher open to action on the score of libel, blasphemy, treason, etc., . . . As Diderot never saw his manuscript again, nor the final text until it was printed, this process had been going on for some time before he noticed it, although in fact there were very few articles apart from his own and Jaucort’s which were subjected to this unofficial but no less efficient censorship.⁵³

Diderot was so outraged by this betrayal that he deserted the project, supposing that a high level of censorship had been applied throughout the texts when in fact the real impact of this unwelcome collaboration was not as extensive as he thought.⁵⁴ He was eventually persuaded to return and completed twenty-eight volumes. The Cyclopædia, being published well after the concluding years of the Restoration, enjoyed the benefits of being published in a significantly more stable era. It suffered no recorded instances of production-level vandalism. It also enjoys a material stability that is impossible for Wikipedia: the content of a fixed text can be altered only during production, in terms of adding or deleting figures, inserting misinformation or nonsense, and other text-level alterations. The text can certainly be censored and the material form broken or burned, but there is little potential to alter the words themselves after the printing and distribution processes.

A significant amount of work by both human and nonhuman Wikipedians is devoted to policing vandalism, which is one of the most deleterious differences between our two primary artifacts. The low interface barrier of wikis can be extraordinarily productive, but it also invites nongenerative and even destructive performances. Agency is not always productive or positive, Campbell reminds us: it is also “perverse, protean, and ambiguous” and “can be malign, divisive, and destructive.”⁵⁵ Vandalism is a commonplace in Wikipedia, an expected but not invited form of contribution that alters the text and demands a range of rhetorical response from editors. The result is a struggle between competing cultural ideals and discourses, between the dominant Wikipedian philosophy of constructive openness and rather different philosophies of what can be done with an open site that anyone can alter.

The Wikipedian community has from the beginning been adept at catching and reverting vandalism. Because of the vast amount of text that needs to be policed and the high incidence of vandalism, a number of nonhuman actors participate in this work. Bots automatically revert common offensive words, usually within the same minute the vandalism occurs. Editors also monitor a central, algorithmically generated watch list of suspected vandalism instances, and those who have set up individual watch lists for pages they work closely on are also notified. One of the earliest studies on vandalism in Wikipedia found that the majority of vandalism instances were repaired in an average of 2.8 minutes.⁵⁶ The 2007 study of Priedhorsky et al., which was conducted after several years of increased vandalism rates and which analyzed one of the largest corpuses of any Wikipedia study at that time, roughly confirmed the findings of Viégas et al. about repair, finding that 42 percent of incidents were repaired “essentially immediately (i.e. within one estimated view).” However, some vandalism remained unrepaired for longer periods: 11 percent of instances persisted beyond one hundred views, 0.75 percent beyond one thousand views, and 0.06 percent beyond ten thousand views. Many eyes correct many issues, but not necessarily all of them.

Vandalism is often discussed in the media as though it were a unified action, but studies demonstrate that it actually encompasses a broad range of performances.⁵⁷ Different types of vandalism shape the text in different ways, however temporarily: for example nonsense edits like “asdflkj asdf;lj” simply add clutter, while misinformation such as altering census figures by one digit deliberately subverts the goals of the encyclopedia. Full deletions of the text, while also subversive, are easily reverted with one click of the mouse, but offensive edits that are woven into the text can require closer editing to remove and potentially alienate readers who view the page version while it is posted.

Boredom is a common impetus for vandalism, along with frustration with page topics, as this instance demonstrates: Here, the original text describing the historical development of trigonometry was deleted and replaced with the declaration “Trigonometry is the work of terrorists and is frowned on by our society.”

Deletion and replacement of text in the Trigonometry article with misinformation. Image courtesy Wikipedia under CC BY-SA license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.

This page was not randomly targeted for vandalism. Instead this performance is likely the work of a disgruntled student facing down a trig assignment during an all-nighter, given the edit time of 3:56 A.M. This vandalism pointedly replaces helpful (but not vital) information on the page with an expression of dislike of the topic while simultaneously referencing the recent international concern with terrorism. This sort of vandalism to pages on common curricular topics is remarkably routine during school hours, frequently leading Wikipedia administrators to temporarily block school IP addresses.

These typical forms of vandalism have little rhetorical appeal. The actors performing them often have little investment in or acknowledgement of the Wikipedian community, its policies, or its social norms. The appeal for these performances lies in the captivating potential of violating expectations for the encyclopedic genre, leaving gobbledygook or misinformation for later readers who may expect to find a rigorously curated text. In the project’s earlier years, vandalizing pages simply in order to demonstrate the high potential for vandalism or see how long facetious edits would stand was also a fairly popular impetus, particularly among researchers and pundits who were publicly commenting on the project through blogs or even more prominent media outlets. In 2004 Internet Studies researcher Alex Halavais made a number of experimental alterations and posted a typical announcement of them on his blog. “No matter which side of the debate you find yourself on, this sounds like an interesting experiment. So, I have made not one, but 13 changes to the Wikipedia site. I will leave them there for a bit (probably two weeks) to see how quickly they get cleaned up. I’ll report the results here, and repair any damage I’ve done after the period is complete. My hypothesis is that most of the errors will remain intact. Does that invalidate Wikipedia? Certainly not! If anything, the general correctness and extent of Wikipedia is a tribute to humankind. It suggests the Kropotkin may be right: that the “survival of the fittest” requires that the fittest cooperate. It means that there are very few Vandals like me who are interfering with its mission.”⁵⁸ This sort of vandalism served a far more public purpose: that of public argument for (in Halavais’s case) or against the openness or reliability of what was then a new and contested digital resource.

Other types of vandalism serve far more rhetorical purposes, particularly during kairotic moments that receive intense media attention. This attention frequently drives real-time composition of articles that simultaneously receive high readership traffic as the event unfolds. Members of the public have taken advantage of these instances to distribute political commentary to what is perhaps the widest audience they might have access to in their lifetime. During Texas senator Wendy Davis’s eleven-hour filibuster for abortion rights in the summer of 2013, supporters around the world offered their support through social media. More than 175,000 people watched the live stream of the proceedings, and “Wendy Davis” and “#standwithwendy” trended globally on Twitter that night. One supporter edited the information box on the Wikipedia article on Davis to list her occupation as “The LeBron James of filibustering.” After the Senate changed the time stamp on the vote to backdate it prior to midnight and therefore claim that the bill had passed, Republican senator Robert Lloyd Duncan’s Wikipedia page was edited to include “Warping Space-Time” as one of his professions. Both of these humorous edits were quickly removed, but not before they were screen-capped and widely distributed in a number of time lines of the evening’s events created by prominent digital media outlets such as Slate and BuzzFeed.⁵⁹

These edits both functioned as public support of Davis: the first labels her by comparison as someone who is both a champion and a most valuable player; the second publicizes Duncan’s complicity in fraudulently time-stamping a vote. Given Wikipedia’s well-established reputation for reversion of noncompliant edits or vandalism, these contributors likely knew that these changes would not stand for long and therefore would not be part of the longer-standing record of Wikipedia except as part of the page histories. However, owing to their good-natured humor, they were captured and amplified through more permanent public records of this newsworthy event. These instances of vandalism are meant as public commentary and encouragement for larger movements and events outside the realm of Wikipedia, and these well-intentioned vandals counted on kairotic high traffic and attention for effective distribution. They may not have hoped for wide circulation, but they took advantage of the interface affordances, their understanding of Wikipedian page conventions, and the moment in order to express affiliation and support. Regardless these contributions pushed against social expectations for the encyclopedic genre, Wikipedian policies, and the seriousness of the Wikipedian community itself, and they were quickly reverted.

The ontology of these encyclopedias is complex, contingent, and riddled with competing interests and destructive performances. Collectives are productive more often than not; otherwise actors would not exert the considerable energy required to negotiate collaboration. These collectives have been extraordinarily productive, creating some of the most extensive textual products, affiliations, and policy systems in this genre. Just as often, though, performances unfold in negative ways that sabotage curatorial work and snap the loose ties of a network, driving potential actors from the project or temporarily destroying sections of the text itself. It takes not only considerable human energy to maintain these texts and communities, but also a deep reliance on the capacities of nonhuman actors.

Chapter 5 Production Collectives

Page and Screen

The curatorial skills required to transform a reference text that contains narratively arranged words and images into a useable, accessible, unified compendium with searchable content are frequently unnoticed by casual readers. This invisibility is partly due to the simple fact that solid organizational schemas and usable navigation elements such as cross-references and strategic links are largely unnoticeable when done well. Many genres are meant to be read as linear narratives that are read front to back. This is not the case for reference texts, which the reader often picks up in search of specific information. Consequently a multivolume reference work like an encyclopedia must include strategic, manageable interface elements that make the information findable and, ideally, make it easy for the reader to locate related information. These strategic links, recomposed texts, descriptive metadata, and information architectures are suasive elements that contribute heavily to the ethos of arguments, reinforce worldviews, and sanction knowledge, as Chambers’s interlinking of Newtonian topics demonstrates.

Jodie Nicotra has powerfully addressed elements of this skill set, arguing that understanding findability and information architecture as compositional skills is fundamental to teaching forms of digital literacy that account for the social, networked nature of contemporary writing. The discipline of writing studies has long been interested in rhetorical contexts of literacy, but as she has argued, familiar ways of teaching essayistic writing no longer fully account for the ways that writing is developed or functions on the web: “Now more than ever the focus is much more on the organization of the total network than on the individual producer of texts. . . . The sheer amount of information with which we’re dealing now and the medium in which it primarily occurs has perhaps given the importance of organization over individual authorship a heightened intensity. Thus, the issue of findability [and information structures] is an important one for contemporary rhetoric and composition.”¹

Nicotra focuses on folksonomic tagging in social sites like Flickr as an example of small, collaboratively produced texts that negotiate and facilitate persuasive findability. This distributed development of information taxonomies is both rhetorical and indisputably categorized as writing, She contends, creating a space for students to develop grounded understandings of audience awareness and a metacritical awareness of network participation. The labor and small texts necessary for this work are not less important or diminished writing simply because they are less visible writing. Rather the converse is true: these elements are essential for functional, networked texts and carry with them the value attached to writing-as-skilled-craft.

These skills apply equally to print and digital encyclopedias, but digital affordances render them more dynamic and more easily managed. These elements also help both writers and readers realize the full potential of digital environments. Form is a particularly powerful element of textual agency, and hyperlinks are a vital textual form that enables lively, traceable textual connections and paths for readers as well. They are also important tools for curators, since category links enable taxonomic sorting with a single click that pulls all pages with the same tag into a unified query result. The same collection of articles can be sorted in myriad ways, resulting in a variable text that can recontextualize data through juxtaposition. The potential for such serendipitous juxtaposition is as important and intentional an element of the modern encyclopedia as careful arrangement has become.

Nonhuman actors are essential for developing curation at this level, from the typographic conventions that distinguished cross-indexes in print encyclopedias to the complex, dynamic infrastructure of digital reference works. These actors enable the development of sustainable interfaces and shape the performances of readers. Two levels of interfaces are important in curatorial processes: the page or screen that the reader uses, of course, but also interfaces that allow the material production community to perform the work of preparing the curated text for use. Production workers are another crucial part of curatorial collectives, and yet, like the structural elements that they frequently directly influence, they remain largely invisible to the reader. Without their skill, labor, and coordination, these texts would largely not exist.

An exploration of the ways that human and nonhuman actors influence development of both levels of interfaces must begin with an understanding of the problems of arranging knowledge in information-rich environments and building in textual features that make the resulting information structure usable for readers. This work is undertaken not just by the curatorial communities, but in printing houses and labs, both of which make heavy contributions. Furthermore the interfaces shape not only the text but also the content contributors and the development community that supports those interfaces. All these members of the collective play important roles in the process of building encyclopedic texts and pushing them into successful circulation.

Chambers wrestled with the problems of information infrastructure during a period that was itself confronting the realities of information overload. At the same time the intensity of natural philosophy experimentation and worldwide explorations sponsored by the Royal Society produced continuous impetus for a widespread effort to taxonomize the natural world. The process of arranging the encyclopedia was inevitably intertwined with this encompassing cultural invention process, since a usable encyclopedia had to effectively and efficiently order knowledge that was being contemporaneously produced by experts in multiple fields. The organizational challenges were monumental: “Chambers had to confront the reality that Bacon himself acknowledged,” Yeo has written. “Knowledge, however acquired, had to be recorded in print in order to be available for comparison and cross-checking. . . . The progress of knowledge depended on reliable storage, retrieval, and communication.”² These problems of findability and taxonomization placed the encyclopedic author firmly within the realm of church and state, since curating this text required negotiating tensions concerning religious respect and the borders of religion and science. A taxonomy is rarely just an taxonomy; the problem of ordering knowledge bridges the questions of what is knowable and permitted to be known.

Until the early eighteenth century, reference texts were typically arranged thematically.³ Comenius’s Orbis Pictus Sensualium, for instance, contains 150 chapters with categorical divisions such as “inanimate nature” or “humans and their activities.”⁴ Other lexicons and grammars, which were often used as reference texts, followed suit, as did dictionaries. Such schemas respected the divine order of the natural world but were also necessarily vague, presenting a challenge for new readers of a text. Bacon had planned 130 sections for his own failed reference text that was sectioned in imitation of the Divine Work: Partitions of the Sciences, New Method, Natural History, Ladder of the Intellect, Anticipations of the Second Philosophy, and Active Science. While other encyclopedic projects did not mimic these divisions exactly, topical arrangement remained the standard. Chambers himself offered a map of topical divisions of knowledge in the preface.

His map shows forty-seven major areas of the sciences and arts. However, his primary goal was not classification in the sense of natural philosophy but rather “a reduction of the vast bulk of knowledge into a lesser compass.” He also demonstrated the ways that the Arts formed an important division of the Universal Knowledge that was essential to educated readers. By incorporating the arts as essential knowledge, he reinforced the title page’s claim that this work was indeed a universal dictionary.

Chambers’s taxonomy of knowledge. Image courtesy of University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center

However, Chambers did not order his text according to this map. One of his central innovations was popularizing alphabetization by individual topic as a common means of ordering encyclopedic information. Alphabetization allowed for easier rearrangement in subsequent editions that would need to incorporate new articles and account for linguistic shifts. He also became enamored of it for its arbitrary placement of subjects.⁵ The topical juxtapositions imposed by alphabetization exploded any potential linear readings of his text. Chambers cheerfully extolled the heuristic virtues of this system: “When numbers of things are thrown precariously together, we sometimes discover relations among them which we could never have thought of looking for.” This novel means of arrangement represented a significant innovation that could be read as an imposition of man’s order on God’s creation, and Chambers went to great lengths in the preface to deflect potential charges of heresy. He argued that it provided a clearer means of order for a broad reference text, especially given what he called “the present wild state” of the English language.⁶

He was the first to introduce extensive cross-indexing in an encyclopedia, thus creating a traceable information network within his own text.⁷ His primary objectives were to help guide readers to other topics in the same basic area of knowledge and in the process promote a Newtonian worldview, but he also rendered nonlinear reading an overtly encouraged aspect of working with an encyclopedia. This expectation is made clear in the instructions that appear at the end of the first volume’s front matter, which explains to the reader how to navigate the unfamiliar cross-indexing between the tipped-in images and the central text: “The figures relating to each art are placed fronting the name of the respective art, in the body of the book, and are referred to under that title as Tab.Architecture, Tab.Geography, etc. To each figure is also annexed the word for whose exemplification it serves, so that the reader may either go from the word to the figure, which exemplifies it, or backwards from the figure, to the word which explains it.”⁸

Here we see Chambers abandoning an element of authority that we commonly accord to authors of narrative texts: the ability to dictate the ways in which a reader moves through the text. The readers of the Cyclopædia may follow their interests forward or backward between figures and texts—or anywhere at all within the book, tracing the network of cross-indexes. In the second edition these pointers to other relevant topics were typographically distinguished from the text of articles by being set in capital letters. This abiding visual convention was not developed by Chambers, though: it was an important innovation by the printing house.

Printed Page as Interface

The bound book has been with us so long now that it seems natural in our everyday interactions, but it is as unnatural as any other technology, a handheld nonhuman collective. It, like all other technologies, is a situated, integrated part of human life rather than a neutral object, and an important element of authorial agency.⁹ The book is a socio-technical system, comprising not just the author and publisher but the full range of humans and nonhumans whose collaborative work is essential to the finished product and its circulation. In the case of the texts under consideration in this study, humans’ development of the bookmaking craft and, later, moveable type enabled them to reproduce large-format, multivolume texts efficiently enough that they could be distributed to the literate public through paid subscriptions—as with the Cyclopædia—rather than limiting editions to handwritten manuscripts commissioned by the truly wealthy.¹⁰

The compositional contributions of the printing house illuminate another aspect of curation that accounts for audience concerns from a somewhat different angle. In this cultural moment when the Romantic Author was not yet reified or pervasive, the composition process was understood as far more distributed than the author-focused angle that is naturalized today. When a manuscript came to the printing house, the production process was not one of “slavish reproduction,” as Adrian Johns has noted.¹¹ In her study of authorship and the early modern English text trades, Lisa Maruca has argued that “those who worked within many professions of the print trade (from printers to publishers to writers) understood books and other print products to be the result of a collaboration of many hands and the process of textual production to include not only writing but also the work—and workers of—technology.”¹²

While the text’s composer may have kept marketability and economic factors in mind entirely or not at all, the printer worked with these issues as a foremost concern. Having been commissioned by the publisher, the printer was bound in a financial agreement that focused on cost, labor, and marketability. (After all, successful sales might well mean additional printings.) The compositor, printer, and binder all worked in the service of their master, not for the writer. With the scope of their performance constrained by the economic factors of the project, they focused on creating a usable reference text with content features that could be worked with sustainably across multiple editions. The quality of the materials that made up the book were also shaped by the printer’s agreement with the bookseller and, further, by the bookseller’s success with subscribers. The visual ethos of the text would have been closely accounted for, since leather bindings or gilt titling would have contributed to a distinguished final product that was suitable for the private libraries of wealthy or professional subscribers, while the loose serialized pages were more casually presented to the lower classes. All these factors in turn shaped the prestige and reputation of both the printer and the bookseller.

The printer’s “arts,” Maruca wrote, render the text legible¹³—and, in the case of reference texts, usable. Practitioners of the trade considered themselves to be significant creative contributors to texts, sometimes to the extent that they superseded the messier contributions of the writer through their corrections. Printers shaped the central ethos of the final product in a variety of ways that are now invisible to the twenty-first-century reader. Decisions about typography and style would have been made by the publishing house and printer rather than the writer, thus demonstrating an extension of curatorial agency that includes development of the material form of the text in the curation process.

In the case of the Cyclopædia, the most evident contributions are found within technical decisions about the typeset text. While Chambers was intensely interested in the state of the English language and wrote about philological issues in the 1728 preface, there is no evidence that he directed typographical changes in his own text. These hand-set typographical alterations, which were contributed by the compositor at the printing house, were labor intensive and contributed to the project’s most basic ethos. Two primary typographic changes were made between the 1728 and 1738 editions: a shift away from Germanic capitalization and the introduction of fully capitalized cross-reference terms. The capitalization shift is evident from the first sentence in the table: “Natural History” becomes “natural history,” “Sometimes” becomes “sometimes,” and so forth. These changes alter the fundamental feel of the text, moving it from the then-typical style of Germanic capitalization to a more modern typographical style that was quite progressive for its time. In a genre that depends on cultivating an ethos of not just reliability but also timeliness, this change contributed to the text’s kairotic presentation.¹⁴ With these alterations the typesetter and printer make significant contributions to this text in ways that are quite apart from the central composition process. This labor functions as an important but largely invisible aspect of curation, occurring at a midpoint between the time the text leaves the original composers’ hands and before it reaches the binders, the bookseller, and the reader. As with practically any other stage, nonhumans—in this case the lead type, the type drawer, the composing stick, the galley, the forme, the paper, the ink, the press—play an important role alongside the human craftsman.

In the example shown in table 2, few stylistic alterations have been imposed. In the first paragraph “Mine” changes to “subterraneous place or mine.” The third paragraph has been split. What is more important, three additional indicators of cross-indexing have been added in all capitals: METAL, OAR, and MARCASITE. These changes enhance the interface that is the page by developing a distinct typographical convention that signals to the reader that there is more to be found, a path to follow, in much the same way that readers of digital texts understand that a blue or underlined word is a link that leads to another page. The move to fully capitalize cross-indexed terms provided a similar visual differentiation, setting these words apart from other proper nouns that were capitalized through Germanic capitalization conventions. This important innovation marks the visual emergence of a network within the text, explicitly inviting readers to invent individual readings.

The widespread adoption of typographically distinct cross-references as a navigational convention in the reference genre means that readers of encyclopedic texts nearly always face a different range of possibilities than do readers of prose or poetry. Many genres are designed for linear reading that begins at the start of a narrative, goes on to the end, and then stops. Any reader may determine an individual path through any sort of text: skipping the introduction, flipping ahead to find out the ending, or reading strategically for strictly informative purposes. Still our primary conceptualization of the reader is of one who reads novels, essays, articles, or poems from the beginning on till the end. However, the encyclopedic reader encounters a text specifically built to suit individual performances. One rarely reads an encyclopedia front to back; rather the usual point of entry is a topic of interest, from which the reader may continue to compose an individual, temporal experience of the text. Links in Wikipedia perform much the same function and are a fundamental feature. Similarly someone searching Wikipedia primarily for contemporary bands and movies experiences it primarily as a compendium of popular culture, following series of links that organize informational paths in what Joshua Reeves has called “flowing” media experience.¹⁵

Table 2
Parallel comparison of the iterations of the Minerals article

1728

1738

MINERAL, in Natural History, is sometimes used in the general for Fossil, and applied to any Body, simple, or compound, dug out of a Mine; from which it takes the Denomination. See MINE.

MINERAL, in natural history, is sometimes used in the general for fossil; and applied to any body, simple or compound, dug out of a subterraneous place or mine; from which it takes the denomination. See MINE.

In this sense, the Metals, Sulphurs, fossil Salts, Semi-metals, &c. are Minerals. See FOSSIL.

In this sense, metals, sulphurs, fossil salts, semi-metals &c. are minerals. See FOSSIL.

On this Principle, they divide Minerals into two Classes; the one fusible, and malleable; i.e. which melt with Fire, and stretch on the Anvil; which are what we properly call Metals. The others want those two Properties; and are what in the strict sense we call Minerals.

On this principle, they divide minerals into two classes the one fusible, and malleable; i.e. which melt with fire and stretch on the anvil; which are what we properly call metals.

See METAL—The others want those two properties; and are what in the strict sense we call minerals. See OAR and MARCASITE.

This performance is much like that of the traveler choosing a route, as Eco, Magli, and Otis have suggested: “Just as a railway system is structured in a rigid manner while authorizing different routes, an encyclopedic knowledge can be structured and nonetheless oblige the one who consults it to elaborate conjectures about the best route.”¹⁶ These individualized interests also influence readers’ experiences of becoming more active curators of encyclopedic texts should the opportunity and inclination present themselves. The encyclopedic form shapes their performances: by providing a series of textual links that can be arranged to form a path; by dictating the nature and tone of acceptable contributions; and by providing an authoritative, informative ethos that some forms of vandalism (such as misinformation) push specifically against.

Dreams of Mechanization

Cross-references quickly became the standard in printed reference texts, but the obvious potential offered by a networked system of links between related topics and the problems of print led to dreams of developing a mechanized encyclopedia. The material problems of curating ever-expanding and changing information texts suggested that developing a mechanical system that could facilitate users easily dropping in new information would clearly be worthwhile, and the incredible potential of developing personal information ecologies was certainly not lost on either scholars or the military-industrial complex. Forward-thinking individuals kept searching for ways to develop a mechanized reference system, rhetorically positioning the idea as a liberatory expansion of educational access. Another common selling point was the ways a mechanized encyclopedia would help humans move beyond the temporal limits of printed texts. It was not until the release of Encarta in 1993 that a fully technologically networked encyclopedia would be successfully launched, but a number of individuals made proposals for such texts in the intervening 265 years that elapsed since the first edition of the Cyclopædia. The first modern proposals for such an encyclopedia came from a man well known for futuristic technological dreams: H. G. Wells.

In 1936 and 1937 Wells delivered a series of lectures on what he called “The New Encyclopedism,” a centralized, curated collection of the world’s knowledge that he claimed would enable mankind to enter a new age of peace. Later collected in a volume entitled The World Brain, these lectures describe in detail what such an encyclopedia might look like:

A World Encyclopædia no longer presents itself to the modern imagination as a row of volumes printed and published once for all, but as a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified, and compared. It would be in continual correspondence with every competent discussion, every survey, every statistical bureau in the world. . . . This Encyclopædia organization need not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network. Quite possibly it might to a large extent be duplicated. It is its files and its conference rooms which would be the core of its being, the essential Encyclopædia. It would constitute the material beginning of a real World Brain. . . . If such a thing is to really live it should grow rather than be made. It should never be something cut and dried. It should be the survivor of a series of trials and fresh beginnings—and it should always be amenable to further amendment.¹⁷

He pointed to microfilm, which the American Library Association had just endorsed in 1936, as the mostly likely physical material for such a project.¹⁸ While he cast the project as proletarian in both scope and access, he nevertheless recommended retention of a “directorate and staff of its own type, specialized editors and summarists.”¹⁹ Still the World Brain would differ from previous encyclopedias written “by gentlemen for gentlemen” and be distributed as widely as possible all over the world. The volumes would be in constant cycles of revision and replacement, continuously redeveloped and redistributed as textbooks, dictionaries, and shorter reference works for “individual and casual use.”²⁰

It was not long before another inventor offered a somewhat more compact model for a networked encyclopedia. By the time Vannevar Bush published his 1945 proposal for the Memex as a solution to information overload, he had been considering the problems of managing substantial amounts of military information for some time. He began to formulate plans for a semiautomated system a few years before World War II, when he served as head of the National Defense Research Council (NDRC) and later the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).²¹

His Memex would be an infinitely expandable, interlinked series of microfilm cards projected onto slanted, translucent screens. The economics of production had finally advanced enough, Bush noted, that long-hoped-for machines such as calculators and computers could finally be produced on some marketable scale in the near future. A cheap, reliable machine should be able to provide a solution to the problem of directly linking a primary text with the reader’s ancillary notes. A simple algorithmic indexing system would connect the two and be controlled via a keyboard, buttons, and levers.

The resulting system would be an “enlarged intimate supplement to . . . memory.” It would also readily lend itself to hyperlinked cross-indexing: “Whole new forms of encyclopedias will appear,” predicted Bush, “ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the Memex and there amplified.”²² Users would be able to purchase some content—books, periodicals, and newspapers—from companies and drop them into the system. Business correspondence could be inserted as well, and “direct entries” would also be possible. The Memex was widely discussed but never went into production. Still many historians have suggested that it clearly influenced early developers of computers and the Internet, particularly J. C. R. Licklider and the ARPANET research team, who continued military research that led to the first digital transmissions.²³

One of those early adopters, Ted Nelson, launched what would become the most extensive (but ultimately unsuccessful) attempt at a digital encyclopedia prior to Wikipedia. Nelson has been actively developing Xanadu since 1960, when he envisioned it as “a simple-to-understand electronic publishing system for the world, and a new technical way of simplifying and improving the world’s storage data.”²⁴ Nelson aspired to develop nothing less than a hypertextual system that would store, index, and facilitate publication of the entire world’s literature, and his concept is alternately cited as an early draft for both the World Wide Web and Wikipedia. He was insistent that the project would also facilitate a system of automatic micropayments to authors/creators in exchange for reuse or quotation of their work. While his stance was vehemently anticopyright—he felt that anyone should be able to publish information—it was just as vehemently pro–intellectual property in this requirement for payment. Tim Berners-Lee, in his account of meeting Nelson, suggests that this insistence on a pricing structure that was consistent worldwide was one of the reasons that Xanadu never succeeded.²⁵ Nelson put together a project team in 1979, made the preliminary design public in 1981, and pressed ahead with the database structuring. The project was acquired by Autodesk, which invested an estimated US$5 million before discontinuing its sponsorship in 1992.²⁶ It has since largely languished, although Nelson continues as the project evangelist and launched a 2014 version called OpenXanadu.²⁷

Each of these unsuccessful projects represents a situated desire for a networked encyclopedia that is articulated within the potential and needs of its time. Whether they sought to manage government documents or literature, each of the proposals addressed the exigencies of information overload and explored potential collaborations with nonhuman actors that could facilitate a means of distributing and managing information for as many users as possible. In every case interfaces have been a crucial factor in the success of networked encyclopedic projects.

Wikipedian Interfaces, Development, and Curation

Building a digital encyclopedia that is sustained on multiple levels by digital networks demands an even more extensive collective that includes hardware, coders, and robots. These actors mark significant, obvious differences in the Cyclopædia and Wikipedia while also connecting the latter to the precedents set in the eighteenth century. Rather than relying on publishing houses, printers, bookbinders, and typesetters for material production and ethos, this digital encyclopedia depends on strict server maintenance, standards-compliant code, well-developed visual templates, and other central aspects of site management and architecture. It also takes advantage of the potential for automated management by deploying a vast array of bots to handle textual production and management, including surveillance and correction of vandalism. All these actors are essential and interdependent, just as important as the human editors who receive most of the credit for creating Wikipedia.

Wikis have been in active use since the Portland Pattern Repository’s companion website, WikiWikiWeb, was established by Ward Cunningham in 1995.²⁸ Cunningham named his platform after the Hawaiian term for “quick,” “wiki wiki,” and built the original wiki interface around design principles that facilitate what has become known as the wiki philosophy: open, organic, mundane (simple), universal, overt, tolerant, observable, and convergent.²⁹ In keeping with these principles, the markup of wiki text does not require the user to know standard HTML or other markup languages. Instead wikis have historically relied on a simplified system of wiki code, which the backend system converts to HTML and uploads. This low interface barrier is intended to invite updates by a new and casual users who do not necessarily know or wish to learn standard coding languages.

Wiki platforms are fundamentally networked on several levels: physical, intertextual, and social. Since they rely on a database running on a central server that supports access by multiple users, a wiki can exist only in a digital environment.³⁰ Users move within a loose, organically changing network of intertextual and interpersonal connections, particularly in larger wikis like Wikipedia.³¹ The looseness built into these designs enables radical collaboration, “because of [their] total freedom, ease of access and use, simple and uniform navigational conventions, and apparent lack of formal structure.”³² Digital rhetoricians have noted that individual and community ethos in digital environments are also influenced by technology itself, and that this ethos has the potential to shape human-computer interaction³³ and form a barrier for users.³⁴ This contention applies equally to wikis and the confluence of technologies that operate within them. The low interface barrier and basic wiki design principles influence and are influenced by the community ethos and recursively shape the labor at hand.

As with the printing houses that produced the Cyclopædia, the coders of Wikipedia represent multiple communities who make contributions to the form of the text as well as particular aspects of its content. Since the development of digital tools does not rely on the time-consuming and costly process of material manufacturing, which demands additional craft knowledge and skill sets, it has also been possible for discrete groups within the coding community to devote their efforts to developing tools that better facilitate workflow, limit server downtime, and even write the encyclopedia itself. The Wikipedian coding community has from the beginning been both broad and collaborative. It is composed of limited staff working with many volunteers in yet another example of commons-based peer production.³⁵

In the same way that the printers of the Cyclopædia were responsible for a number of genre conventions and for the ethos of the typesetting, Wikipedia’s coders are also responsible for many of the features that have come to be associated with the genre of the Wikipedia page template: the easily navigable static sidebar, content boxes with section links, and the information summary box that appears at the top right of each article.³⁶ The development community rolled out the platform’s categorization system in 2004, bringing site-wide, hyperlinked taxonomy within reach.³⁷ The use of automatically implemented templates standardizes the visual ethos of the encyclopedia, enhancing perceptions of reliability and authority.

The front page of a Wikipedia article, with page tabs at the top.
Image courtesy Wikipedia under CC BY-SA license.

Wikipedia’s interface presents a powerful example of the social, articulated nature of interfaces. MediaWiki, the open-source wiki platform that powers the encyclopedia, is a multilayered interface with tabs for reading, editing, and discussing the topic of each page, as well as for automatically archiving all activity on the article since its inception. Over time the interface itself has been rearticulated to better facilitate the labor it enables, illustrating Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s contention that “the interface is not simply a tool, but a structure for work—a set of forces articulating a specific form of work, a set of forces articulating work.”³⁸ In this case the work at hand is textual curation. The Wikipedian development community has customized the MediaWiki interface to better facilitate distributed curatorial work.

The design and deployment of the wiki backend and interface necessarily shape both contributions and community. Any registered user—human or nonhuman—can perform direct action on the text, adding new information, removing contributions, inserting images, video, or sound, linking to other texts, or contributing a dizzying array of other potential changes. Users can communicate directly on the Talk page for each article or leave notes explaining changes. The richness of this environment demands strong curatorial skills that are specific to the potential of digital environments. Curatorial skills reach beyond basic editing to address the scope and infrastructure of large texts in specific ways: project management, strategic linking, and creating metadata. Many of these tasks entail what the community calls wikification, or “formatting according to Wikipedia style.”³⁹ Wikifying can include converting plain text to hypertext, adding interwiki links, or restructuring the articles into the usual article format of an overview followed by subsections, as well as the specific tasks mentioned above. Done correctly these curatorial elements create a text that is not just well written but well structured, composed of multiple potential paths that are both findable and usable.

The Edit page for for an article, showing simplified wiki code. Image courtesy Wikipedia under CC BY-SA license.

The interface features that are visible when readers first click through to an article have changed little. The Article, Talk, Read, Edit, and View History tabs are typical across wiki platforms. The Edit Source tab was added after the development of the Visual Editor in 2012. Article and Talk are the two primary layers of any article, allowing the reader to move between two interactive experiences: consumption of multimodal text and social consideration of the text. Users click on any of the four tabs on the right side of the tab bar to read, edit, or view the history of either the article or the related editorial discussion.

For many casual users of the encyclopedia, the Article view is the only view they ever notice. Many never click on any other tab. Barry Newstead, Wikimedia’s Chief Global Development Officer, has estimated that 90 percent of users outside Wikipedia’s “core community” never realize that the pages are editable.⁴⁰ Attracting new editors is a constant challenge owing to the fact that many simply never realize the potential for individual participation exists. Those who do choose to contribute are asked to work with a bare-bones interface that presents them with simplified wiki code.

While the interface presents familiar, simple icons that most editors have encountered in other interfaces, it still serves as a barrier to developing a diverse collective. As Adam Banks has argued at length, interfaces are inevitably rhetorical, evidencing cultural norms and literacies in ways that invite participation from those who identify with these norms and whose prior literacies lead them to intuitively navigate these interfaces.⁴¹ Wikipedia’s long-standing core community demographic of wealthy white males with considerable backgrounds in gaming, coding, and digital communities had proved unsustainable, making diversification necessary for not only ethical but pragmatic reasons.

Wikipedia’s Visual Editor interface, which offered a more welcoming WYSIWYG option for casual editors. Image courtesy Wikipedia under CC BY-SA license.

A primary difficulty presented by the editing interface is that it requires editors to work directly with code, however simplified. Wiki code is considerably simpler than other coding languages, but it still requires contributors to cross the barrier of reading and using markup within their written text. The learning curve is low, but learning—that links require double brackets, to give just one example—is still a sufficient barrier for many busy or distracted users. It requires time to figure it out, and many casual contributors with very limited leisure time simply do not have that time. This requirement limits the contributing community in ways that only strengthen the exclusionary aspects of the community, since women and other underrepresented demographics are the potential contributors most likely to have limited time and, possibly, limited digital literacy or access. The substantial heaviness of the platform also limits contributions by editors who use mobile phones as their primary computing device, as is frequently the case in African nations. The interface is intended for editors working from desktop setups or laptops with more screen real estate and, optimally, a mouse.

The Wikimedia Foundation recognized the rhetorical effects of the editing interface a number of years ago and prioritized replacing it with a visual editor that would offer a default WYSIWYG option for editors. “We must adapt our editing technology to the changing web, improve the social experience for new users and grow participation in the Global South,” announced the 2009–10 foundation report.⁴² The interface update was part of a multifaceted strategy for attracting fresh editors to the project.

With one-click formatting options, new users no longer encountered the initial barrier of integrating wiki syntax with their text. Developers thought that users with basic digital writing experience involving blogs would find the interface particularly comfortable, as it mimicked popular blogging platforms such as WordPress. The older, syntax-dependent editing system was retained under the Edit Source tab as a way to appeal to more experienced users who considered themselves to be experienced Wikipedians or core users. A number of other changes also furthered the goal of making the psychological and practical transitions to editing more appealing to readers: adding a multimedia uploader that mimicked common conventions of other familiar uploader utilities, ongoing live usability testing that resulted in minor tweaks to interface aspects throughout the entire workflow, and rhetorical revisions of single-sourced review messages that experienced editors working with the Page Patrol initiative send to those working on newer pages.

The Visual Editor implementation was met with dismay by the core community, who found that it deleted or mangled their edits during the posting process. Their demands to remove the interface were initially rejected by Wales, who was adamant that the Visual Editor was central to a new, more inclusive ethos that Wikipedia would have to embrace in order to continue to grow. A few weeks after the launch, German Wikipedia editors rebelled, and communities from other nations followed. By September 2013 the Visual Editor had been moved to opt-in status—and in order to opt in, users had to know it was available. Newcomers who were unfamiliar with the options were effectively limited to the older, code-based interface that had proved to be prohibitive to participation, and the hoped-for change in the ethos of the editing interface was tabled.⁴³ This design element is one of many reasons that the editing community has not expanded since its peak year, 2007.

However, the communities that remain continue to be productive. This productivity is localized in smaller communities formed around curatorial tasks, as, for example, the Military History group has.⁴⁴ This group is typical of the thousands of interest-based groups that have sprung up within Wikipedia, most of which are dedicated to mundane, necessary topics that individuals find some passion for. I focus on this sort of group because it exhibits aspects of the incremental activity that drives iterative expansion in distributed authorship rather than the swarming behavior that is more typical of topical areas that are currently in the news or subject to popular controversy. This group’s page announces that its members are “dedicated to improving Wikipedia’s coverage of topics related to military history” and openly invites participation in improving any of the more than one hundred thousand articles within the scope of the project. This sort of loosely directed curatorial effort is the foundation of growth within the system.

For subject-area communities, the job of producing relevant texts serves as a central impetus. This group’s community page announces that its members are “dedicated to improving Wikipedia’s coverage of topics related to military history” and openly invites participation in reaching any of its current four major milestones: having 750 of its articles approved for featured article status (77.7 percent complete), achieving five hundred items of featured content other than articles (80.2 percent complete), improving two thousand of its articles to “good” status (90.8 percent complete) and having at least 10 percent of its articles rated B-Class or better (79 percent complete).⁴⁵ Each of the classifications is linked in order to better direct members; for instance by clicking on “featured articles” the reader is taken to an alphabetized list of articles on military history that need improvement.

The community has organized departments devoted to assessment, motivational contests, coordination, and incubation of new groups and initiatives within the project. The hyperlinked task list directs community members to lists of articles needing specific types of curatorial work: references/citations, accuracy, structure, integration of photographs, tagging, and assessment. An extensive list of “Articles to Be Created” provides starting points for editors who prefer to start from scratch. As is typical of most groups, the group maintains an Open Tasks page listing articles that need general or specific improvements. Many of these improvements focus on wikification: 35,972 articles need work on reference or citation, for instance. Others need work on “coverage or accuracy,” “structure,” and “photographs.” At this writing, the assessment list was backlogged, as was the list of articles that needed project tags fixed. The page also lists content currently under various sorts of review: peer reviews, “good” article candidates, featured article candidates, and the like. These task lists highlight the community’s focus on curatorial tasks as essential to community standards of good composition and point community editors toward these tasks as priority items. This sort of broad yet detailed project management functions as the topmost level of curatorial work: defining the parameters of a project and identifying the work to be done.

Interested editors self-select to contribute to these pages, making additions that they feel qualified to offer. A significant proportion of the work involves wikification, particularly in the form of link management. In my limited sample, link management was the most common task performed. As is the nature of wikification, this work was not limited to concerns about the written text of the articles, but rather to linking those articles within the variable network of the encyclopedia.

Insertion, deletion, and maintenance of interwiki links made up the highest proportion of tasks in the sample. Links to other pages within Wikipedia serve as digital forms of the cross-indexing, encouraging readers to linger in the text and create their own contingent experience by writing paths within the network. For example at this writing the Fortification article has been edited forty-eight times to add links to other article pages, and only one link was removed. It is a typically densely interwoven hypertext with multiple links in nearly every paragraph, offering the reader a quick leap to topics as diverse as Sumer, Oppida, the Yongle Emperor, and Concrete. Additionally it offers an extensive list of other relevant pages in the “See also” section, as is typical in many established pages. Aside from offering pathways to readers, this dense interlinking serves an internal rhetorical purpose: hailing the editors of related pages to encourage collaboration and return linking, both of which attract increased attention to the article. Algorithms facilitate this identification: the “what links here” function on each page automatically compiles incoming links for review.

The addition of category links further strengthens ties within the network on both textual and social levels. These links appear at the bottom of each article, providing users with a means of navigating by topical area instead of searching for individual pages. These taxonomic links are a core element of the system’s information architecture, so important that a substantial WikiProject focuses solely on their maintenance. On the Fortification page, heavy editors of the topic did not insert the category links, which were instead added by members of the Categorization WikiProject.⁴⁶ In the process of working through that WikiProject’s task list, these editors often by necessity deal with article topics that they are unfamiliar with, and occasionally this leads to conflict. For example the Falconry article is currently categorized as “Falconry” and “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity,” but at one time it was also categorized under “Blood Sports.” The core page editors, who included several experienced falconers, took issue with this categorization and removed it, leaving the note “Blood sport? wtf?” There was no further conflict, and the edit has stood for some years.

Implicit moral or ethical judgments are not uncommon in taxonomic systems, as a number of scholars have noted. The same was also true of this exchange in the Gardens article, which features a list of gardens mentioned in famous literary works, including religious texts. The title of this list underwent some revision early on, beginning its life as “Gardens in fiction.” On April 2, 2004, the editor Fennec changed it to “Gardens in fiction, religion and myth” because of concerns about alienating audience members. This editor noted, “Watch what you call ‘fiction’, people are liable to get upset:).” While the edit imposes change on a previous writer’s work and the tone of the note is rather terse, the note also explicitly works to avoid conflict through the use of a concluding smiley. The edit also moves the title toward a more typically encyclopedic description. There was no overt conflict in the history or discussions over this edit, but at some point in the life of the article the list title changed again. It currently stands as “In religion, art, and literature.”

Another prominent category of interwiki links is links to the same article in Wikipedia translation projects. This link form builds a digital network between the various language versions of Wikipedia, increasing the chances of non-English speakers locating the article in their own language after being directed to the English version by, say, a U.S. Google search. These links offer an invitation to underrepresented editors and readers, rhetorically positioning Wikipedia as an international community that does not wall off the prominent, largest version—the English Wikipedia—from the other 288 official Wikipedias.⁴⁷ Building paths that encourage international contributions also encourages translation work as well as potential diversification of viewpoints.

Finally external links in the Reference section of each article provide pathways to cited resources. These links enhance the logos of pages, providing verifiability for claims made within articles and discouraging contributions of original research. These links require several sorts of curatorial labor: verifiability assessments ensure that citations are in place and linked; link bot patrols flag broken links for replacement; and both humans and bots monitor links for spam or link farming. This work, along with the link maintenance previously described, tightens the connections of a monumental network to a plethora of texts and entities both within the project itself and on outside web pages. Taken as a whole, these connections coalesce into an articulation of Wikipedia’s place as a public resource that exists firmly within the open culture of the web rather than in any specialized educational environment.

Encouraging and facilitating rigorous curatorial practices is so important to the maintenance and quality of Wikipedia that the Foundation supported the development of the Page Curation tool suite in 2012. This interface provides experienced editors with a feed of new pages and a curation toolbar that facilitates more efficient review of articles. For the first decade of the project, page patrollers relied on algorithmically generated feeds of new pages and used third-party applications for more efficient curation of content. The new interface provided a centralized dashboard for flagging curatorial issues on pages or offering Wiki-Love as a reward for carefully curated work. Sending WikiLove in the form of a personal message or by awarding community recognition in the form of Barnstars, Kittens, or other award badges that are posted on the recipient’s User page is a way to offer positive reinforcement to newer editors for their contributions. Wikipedians hope that these sorts of rhetorically situated welcoming moves will encourage retention of new editors and, consequently, extension of the community.

Wikipedia’s Page Curation toolbar with single-sourced message tags for a broad variety of curatorial situations. Image courtesy Wikipedia under CC BY-SA license.

The Javascript panel “enables editors to retrieve basic information on the page’s creation and status, mark a page as reviewed, tag it, mark it for deletion, send WikiLove to page creators—or jump to the next page on the list.”⁴⁸ Curatorial management of links is sufficiently central and important that tags concerning link issues constitute four of the seven most common practices: correct URL usage, additional footnotes with attendant links, additional references with related links, and category linking. By clicking the box to the left of each problem description, experienced editors can efficiently leave tags to instruct page contributors regarding improvements that will bring the page up to project guidelines and thus invite continued contribution, encourage additional readership, or, depending on the editor’s philosophical leanings and the state of the page, avoid deletion. The ease of this interface encourages curatorial work within the system by lowering the learning curve, lowering frustration with third-party workarounds, and improving the amount of curatorial work that can be accomplished in one sitting.

The Curation Toolbar also formalized curation as a core term in Wikipedian nomenclature. Until at least 2010 curation was not a common descriptor of the labor that occurred within Wikipedia; most tasks related to the construction or maintenance of articles fell under the umbrella heading of “editing.” Many of the tasks that the Curation Toolbar renders explicit are those that have been prevalent in the system for many years: basic editing, metadata development, sourcing, interwiki linking, categorization, monitoring compliance with the neutrality policy, and monitoring vandalism. By making the work of maintaining not only the text but also the structure explicit, it acknowledges the centrality of this compositional work. Integrating the terminology also rewards editors who have historically invested extensive time and labor in curatorial work, especially during years when the expansion of the text received considerable media attention while structural work was rarely remarked on at all.

Curation badge available to editors who review newly created articles with the Page Curation tool. Image courtesy Wikipedia under CC BY-SA license.

At the same time, curator badges became available for inclusion in Userboxes, offering a way to signal affiliation in the same way that other badges signal WikiPhilosophies. These badges explicitly articulate these tasks as central to the labor of maintaining a rigorously constructed encyclopedia. By publicly identifying themselves as Curators, self-selected Wikipedians lay claim to a broader skill set that includes editing but also extends beyond it to the tasks of wikification and quality control. Displaying one of these badges also advertises the potential for doing this work, allowing a point of entry for the new or the curious who may inquire about what it means to be a curator or who simply look it up themselves.

These curatorial skills and tasks demonstrate the relationality of human and nonhuman friction within these projects. The text, the tools, and the human all come together in order to compose a useable reference work that simply would not be possible without these distributed performances. The contributions of nonhumans are apparent at each level of this process, as they are necessary for the construction and sustainability of any interface, whether it be print or digital. Nonhumans assist in building and maintaining. They shape paths and barriers for human movement through a text and into a community through small and often unnoticeable textual elements such as links and cross-references. As vital as those contributions are, these actors still have more to offer: the autonomous construction, maintenance, and surveillance of texts.

Chapter 6 Automated Curation

Bots are perhaps the central innovation in digital encyclopedic production, representing a significant departure from the production logistics involved in composing print encyclopedias. More than 1,700 bots currently perform a wide variety of writerly tasks in Wikipedia, which is an environment particularly suited to them. The Wikipedian community and audience work alongside bots that consist of automated applications, usually built from a simple scripting language, which execute basic actions when triggered by specific input. The exigencies of information overload and human frailty in the form of short attention spans, error-proneness, and slowness provide impetus for their presence and labor in this particular situation. Bots can handle these tasks more efficiently, more consistently, and more correctly. While they indirectly shape textual production by freeing up human contributors to concentrate on higher-order concerns, they themselves also directly alter the physical and topical scope of the text by composing and editing text, inserting images, maintaining links, and monitoring human activity.

Their automated labor makes possible the inclusion of entries on less-popular topics such as small towns. The time-consuming tedium of gathering such specific information on hundreds of towns, cities, counties, or parishes and then composing individual entries on each one was simply beyond the reach of a writer working by hand, and so no major print encyclopedias included them.¹ Successful planning and execution of an encyclopedia requires a focus on managing breadth so as to result in a useful product. Devoting compositional energy to minor town data takes both time and energy away from creating articles that a wider spectrum of readers might find useful. Additionally the practical considerations of print production make updating specific, quickly outdated information such as census numbers a time-consuming and expensive task that is slow to see distribution. In contrast the affordances of a digital, real-time encyclopedia mean such updates can be made without physical or opportunity cost—and without much human effort.

The human effort involved in collaborating with bots is largely confined to three activities: initial design and development, policing activity, and fixing or updating bots as they experience breakdown or complete their tasks. In each of these stages, human intention and initiative are evident. At deployment bots become proxies that sally forth on their own, carrying out human intention but exerting their own agency that is both productive and occasionally perverse. They also demonstrate the recursive properties of articulated agency through instances of breakdown, repair, and repurposing. As they interact with humans, technologies, texts, and a variety of community attitudes toward automated processes, they serve as one of the most striking examples of distributed authorial agency within the system.

Nonhumans have always been with us, and we have always worked with them, whether we acknowledged it or not, as Bruno Latour has argued extensively over the past quarter century. Now those of us who work with words are working alongside bots more each day. We are so accustomed to relying on automated algorithms such as spell-check or search engines that we barely give them a thought. Most writers have also been working with intelligent agents in one form or another since Microsoft launched Windows 97, which included Office Assistant. This version introduced the all-too-familiar animated helper Clippy, which constantly inquired as to whether human users needed help and then accessed answers from a database as required. When Google Wave launched in 2009, full-fledged bots were built-in composing elements, accessible from the GUI. The world was not ready for Wave, which Google discontinued development on in 2010. All current indications are that most casual users still aren’t quite ready to push a button and knowingly loose a bot on our texts. But corporations are: robots developed by the company Narrative Science² routinely contribute articles on stock fluctuations to Forbes and write data-driven pieces for prominent newspapers like the New York Times. In 2014 the Los Angeles Times was the first paper to publish a story on an earthquake thanks to a bot that posted the story three minutes after it happened. By late 2014 Wired reported that bots now outnumber humans on the web, accounting for 56 percent of all website visits.³

Questions about automated authorship have concerned intellectual property specialists for decades, since a paper on the subject appeared in the Journal of the Patent Office Society in 1969.⁴ Related articles on legal aspects of automated authorship continue to contend with the inevitable issue of nonsentient agency, which has no legal precedents.⁵ It is certainly not too early to consider the implications of automated writing agents. Their collaborative presence will only become increasingly pervasive in composing environments, just as it continues to become ever more present in our daily lives as we come to rely on prescriptive bots like iPhone’s Siri to help manage our daily affairs.

Bots have served as the material originators, composers, and editors of thousands of articles, performing work that is essential to the ever-broadening scope of digital encyclopedias. The article on Darwin, Minnesota, a town that is home to the Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota, serves as a microcosm of these automated performances and points to some pressing questions about the specific form of rhetorical agency performed by nonsentient entities. I suggest that these bots are actors that, through interaction with each other and with humans, demonstrate rhetorical agency.

Historical Context

Humans have sought this sort of automated help for millennia, although our efforts at design and deployment of robotic assistants have more often than not fallen short of our goals. The earliest recorded successes in developing automated tools to mark or keep track of information were water clocks, which were built in Babylon and Egypt in the sixteenth century B.C.E.⁶ The Greek engineer Ctesibius used his extensive knowledge of pneumatics and hydraulics to design a fanciful and complex water clock that incorporated automated moving figures circa 270 B.C.E. Hero of Alexandria, who extended Ctesibius’s research in his handbooks Automata, Pneumatica, and Mechanica, wrote the first documentation on workable robots aside from mythology.⁷ The Antikythera Mechanism, a differential gear arrangement for calculating astronomical information, is thought to have been built around 87 B.C.E. These mechanisms for calculating information form just some of the early products of what Kevin LaGrandeur has called “a very old archetypal drive that pits human ingenuity against nature via artificial proxies.”⁸

Most automatons, such as Ctesibius’s moving figures, were intended primarily for decoration, entertainment, and occasionally education. This remained true well into the twentieth century, when Disney Theme parks’ animatronics served all these purposes simultaneously. However, as Jonathan Sawday has written, in the Middle Ages automatons also became integrated in narrative tropes of wizardry, magic, and natural philosophy. Automatons that served as oracles were attributed to figures such as Albertus Magnus, whose automaton was purportedly destroyed by Thomas Aquinas as a device of the devil. Stories of brazen heads who functioned as oracles appeared in continental tales, demonstrating the desire for automatons who could not just perform or calculate, but invent and bestow information.⁹

The Enlightenment saw an increased interest in automatons. A prominent early example was Vaucanson’s Duck, created between 1733 and 1739. This duck-shaped robot was purported to move, eat, and defecate by use of an automated digestive system that was shown to be a hoax. Still Vaucanson displayed the duck in Paris and then toured throughout the major cities of the continent and on to England, sparking the public’s modern fascination with automatons. In her visual history of automatons, Frances Terpak has argued that “the ingenious mechanical workings of such frivolous automata were appreciated not only by the general public but also by the scientifically inclined,” who appreciated an opportunity to educate themselves on innovative mechanisms¹⁰ and occasionally used them for educational and research purposes. Chambers found the topic significant enough to include a brief article “Androides” in his 1728 edition, describing it as “an Automaton, in figure of a Man; which by virtue of certain Springs, &c. duly contrived, Walks, Speaks, &c.”¹¹ He referenced Albertus Magnus and mistakenly cross-referenced it to an article titled “Automaton” that did not actually appear in the edition.

Engineers had better luck with simple automatons that could aid in textual reproduction. The first manual for a pantograph, which enables a human user to trace a 3-D object onto a flat surface, was published in 1631 by Christoph Scheiner, a German Jesuit and professor of mathematics. He had purportedly learned of the device thirty years earlier from a painter living in southern Germany. Terpak has written that “even though the pantograph produces only an outline of the original . . . its precision and efficiency presented a major breakthrough for the reproduction of images.”¹² This machine accomplished work only through the simultaneous movement of a human user.

The eighteenth century saw the development of writing automatons that performed on their own but could create only text that included short, preprogrammed sayings or drawings. One of the first such devices, built in 1753 by Friedrich von Kanuss, consisted of a metal hand that emerged from stylized smoke to write six lines of text in four minutes. Other writing automatons typically were built as seated, articulated dolls that were programmed by stacked cams, such as Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s “The Scribe.”¹³ Other drawing automatons were programmed to create portraits of royalty and presented as political gifts to those depicted. These robots existed primarily for entertainment and could only repeatedly scrawl their programmed texts. They neither educated their audiences nor produced information.

In the twentieth century, the military-industrial complex heavily sponsored development of intelligent systems and basic artificial decision making. This technology was also deployed in the private sector in industries as diverse as paper-making¹⁴ and air traffic direction.¹⁵ The advent of the web made simple automated coding available to anyone with sufficient access and knowledge, and bots have become a vital element of the Wikipedian infrastructure.

Bots in Wikipedia

Perhaps the most well known of the Wikipedia bots is RamBot, named after Derek Ramsey, who created it in 2002 as an out-of-work computer science graduate from RIT.¹⁶ He noticed the dearth of articles on towns and cities and surmised that most of the information needed to build out these texts could be found on the Census Bureau’s website. He also noticed that many casual editors were reluctant to create a brand-new article page and hypothesized that creating a series of basic article stubs would encourage them to start contributing to articles on places. After creating the first three thousand county articles by hand, he turned to the daunting task of creating 33,932 city articles. Inspired by other bots already handling small tasks within the system, he wrote his own script to handle the entry creation. During the week of October 19–25, 2002, Rambot completed all the city articles. As Andrew Lih noted in his history of Wikipedia, that week saw the first mass article creation in the project’s history, which extended the then fifty thousand article project by 60 percent. However, the community reception of this development was mixed: “Others viewed his work as an abomination—an unintelligent automaton systematically spewing rote text, fouling the collection of articles. Wikipedia was supposed to be a project started by humans and controlled by humans. Was an article where every other word was a number or a statistic a well-crafted start or a data dump?”¹⁷ Eventually the community reached a consensus about the value of the work; the articles have stayed intact ever since.

As of this writing, 1,724 bots work on Wikipedia, performing a surprising variety of tasks that were formerly the exclusive domain of humans who were expected to use their critical judgment and authorial agency to responsibly attend to these duties.¹⁸ Since its initial contribution, Rambot has been updated with functionality to improve existing entries with some intelligence.¹⁹ Plans are underway for the Rambot Translation Project, which will translate all Rambot articles into other languages for inclusion in other language-based Wikipedia editions.²⁰ Other bots work to discipline human users. SineBot monitors human identity by adding {{Unsigned}} and {{UnsignedIP}} tags to unsigned edits, adding signatures when unsigned users can be traced, tracking recurrent violators through their IP addresses, and placing warnings on User Talk pages if behavioral problems persist. They also “report vandalism and suspected personal attacks to antivandalism IRC channels.”²¹ According to its User page, SineBot has made more than two million “contributions” to the system as of this writing. SpellBot, another prominent bot in the project, corrects common typos with the aid of humans who approve its edits. An army of other bots manage interwiki links, tags, and redirects as well as perform general maintenance tasks such as resetting sandboxes.²² Still others monitor the Recent Changes stream, reverting pages that have been vandalized.²³ These particular bots search for anonymous edits, which are statistically more likely to be vandalism, as well as words from a list of common sophomoric terms (for example “poop”). Lih estimates that bots have “helped tremendously by catching well over 50 percent of the obvious vandalism.”²⁴ And finally bots act as archivists, handling automated archiving for heavy-use pages such as the Help Desk.²⁵

Automated Agency

The problem of accounting for nonhuman agents and their agency is challenging. With the exception of work by Miller, Cooper, and Rickert, most studies of rhetorical agency have limited considerations to humans. Indeed this is how we culturally approach such questions: from a human-centric viewpoint. In the current prevailing understanding of this problem, nonhumans, which are always understood as objects, simply do not have the capacity for agency. Accordingly our understanding of what might constitute performance is tied to the human: speech, gesture, and texts with an attributable author who assumes responsibility. But these bots function as attributable authors generating texts that function persuasively within a socially constrained network of agents and texts. Further they themselves shape the texts written by humans, repair human mistakes, and otherwise function in many ways as active parts of the community (although not in deliberative capacities.)

Latour offers the hybrid as a term for understanding the ways that humans and machines working together can accomplish things neither could as separate, unarticulated actor. In his example, a gun held by a human becomes a human-gun hybrid that is capable of acts that neither actor might accomplish alone. This model represents the physical unity of the tool-in-hand, creating a contingent third actor. While bots and their coders never physically touch, the writing and launch of a coded entity creates a third actor that is the deployed code, writing that lives and performs in ways that are very different from text on the page. This writing is transformed into an actor that accomplishes curatorial work that neither its author or its unlaunched code could accomplish alone. It is also an actor with a recursive life cycle that incorporates the potential for destruction as well as generative potential, for breakdowns, adaptations, and redeployments.

Extended Description

1. Coder: Creative Labor Craft leads to Community (1), Intention/Delegation, Design/Deployment Process, and to Agency.

2. Community (1) leads to Coder: Creative Labor Craft and to Intention/Delegation.

3. Intention/Delegation leads to Community, Coder: Creative Labor Craft, Design/Deployment Process, and Bot: Compositional Labor and Agency.

4. Design/Deployment Process leads to Coder: Creative Labor Craft, Intention/Delegation, Agency, and Recursion.

5. Agency leads to Coder: Creative Labor Craft, Design/Deployment Process, Bot: Compositional Labor and Agency.

6. Bot: Compositional Labor and Agency leads to Intention/Delegation, Agency, Community (2), Editors, Readers, Bots, Infrastructure, Shutoff, and Recursion.

7. Recursion leads to Design/Deployment Process and Bot: Compositional Labor and Agency.

Articulated process of design, deployment, performance, and either shutoff or recursion.

The bot’s performance and agency must be considered within not just the technological, social, and textual environments that it operates within, but also in terms of its design and deployment. Without a human coder, there would be no bot to begin with, and the two actors engage in what Amy Propen has called the “co-construction of agency.”²⁶ Accounting for the coder also allows us to separate the two kinds of work that are involved in this assemblage: creative work and compositional work.

Compositional work is most often understood as creative labor to the extent that it is naturalized in the terminology we associate with writing: “I majored in creative writing,” or “We have a creative nonfiction speaker series.” But in the case of a bot who writes, these two types of work are distinct. The creative labor is performed by the coder as he or she designs, develops, and tweaks the bot itself. The bot’s human creator is also a textual curator and a very specific sort of writer: one who writes code that is constrained in mundane ways by community rules, the limits of the technological environment the bot is built within and built for, and the coder’s knowledge and skills. Coding is a craft, one that on its good days demonstrates clear artistry through elegant syntax and work-arounds. Intention also resides with the coder, who builds the bot for specific purposes and tasks: after all, a bot who searches for typos does not have the same purpose or functionality as one who creates maps. The bot itself, being nonsentient, demonstrates intention only by delegation. The sentient decision-making process of figuring out how a bot might best be used within the system, the rhetorical process of seeking community approval, and the creative process of writing the code that “hatches” the bot all point to a different performance of agency than that demonstrated by the bot, who performs the actual work and thus drives material change within the system.

Once it is deployed, the bot performs its own agency as it carries out its tasks and interacts with other actants who may be community members, editors, readers, other bots, textual features, or elements (bots, linkages, photos) and layers (code, servers, databases) of the technological infrastructure that is Wikipedia. Wikipedian bots perform the process of encyclopedic composition, making limited decisions of the sort that place them a bit above Latour’s famous door opener. They compose articles by inserting census data into a predetermined script. They decide whether or not they will perform a given task, such as reverting a vandalized page, or as to whether or not a particular word is a typo that should be fixed. Then they decide the most appropriate solution for the problem at hand (for example a choice between two or more possible word spellings). These bots react to their environment, initiate action with it, and affect change both within the texts and sometimes within the broader scope of the project, as when Wikipedia rather suddenly expanded exponentially to cover thousands of towns.

When we examine an article’s primary text, it is not immediately apparent which text was written by humans and which was written by bots. Which sort of writer contributed which text can be discerned only by careful reading of the page history. Still the work of the bot is never completely black-boxed because its activities are tracked on two levels: the page history of each article that it impacts, which is available to anyone with access to the article, and the activity history of the bot itself, which is available to the coder. Its performance also appears in project logs available to curators who devote their time to tracking vandalism or spam, close copyediting, and other projects that bots contribute to.

Emergency robot shutoff button for RussBot. Image courtesy Wikipedia under CC BY-SA license.

As it performs its tasks, the bot possesses the potential for perverse performances of agency, which invites a clear social response through the quarantine procedures imposed by the Wikipedian community. Because of their capacity for unique and unintentional action, bots are quarantined, tracked, and approved by the Bot Approvals Group (BAG). As the Bot Guidelines note, “because bots are potentially capable of editing far faster than humans can, have a lower level of scrutiny on each edit than a human editor, may cause severe disruption if they malfunction or are misused, and are held to a high standard by the community, high standards are expected before a bot is approved for use on designated tasks.”²⁷ An unsupervised bot can wreak havoc in the text and leech necessary resources from the infrastructure. In order to prevent these blunders, strict rules govern their editing speed. A bot performing high-priority tasks is permitted to edit once every four seconds; lower-priority task bots may edit every ten seconds. Lower speeds are required during typically high-use periods: Wednesdays, Thursdays, and between 1200 and 0400 UTC on any given day. Wikipedian bots may be trusted to perform essential tasks, but they were quickly deemed sufficiently untrustworthy so as to require an Emergency Robot Shut-Off Button on their individual User pages. When Wikipedia Labs launched, bot hosting transitioned to the Labs servers in order to lessen the potential for negative impact on the larger system.

Automated performances of agency have the potential to move a project both forward and backward, occasionally taking a good portion of the larger system down with it. The bots’ performance of agency during a malfunction is not equivalent to the large-scale oppression Campbell mentions in her discussion of malign performances, but it is harmful to community morale, its creator’s social capital, the articles impacted, and potentially entire project sectors or servers. A bot suddenly run amok can hobble the entire system as it slows servers and archival processes to a crawl, frustrating human editors. Bots’ unique agency can also be used for purposefully malicious tasks such as spreading spam on targeted entries or committing more malevolent acts of vandalism. And the possibility of complete and sudden shutdown through human intervention is always within the realm of possibility during these automated performances.

Recursion is a necessary event in this loop of labor and agency when we consider the case of a writing bot with the capacity to continue running as long as the technological infrastructure supports it. If and when a bot comes to rest, so to speak, it is typically for one of four reasons: it has been shut down, it has completed its current tasks, it has been taken down temporarily for tweaks, or it has been decommissioned. In each of these cases, there is a consolidation of full agency to the coder, who must either reprogram the bot for a new task set, make necessary changes/repairs, or decide to leave the bot deactivated. This return reunites the bot and coder in the creative work of the design and development process, where intentions may be reconsidered and redelegated. After these creative issues are resolved through the coder’s skill and craft, then the bot is deployed again for another cycle of compositional work. There exists the potential for a nearly eternal return, since these bots, being lines of code, do not have material aspects that can corrode or degrade. Their code may become corrupt and require fixing, or their servers may be shut down—as might Wikipedia itself, for that matter. But barring these catastrophic events, the bot exists in a recurring loop of deployment, labor, and return, maintaining a discrete agency that intersects with other agents along the way.

Identity and Attributed Agency

This division of not just agency but also identity between the bot and its maker has not always been clear, and both aspects have been negotiated over time by the Wikipedian community. The controversy surrounding Rambot’s initial deployment also inspired policy discussion about Wikipedian identity, since Ram-man originally ran the bot under his own user ID. As a result during this initial run it was impossible to differentiate his own edits from those made by Rambot. A new policy emerged that mandated separate user names and pages for bots, and the Wikipedia policy on bots continues to make a strict distinction between the human user who creates a bot and the bot itself. Bots are required to have their own names and User pages (hence RamMan’s bot’s user name is RamBot), thus assuming identities that are textually equivalent to human users. Their scripts must be able to leave notes and comments akin to the ones human users leave when making an edit; that is, an automatically logged signature and a cordial description of the changes made.²⁸

These naming conventions, along with award practices, provide a compelling illustration of not just the ways that rhetorical agency is articulated, but also the rather surprising extent of nonhuman performance found within the text. Considering the sort of agency a bot might demonstrate is a peculiar task, given the fact that as a society, we are generally reluctant to formally admit any attribution of agency to nonsentient actors. However, daily attributions of agency to nonhuman objects are common in everyday life, as Latour (writing as Johnson) also has pointed out in his discussion of “gremlins”: “we are constantly granting mysterious faculties to gremlins inside every conceivable home appliance, not to mention cracks in the concrete of our nuclear plants.”²⁹ We talk regularly to our computers and cars and are not uncommonly convinced that they answer back. Miller and others have also noted that certain humanoid characteristics of expert systems and intelligent agents facilitated easy attribution of agency by the humans they interacted with.³⁰ As a result human users frequently develop personal relationships with them, especially if the agent convincingly simulates true interaction, as with the MUD softbot Julia, who convincingly conversed with other system users.³¹ This act of attribution, Miller suggests, is a necessary condition for agency “because it is what creates the kinetic energy of performance and puts it to rhetorical use. Agency, then, is not only the property of an event, it is the property of a relationship between rhetor and audience. . . . We understand agency as an attribution made by another agent [emphasis original], that is, by an entity to whom we are willing to attribute agency. It is through this process of mutual attribution that agency does, indeed produce the agent.”³² Part of our willingness to attribute agency must indeed be simple anthropomorphism. However, we are also accustomed to nonhuman actions shaping our lives (as when a computer crashes close to a deadline) and accustomed to resisting the constraints they impose (as when we admonish our students that a crashed hard drive does not warrant an extended deadline).

While attribution is an important rhetorical element, it is not a requirement for agency: these objects perform agency and shape the environment around them whether or not humans decide to recognize it. Subaltern groups also do not require attribution or recognition by dominant communities for their performances of agency but instead rely in some instances on shielding themselves from attribution through the use of hush-harbors and similar safe spaces. That aside, human acts of attribution have the potential to reveal quite a bit about the ways in which we live with technology differ from the things we are willing to admit believing about technology. For example this quote from a Wikipedian discussing the impact of Rambot reveals an attribution that is not unlike the ways that we might describe any technological intervention that spurs invention in writing. Editor Meelar agreed with the assessment of Ram-man (Rambot’s creator) that providing article stubs for each town increases the chance that users will build them out, since the practice removes the slightly intimidating barrier of starting a new page in Wikipedia.: “The point is that I wouldn’t have bothered to write any of my contributions, and probably many other users wouldn’t either, if Rambot hadn’t given me a starting point and some organization.”³³

Notice that Meelar, who is aware of the process that led to these articles being created, does not attribute their creation to Ram-man. Faced with a choice between attributing authorial agency to a human or a faceless bot with no ingratiating characteristics, he says that Rambot gave him a starting point and imposed organization, thus shaping his own actions. Another similar instance of attribution is the Barnstar award on Rambot’s User page. The award reads, “For the seemingly impossible amount of useful, accurate, and completely unbiased articles you have created and continue to update, despite being one of the youngest contributors to Wikipedia, I award you with this special Barnstar Award, the Tireless Contributor Barnstar. Batteries not included.”

Barnstar awards represent community acknowledgment and appreciation of individual Wikipedians who demonstrate outstanding contributions to the project. This particular Barnstar notes Rambot’s adherence to socially negotiated community guidelines through creating “useful, accurate, and completely unbiased articles.” Note that through this award’s placement on the bot’s User page, it directly celebrates the bot’s contributions rather than its creator’s; no such award has been presented on Ram-man’s User page. Similar awards appear to be fairly common on bot User pages. For example the vandalism-reverting VoABot II’s User page is littered with ten awards for its actions: seven Anti-Vandalism Barnstars, two Defender of the Wiki Barnstars, and the WikiChevrons for protecting articles on the main page. Only two additional awards were clearly meant for its creator: a Surreal Barnstar for creating the bot and a Da Vinci Barnstar from a user who clearly addressed the developer by saying, “I am very impressed by your bots and software work.” The Bot-Builder award’s title indicates it is also meant for the coder, but the language commends both builder and bot: “On February 27, 2008, VoABot II fought off six repeat vicious vandalism attacks on the Wikipedia entry-Ukraine. [sic] The response rate was exceptional, under 1 minute. As a creator of this defending machine, you are bestowed this ‘Bot Builder Award.’ Much thanks from the Wikipedia community.”³⁴ Bot and bot creator are both commended for fighting off vandalism attacks, but one entity is acknowledged as the coder who performed the craft/work of building the bot, which in turn performed the actual work of fighting vandalism. This attribution implicitly acknowledges a distinction between the different forms of creative and compositional work performed by coder and bot respectively. Other examples further demonstrate the extent and types of work performed by automated writers.

Bots at Work

The specific rhetorical situation of the small-town Wikipedia articles affords text written primarily by bots, since these articles tend to attract so little human attention. This heavy ratio of bot-generated text is not necessarily true of all town entries. For instance the article on Syracuse, New York, has followed a very different trajectory from its creation. As a far more populated town, its article saw immediate human involvement as well as continuous human-driven additions and improvements. However, the questions that interest me do not revolve around the central features or compositional life of a town or city article, but rather around the special technological affordance of using bots to write such articles and the sort of agency they demonstrate. Therefore I focus primarily on the Darwin, Minnesota, article because it is typical of many articles for small U.S. towns that rarely capture the public’s attention and consequently see little human editing.³⁵

Primary text of Wikipedia article on Darwin, Minnesota. Image courtesy Wikipedia under CC BY-SA license.

As seen in figure 12, the primary text of the Wikipedia article on Darwin, Minnesota, is brief and basic. It contains only essential statistics on the town’s location, population, geography, and demographics. We learn that the city has a total area of 2.15 square miles and that Darwin’s 350 residents use U.S. Route 12 as the main route. In the 2000 census, the median household income was US$34,286, and 10 percent of the population lived below the poverty line. When the 2010 census information was automatically integrated the income information was not updated, but the bot-written update included the fact that 96.9 percent of the population identified as white. Despite the article’s eleven years of existence, we learn nothing of Darwin’s primary industry, of its celebrations—nothing that cannot be found in census stats or other government data, because human editors have not added this sort of information. Until 2012 no information regarding the Twine Ball, the town’s most significant claim to fame, appeared on the page.

Discussion page for Darwin, Minnesota, article. Image courtesy Wikipedia under CC BY-SA license.

Regardless this article is inarguably a coherent text that has been created within a prescribed textual and rhetorical situation. The composers of this article are participating in a larger community and structure and have produced an article that is meant to invite reciprocal participation from that community. It meets the Wikipedian article conventions of including a descriptive title, the standard project byline, and an introductory overview followed by subsections and a list of references. A map and at-a-glance subject stats are listed on the right-hand sidebar, as they are for all town entries. The tone of the text, while dry, is unbiased and straightforwardly informative, meeting the community’s symbolic constraints of neutral point of view and no original research. The strategic, fairly dense inclusion of interwiki and external links not only provides pathways for human readers but also increases page rank for search engines. The Discussion page shows that there have been no backchannel discussions about the content of the Darwin article.

On October 30, 2007, an anonymous visitor inquired as to the origins of the town name, but no reply has been offered as of this writing. The article has been flagged as being “within the scope of WikiProject Minnesota, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of articles related to Minnesota on Wikipedia.” Visitors are invited to contribute to this curatorial project, and the article has been rated as “start-class” and of “mid-importance” to the project. So far this appears to be a sleepy little entry. But over on the History pages, we find a surprising amount of activity: sixty edits at this writing, thirty-five of which were made by bots. The initial article creation is credited to Ram-Man, but that edit was actually made by Rambot, since the bot was still running under the human user’s name at that point. Through attention to edit history details, it becomes evident that not just one but thirteen other edits involve bot-written article creation in other Wikipedia translation projects.

The English text itself has been largely bot-written from its inception: the initial article consisted of 358 words, and as of this writing, the article stands at 678 words. In other words approximately half of the article text has been in place since the first bot-written draft. Judging merely by sheer textual bulk, we might conclude that this article has been effectively created by bots. However, a closer look at the edit types tells us more about the specific sort of work that has happened here.

The article has been edited fifty-eight times during its decade-plus existence, and thirty-four of those edits—59 percent of the total—have been performed by bots. Analysis of the edit types in this article, noting which were performed by humans and which by bots, reveals the extent to which bots perform originary, compositional labor that goes far beyond simple correction of typos or reversion of vandalism to include entry creation and deletion, image additions, fact checking, categorization, interwiki linking, and updates to the text itself.

Bots and humans rarely perform the same edits in this article, with the exception of fairly simple curatorial tasks: the addition and correction of facts, and maintenance of categorization. Bots handled the majority of tasks associated with building an entry from the ground up: initial creation, translation into other languages, formatting with templates, adding images, adding information boxes, and both adding and updating facts. Humans categorized the article topic under “Cities in Minnesota” and “Meeker County, Minnesota” and added and updated images and some facts. They also performed minor edits, template tweaks—and, perversely, vandalism.

Fifty-one percent of the twenty-nine human edits to this article were either acts of vandalism or reversions of vandalism. Most involve humans vandalizing the entry by tinkering with statistical information and then other humans reverting that vandalism. Some instances of vandalism may or may not have been malicious: the January 3, 2007, instance simply involves an editor typing “afdsfasdf asdf,” which may merely indicate a user who was exploring the ease of editing a wiki and was unaware that such activities should be confined to the user’s sandbox. This sort of edit would not automatically trigger a ping to the vandalism activity lists, and so this activity was not reverted until five days later. (The proximity to a major holiday may also have to do with the slowness of this reversion.) In 2011 an unregistered user drastically lowered the population data and inserted claims that “the entire city of Darwin was created by Delton Voigt, who also invented Pop-Tarts” and that the town claimed the world’s largest Pop-Tart and also to own Russia. These edits were reverted the same day.

The agency humans deployed in their edits demonstrates the protean possibilities for its deployment: they spend much of their energy twiddling, squabbling, and undoing additions without contributing significantly to the piece. They tweak numbers to disseminate misinformation and then effectively cancel each other out; they type randomly and then leave, never returning to add meaningfully to the page. Although the reversions, minor edits, and fact updates that humans performed did unquestionably contribute to the quality of the article, they do not consistently demonstrate the sort of productive text building that bots do in this article. Almost all the generative textual work, additions of images, and information updates to this article were done by automated actors and have been for more than a decade. The same is true of innumerable other articles in this encyclopedia.

Can this automated labor be described as authorial invention in the rhetorical sense? Clearly when Rambot was deployed for the initial creation these articles, it brought many texts into being that did not previously exist. However the bot never browsed other city entries, realized that Darwin was missing from the master list, and decided to create an article on that topic. We cannot claim that the bot worked through the gritty cognitive moments of conceiving of a topic, applying its own originality or intellect to the process, and then writing an entry with all the starts, stops, twists, and turns that we associate with the writing process. Nothing about this fits our definitions of human invention. Rather the bot ran its script, pulled in the information it was directed to access, and plugged that information into the spaces where it belonged. Other bots came along because this article was in their prescribed path and performed the duties they were directed to pursue.

The compositional work these bots do constitutes persuasive rhetorical performance, although the process necessarily looks rather different from human performances. As the bots performed the work of building this article, they ran algorithms and scripts. They did not make cognitive choices about words based on flow or sound or other stylistic implications. Rather they followed a series of if-then sequences in order to determine if there were typos to be corrected or vandalism to be reverted. They did not design the visual aspects of the page to meet their own aesthetic standards but instead applied a template and placed illustrations in the prescribed sectors of the page. And in performing these compositional tasks, they did not learn new skills or hone existing ones. Instead they did what they were built to do and moved on. They did not conduct creative work, but yet we have here cogent articles that contribute to and shape this textual project. But none of these factors mean these bots did not possess and perform agency; they point, rather, to our own refusal to attribute agency to nonhumans.

Wikipedia’s writing bots actively create and correct text. They interact with each other and with humans as well as with the larger technological infrastructure. Their uncreative compositional work directly shapes and extends the existing encyclopedia, and they are more consistent and productive in this labor than most human contributors. This work extends beyond mere compilation and involves some of the most vital tasks of textual curation: management of metadata, internal and external links, maps, and facts. In the case of this article, bots performed a good portion of the heavy lifting of composition and are largely responsible for the existence of the text.

Automated composing agents are a welcome, long wished for change for overwhelmed encyclopedists as they face down the anxieties of information overload and the formidable pragmatic challenges of curating an ever-expanding text. The creation and deployment of bots by expert coders provide a view into real uses of automated composition. They also demonstrate the articulated nature of rhetorical agency as this complex balance of intention and performance shifts between creator, who performs the craft and creative labor of coding, and bot, which performs the compositional work. Both forms of labor are vital in the development, deployment, and execution of automated curation.

Conclusion

Perhaps more than any other genre, encyclopedias demand the work of a collective in the fullest sense of the term. As the limits of the genre stretched during the early modern era to hold the universe that “universal dictionaries” gathered and sold, so too did the physical books that contained them. By then the known world had grown so large that no single person could hope to master all areas of knowledge, although one could still create a successful career in natural philosophy that combined the arts, craft work, and what would eventually be known as science. Composing a reference text required careful consideration of existing literature and information gathered from one’s contemporaries, recomposition of those gleanings into a new, coherent text, and the creation of a useable information architecture and interface. The nature of this curatorial work demanded that the author relinquish some degree of authority and collaborate extensively with amanuenses, publishers, societies with vested interests, and the craftsmen of the printing house. At each turn humans and nonhumans worked together to produce the material form of a text that was physically large, heavy, and dense.

Not much has changed, and yet everything has changed. Dynamic textual curation of complex information ecologies is no longer the future, as it was when Wells, Bush, and Nelson proposed their plans for a mechanized encyclopedia. Nor is it something that happens only within specialized collectives such as Wikipedia. It is simply what writing looks like now, particularly in large, open, digital texts: real-time collaborative practices that manage expanding and contracting texts with nearly infinite information capacities. It is writing that hums with life as texts are gathered, filtered, and recomposed, as links are made and tightened within a network, and as information structures are erected on constantly unfolding scaffolds. The humans and nonhuman actors that come together in these projects collaborate, argue, facilitate, vandalize, revert, police, send money, print pages, and build interfaces. Above all else they contribute.

At their best they curate, delivering usable, structured information in the best ways they can by working with the tools that they have, creating texts that take full advantage of the possibilities offered by digital environments. Lunsford described this potentiality some time ago in her discussion of the broadened dynamics of digital writing: “It is as though our old reliable rhetorical triangle of writer, reader, and message is transforming itself before our eyes, moving from three discrete angles to a shimmering, humming, dynamic set of performative relationships.”¹ Curated texts and the collectives that produce them exemplify these performative relationships, which are centered in the curated product itself, in the functions that networked, informative texts (whether analog or digital) should perform and help users perform. The small and often invisible texts that make websites functional are essential elements that help us realize the fullest potential of digital environments. These aspects of functional digital composition and compositional labor help us better account for the full range of skill and labor in new media writing in our classrooms, in our research, and at our own desks.

Curatorial work challenges comfortable notions of what constitutes authorial agency, autonomy, originality, and authority. By inviting the crowd as collaborators, either through use of prior texts or through direct contributions, curators surrender claims to original genius in favor of the powerful potential of distributed collaboration. The cumulative knowledge and labor of contributors enables exponential development of not just knowledge and texts, but also interfaces and technological actors, which in turn also contribute to the product. This openness brings with it the inevitability of destructive performances, whether in the obvious form of vandalism or in the development of systemic biases, heavy policy structures, and exclusionary discourse that narrow collectives and texts. This distributed authorship disrupts notions of the Author as a distinctly generative construct that brings forth rather than destroys. Understanding agency as the potential to act and be recognized requires acknowledgment of destructive performances and ambivalent, mutable texts that change over time as new performances are layered on top of old. The decentralization of authority within these distributed collectives renders visible the kinetic energy of rhetorical agency. Agency is a potentiality possessed by no single actor, but created through the friction of human and nonhuman actors composing, building, negotiating, reading, finding.

The work and life cycle of nonhuman writers offer a particularly clear demonstration of the ways in which authorial agency is articulated among multiple agents: humans, nonhumans, the community, socially negotiated expectations, the text, and the technology. They also experience recursion, returning to its coder for repairs, updates, revision, and redeployment. Understanding the work of writing an encyclopedia as distributed rhetorical performances by both human and nonsentient agents demonstrates its inherent dependence on interactions that function as points within a larger articulated structure.

Accounting for nonhumans in models of rhetorical action has the potential to enrich our understanding of fundamental aspects of rhetoric itself. Traditionally our discussions concerning rhetoric—even rhetoric and technology—have proceeded from a human-centered approach. This has produced human-centered conclusions, as one might expect. It has also produced questions that have been largely concerned with ways of developing rhetorics of technology rather than asking how technologies themselves affect us, work on and through us, and are themselves persuasive. Shifting the balance toward a more equitable emphasis on the ways that we live and communicate alongside machinery opens space for us to think more broadly about rhetoric itself, the ways it develops, and the ways that it fundamentally functions.

Appendix

Article Growth over Time, Sampled at Two-Year Intervals

Title

Creation Date

Initial Length

2003 Length

2005 Length

2007 Length

2009 Length

2011 Length

2013 Length

2015 Length

Falconry

1/16/03

21

21

3,551

5,962

6,076

7,602

8,177

8,791

Fortification

3/31/03

32

32

1,049

2,215

3,486

3,939

5,562

5,861

Garden

2/27/02

1

701

945

1,353

1,393

1,696

2,487

2,506

Minerals

12/12/01

236

1,038

1,533

2,581

2,698

4,280

12,563

12,646

Trigonometry

9/8/01

157 (69)

532

935

2,188

2,240

2,452

2,403

2,848

Notes

Introduction

1. Wells, The World Brain.

2. Bush, “As We May Think.”

3. Nelson, Literary Machines 93.1.

4. Woodmansee, “Genius and the Copyright,” 38.

5. LeFevre, Invention as a Social Act.

6. For an extensive treatment, see Maruca, The Work of Print.

7. I do not substantially address related external elements such as juridical factors, for instance, or the role of the authorial signature within print economies. Relatedly, because of the encyclopedic reader’s active contributions, I do not consider the reader an “external factor” or an entity that the text is bequeathed to after publication, especially in digital contexts.

8. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation; Gitelman, Always Already New; Pingree and Gitelman, “Introduction: What’s New about New Media?”; Kaufer and Carley, “Some Concepts and Axioms about Communication”; Park, Jankowski, and Jones, The Long History of New Media.

9. Standage, The Victorian Internet; Stubbs, “Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions.”

10. Blake, “Zograscopes.”

11. Schiavo, “From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision.”

12. Bazerman, “The Case for Writing Studies as a Major Discipline.”

13. Bekman, Johnson, McEvoy, Hostetler, and Trapani, “Curating the Crowdsourced World.”

14. “Community-Curated Works.”

15. Rosenbaum, “Can ‘Curation’ Save Media?”

16. A. Williams, “On the Tip of Creative Tongues.”

17. In addition to the primary suspects that I discuss here, some examples include information architecture, which has become an established field of study over the past two decades, and metadata, which now sees dedicated graduate-level courses and is rapidly becoming its own area of specialization.

18. Both fields increasingly offer focused certification in digital curation. See Johns Hopkins University’s Certificate in Digital Curation offered by their Museum Studies Program and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s similarly named certificate, as well as interdisciplinary programs at the University of Maine, UC Berkeley, San Jose State, and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

19. “Curation.”

20. Boylan, “The Museum Profession.”

21. Ibid., 418.

22. Harvey, Digital Curation, 8. An important aspect of curation that I have not mentioned in this study is preservation, for reasons related to both disciplinarity and space. Preservation of digital media artifacts is a core skill taught in each curation certificate that is currently offered in the United States. The scholarship in this area largely stems from library science, which offers wonderfully pragmatic work on dealing with the very real problems of file degradation and technological obsolescence in media-rich collections. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s award-winning Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination offers an English studies perspective. His attention to affordances of media storage devices makes a persuasive argument for continued attention to the material conditions of preservation.

The field of rhetorical studies has much to offer this area of inquiry, especially in investigations of technological affordances for preservation that are commonly deployed in distributed collaboration systems. Wikipedia preserves not only a record of every edit since its inception, but also a dynamic file of every single iteration of every single page that has existed in the system at any point in time. This vast record offers not just one of the world’s largest banks of data on distributed collaborative practices, but an incredible open archive of material for investigations into rhetorical aspects of automated, iterative, public preservation.

23. Johnson-Eilola, “Among Texts.”

24. Lunsford, “Writing, Technologies, and the Fifth Canon,” 171, emphasis mine.

25. The two encyclopedias I examine are slices of time in a long tradition of reference texts that stretches back to antiquity. As Bernadette Longo, Pamela Long, and others have argued extensively, the handbook tradition represents an important early development in both technical communication authorship and reference texts. Reference genres stretch back at least to the Phaedrus (370 B.C.E.) and Protragoras, (380 B.C.E.), which functioned as proprietary resources for rhetorical education. During that same century, Iktinos, the architect of the Parthenon, collaborated with Kallikates on an architecture handbook that became a central resource in that field. In his foundational history of encyclopedias, Robert Collison acknowledged the first Roman encyclopedia as Cato’s Paecepta Ad Filium, introduced in 183 B.C.E., but Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis (77 C.E.) is still widely considered the first major Western encyclopedic work. Despite the single authorial name it is attributed to, its development was also supported by a network. The encyclopedist’s nephew, Pliny the Younger, later described his uncle’s activities to a correspondent, noting the multiple laborers that contributed by reading passages aloud to the encyclopedist, taking dictation and notes, and performing other secretarial duties, as Long describes. However, Collison also has pointed to the Ikhwan al-Safa’s Rasa’ulu Ikhwan al Safa, which appeared in 980, as “the first example of collaboration in encyclopedia-making” (41–42). The collaborative nature of both of these texts demonstrates that even before the onset of early modern information overload, the immense work of composing large reference texts demanded the labor of more than one person.

As the centuries progressed, the major world cultures each produced their own extensive encyclopedias; perhaps the most prominent were the Chinese Huang Ian and the Arabic Kitab ‘Uyun al-Akhbar. The British came rather late to the genre when the Scottish monk Richard of St. Victor compiled the Liber Excerptionum. In 1380 the Strasburg abbess Herrad produced the Hortus Delicarum, a scientific and theological compendium, which is commonly considered the first encyclopedia produced by a woman. The transition from scientific compendium to the modern encyclopedia was bridged in 1315 with the Compendium Philosophiae, and the term “encyclopedia” entered the lexicon with Paul Scalich’s encyclopedia, Seu Orbis Disciplinarum, slightly more than two centuries later.

26. Sandler, “Notes for the Illuminator.”

27. Daly, Contributions to a History.

28. Collison, Encyclopedias, 99.

29. Ibid.

30. Espinasse, “Ephraim Chambers”; Kolb and Sledd, “Johnson’s ‘Dictionary’”; Mack, “The Historicity of Johnson’s Lexicographer.”

31. Greenberg, “Laurence Sterne and Chambers’ Cyclopædia.”

32. Hillway, “Melville’s Education in Science”; Leonard, “Descartes, Melville, and the Mardian Vortex.”

33. Mott, American Journalism.

34. Donnelly, “Jefferson’s Observatory Design.”

35. Collison, Encyclopedias, 119.

36. Sanger, “The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia”; Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution.

37. Giles, “Special Report.”

38. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment.

39. For in-depth examinations of the historical development of this ethos in very early Internet communities, see Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; and Rheingold, The Virtual Community.

40. For more on the historical development of copyright and copyleft arguments in the United States, see Litman, Digital Copyright; and Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs. For examples of the popular arguments that drove the expansion of Creative Commons licenses in the first decade of the twenty-first century, see Lessig, Free Culture. For more on the argument for open access, see Willinsky, The Access Principle. For more on pragmatics of open access, see Suber, Open Access.

41. Hawhee and Olson, “Pan-historiography,” 93.

42. Cowper, A Prospect of Gray’s Inn, 141. Cowper provides a consolidated history of the inn from 1506 until the 1980s.

Chapter 1: Distributed Curatorial Practices

1. Chambers, Cyclopædia, xxix. Emphasis in the original.

2. Ibid.

3. Chambers, “Preface,” a.

4. Chambers, “Preface,” xxix.

5. In pursuing this practice, he adopted a policy similar to Wikipedia’s “no original research” policy.

6. Chambers, “Preface,” xxix. His argument prefigures Thomas Jefferson’s more famous 1813 contention that “he who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air . . . incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation” (Writings 13:333–35). An essential difference is Chambers’s focus on textual borrowing and Jefferson’s arguments for limited ownership of patents in developing nations in order to promote cultural and economic growth.

7. See U.S.C. 17 §101. He also made no claims of ownership on the prior texts or the information conveyed by them, instead focusing his claims entirely on the text at hand, a move that is also in line with our legal conception of derivative works.

8. Chambers, “Preface,” xxx.

9. Chambers, “Preface,” i.

10. Chambers, “Preface,” xxx.

11. Chambers, Cyclopædia, i.

12. For more on the nomination of professional men and the intersections between the Royal Society and the more egalitarian membership of the United Grand Lodge of London, see Berman’s comprehensive study, Foundations of Modern Freemasonry.

13. Chambers, “Considerations Preparatory,” 3

14. Chambers, “Considerations Preparatory,” 4.

15. Macbean’s dates of service to Chambers are not known. He was later an amanuensis to Samuel Johnson. See Seccombe, “Macbean, Alexander (d. 1784).”

16. Quoted in Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 143.

17. “Ephraim Chambers to Macbean,” 413.

18. The expanded second edition of the Cyclopædia presumably incorporated these submissions. To my knowledge there is no existing data regarding how many submissions were received or how many were incorporated. There is no indication in the text of which bits of information (or even entire articles) might have come from readers.

19. Biagioli and Galison, Scientific Authorship.

20. Chambers, Considerations Preparatory, 4.

21. Even earlier encyclopedic projects had also made use of collaborative writing practices, most especially in community-based projects produced by academies or monasteries. For more on monastic traditions of collaboration, see Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes; and Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.

22. Collison, Encyclopedias; Mugglestone, Lost for Words; Winchester, The Meaning of Everything.

23. One exception to this incremental process is occasions when significant prior texts have been imported wholesale, such as when the 1911 Britannica was imported as the initial data dump.

24. For more on the reader-as-writer of nonnarrative texts, see Eco, Magli and Otis, “Greimassian Semantics and the Encyclopedia.”

25. Lunsford and Ede, Singular Texts/Plural Authors, 133.

26. Gurak, Cyberliteracy.

27. Pigg, “Coordinating Constant Invention”; Sawyer, Group Genius; Spinuzzi, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Technical Communication in the Age of Distributed Work”; Tapscott and Williams, Wikinomics.

28. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks and The Penguin and the Leviathan; Tapscott and Williams, Wikinomics.

29. See, among others, A. Davis, Webb, Lackey, and DeVoss, “Remix, Play, and Remediation”; Logie, “The (Re)Birth of the Composer” and “Peeling the Layers of the Onion.”

30. Aufderheide and Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use; Fisher, Promises to Keep; Lessig, Code, The Future of Ideas, and Remix; Litman, Digital Copyright; Patry, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars; Vaidhyanathan, Copyright and Copywrongs. See also Biagioli, Jaszi, and Woodmansee, Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property.

31. See Jenkins, Textual Poachers; Navas, Gallagher, and burrough, The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies.

32. Barthes, “The Death of the Author”; Foucault, “What Is an Author?”

33. In addition to Barthes and Foucault, see Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind; Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play”; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Kristeva, Desire in Language, among others.

34. See Rebecca Moore Howard’s extensive work on this topic for more on the nuances of constructing, policing, and punishing plagiarism, in particular Standing in the Shadow of Giants and “Postpedagogical Reflections on Plagiarism and Capital.”

35. Woodmansee, “Genius and the Copyright,” 38.

36. See Milton, “Areopagitica”; Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding; Donaldson v. Beckett; U.S. Const., Art. I, §8, cl. 8; U.S.C., Title 17, §102 and §106.

37. Rose, Authors and Owners.

38. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print.

39. For fuller histories of English print culture and the emergence of copyright, see Johns, The Nature of the Book and Piracy; Maruca, The Work of Print; Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective; Rose, Authors and Owners.

40. Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” 7.

41. Collin Brooke, Lingua Fracta.

42. If, indeed, it was ever possible for a single person to take on this sort of project. Pamela Long has pointed to Pliny the Elder’s nephew’s account of his uncle’s devotion to assembling his ancient encyclopedia. Extensive servant help with small daily matters enabled him to work continuously: for instance books were read aloud to him while he ate a dinner prepared by others and took notes. He also studied or took notes while being bathed and while being transported about town on a litter to meetings. Additionally he employed a secretary to assist him in the work while he traveled. Without the leisure time afforded by these mundane service contributions, the production time available to him would have been much more limited.

43. While it does resemble contemporary remix culture, it departs from it in its central aim, which is not to produce a new or inventive creative product through pastiche, but rather to produce a thorough and authoritative product through considered collection and filtering of preexisting knowledge.

44. “Wikipedia: Neutral Point of View.”

45. Collison, Encyclopedias.

46. See Dias, Freedman, Medway, and Par, Worlds Apart; Jones, “From Writers to Information Coordinators”; Slattery, “Textual Coordination”; Reyman, “The Role of Authorship.”

47. Reyman, “The Role of Authorship,” 351.

48. Collison, Encyclopedias, 142.

49. Jones, “From Writers to Information Coordinators.”

50. Jones, From Writers to Information Coordinators, 461.

51. Geisler, “Textual Objects.”

52. Prior and Shipka, “Chronotopic Lamination.”

53. Slattery, “Textual Coordination.”

54. Freedman and Smart, “Navigating the Current of Economic Policy”; Spinuzzi and Zachry, “Genre Ecologies.”

55. See the distributed collaborative work of compiling and creating reference manuscripts that were traditionally performed within monasteries (Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes; Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change).

56. Eyman, “Computer Gaming and Technical Communication”; Luce, “It Wasn’t Intended to Be an Instruction Manual.”

57. Lewis, “CMSs, Bittorrent Trackers, and Large-Scale Rhetorical Genres.”

58. There are far more than three hundred thousand individual user accounts on Wikipedia; at this writing, there are 23,602,552 named users. The number of three hundred thousand refers to the number of editors who have edited Wikipedia more than ten times (Wikipedia: Wikipedians).

59. Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” 3.

60. Miller, “What Can Automation.”

61. Lundberg and Gunn, “Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?”

62. D. Davis, Inessential Solidarity, 113.

63. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 185.

Chapter 2: Crowdfunding Curation

1. Gurak, Cyberliteracy.

2. Kendal is located in Cumbria in northwest England.

3. “Original Biographical Anecdotes,” 671.

4. Ibid.

5. Plomer, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, 19; Rivington, The Publishing Family of Rivington, 22. Rivington documents the Conger of 1742 as including Knapton, Longman, Midwinter, Bettesworth, Pemberton, Rivington, and Ward, among others (77).

6. Two examples of the latter include Bettesworth, who with other partners had published an edition of Mandeville in 1722 (“Wilde,” in Plomer, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers), and Rivington, who with Osborn would go on to publish the first edition of Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded in 1741. Rivington later played a central role in convening the New Conger, a publishing consortium that superseded the Conger (“Rivington,” in Plomer, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, 22–23).

7. Hartelius, The Rhetoric of Expertise, 15.

8. Briggs, A History of Longmans.

9. While it is today often commonly referred to as “the first copyright law,” this designation is not entirely correct; the statute was originally intended to break the Stationers’ Guild monopoly. For a foundational account of historical development and issues, see Lyman Ray Patterson’s Copyright in Historical Perspective.

10. Donaldson v. Beckett (1774) 2 Brown’s Parl. Cases 129, 1 Eng. Rep. 837; 4 Burr. 2408, 98 Eng. Rep. 257; 17 Cobbett’s Parl. Hist. 953 (1813).

11. See also Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 46–54; Johns, The Nature of the Book, 450–54.

12. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 49.

13. This long-standing connection between the Royal Society and the Grand Lodge was acknowledged by a joint exhibition in 2008.

14. Berman, Foundations of Modern Freemasonry, 38.

15. Chambers includes the Ashmolean in the entry on museums: “The Museum of Oxford, called the Ashmolean Museum, is a noble pile erected at the expense of the University, for the promoting and a carrying on several parts of curious and useful learning,” 605.

16. Berman, Foundations of Modern Freemasonry, 175.

17. Ibid., 34.

18. Clark and Stewart, cited in Berman, Foundations of Modern Freemasonry, 193

19. Ibid., 106.

20. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment; and Worms, “Senex, John.” Both agree that Senex had been apprenticed to the London bookseller Robert Clavell in 1695 and began publishing through his own house in 1702.

21. Worms, “Senex, John.”

22. Clarke, “The Royal Society”; Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 95; Worms, “Senex, John.”

23. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 95.

24. See K. Kennedy, Lamoine, and Révauger, “Ephraim Chambers.”

25. “Harris, John (c. 1666–1719).”

26. Clarke, “The Royal Society.”

27. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties.” Granovetter noted that weak ties are an important way that communities of strong actors encounter each other.

28. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 96.

29. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; Kafker, “William Smellie’s Edition”; Schlegel, “Freemasonry and the Encyclopédie Reconsidered”; Shackleton, “The Encyclopédie and Freemasonry.”

30. See Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 155–62, for extensive discussion of the influence that Locke’s theories of language had on Chambers’s philosophical development of the Cyclopædia.

31. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 162

32. Other examples include Henry Pemberton’s A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, published in the same year as the Chambers first edition. Voltaire’s Elémens de la Philosophie de Newton, which argued for the universality of Newton’s philosophies, appeared in 1738, the same year as the second edition of the Chambers.

33. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions.

34. Figure based on Yeo’s description of the 1741 serialization (Encyclopaedic Visions, 52–53). The 1728 serialization may well have been priced differently, but no pricing records survive, to my knowledge.

35. Much of this account of Wikipedia’s very early development is drawn from Sanger, “The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia”; and Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution.

36. Leuf and Cunningham, The Wiki Way, 16.

37. Sanger, “The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia,” 317.

38. “Wikimedia Foundation 2011–12 Annual Report.”

39. All 2013 figures from the Wikimedia Foundation 2012–13 Annual Report. While the totals reported are in U.S. dollars, the report notes that donations were in over eighty-two currencies.

40. “Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report 2008–2009.”

41. “About Us,” Encyclopædia Britannica.com.

42. Gurak, Cyberliteracy.

43. “Wikipedia.”

44. Wales, “[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Is an Encyclopedia.”

45. Suber, Open Access, 4.

46. Hartelius, The Rhetoric of Expertise, 27.

Chapter 3: Metaphors of Curation

1. Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, 42.

2. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

3. Lunsford, “Rhetoric, Feminism, and the Politics of Textual Ownership.”

4. Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement”; J. Cohen, “Copyright, Commodification, and Culture”; Lessig, The Future of Ideas.

5. Litman, Digital Copyright; Logie, “A Copyright Cold War?”

6. Lewis, “Piracy Ahoy!”; Logie, Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion; Reyman, The Rhetoric of Intellectual Property.

7. Lunsford, Fishman, and Liew, “College Writing, Identification, and the Production of Intellectual Property.”

8. Behme, “Isocrates on the Ethics of Authorship”; Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship.

9. Logie, “I Have No Predecessor.”

10. Rose, Authors and Owners, 28.

11. Milton, “Eikonoklastes,” 329.

12. Defoe, “Miscellanea,” 515–16.

13. Chambers, “Preface,” xxix.

14. The contents of his library were among those sold in the Inn’s courtyard sixteen years after his death. Fortunately the catalogue of sale survived to be archived in the British Library and, later, in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

15. Osborne and Shipton, A catalogue of the capital collection.

16. See Liebert, “Apian Imagery and the Critique of Poetic Sweetness in Plato’s Republic.”

17. Yeo, “Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopædia (1728) and the Tradition of Commonplaces.”

18. Cited in Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of Commonplaces, 141.

19. Virgil, The Aeneid, 6.599.

20. Virgil, Georgics, 4.203–9.

21. Osborne and Shipton, A catalogue of the capital collection, 22, 24.

22. Bacon, “Aphorism XCV,” 392.

23. Both Bacon and Swift’s works were heavily represented in Chambers’s library, which included bound sets of their writings as well as multiple volumes of commentary. Osborne and Shipton, A catalogue of the capital collection, 23, 25, 35, 41, 44, 66, 68, 89, 109, 111, 112.

24. No volume of Aesop is included in the Osborne and Shipton catalogue, but his library did contain a volume of One Hundred and Fifty of Ancient Histories and Fables (46).

25. St. Clair, “Metaphors of Intellectual Property,” 384.

26. My thanks to apiarist Kurt Stavenhagen for his explanation of these transformative steps in the honey-making process.

27. Parikka, Insect Media, 33.

28. Ibid., 44.

29. Ibid., 34.

30. K. Kennedy, “The Daw and the Honeybee.”

31. Rush lights consisted of reeds dipped in tallow. Tallow produces a smoky light and a less pleasant smell; purveyors who sold beeswax adulterated with tallow were tried and sentenced to punishment that included stints in the pillory.

32. Kritskey, “Castle Beekeeping”; Walker and Crane, “English Beekeeping.”

33. It was later revoked in 1684 and restored in 1688. The company retains it to this day.

34. Cox, “A Chronology of the Wax Chandlers History.”

35. Abbot, Sugar, 15; Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 13. Chambers included an extensive entry on honey in the 1728 edition that provided an overview of basic bee anatomy and hive culture as well as honey production, usages, and related topics (248). He also included a basic definition for the term apiary (115).

36. Cox, “A Chronology of he Wax Chandlers History.”

37. Wildman, Management of Bees, c.

38. For extensive discussion of the complicated role of gender as both civic metaphor and as instructions for the management of women in the British “bee books,” see Merrick, “Royal Bees.”

39. Crane, The World History of Beekeeping, 407.

40. Ibid.

41. For more on contemporary scientific research on hive social structures, communication, and cognition, see the work of Cornell University biologist Thomas Seeley, particularly his book Honeybee Democracy.

42. For more on the commonwealth itself as a metaphor for intellectual property, see St. Clair, “Metaphors of Intellectual Property.”

43. This was an especially important duty when their caretaker had just died, since the bees need to be told and asked to stay lest they attempt to follow their master. For more on this practice, see Ransome, The Sacred Bee. She explained that custom of “telling the bees” was common not just in Britain but also in central Europe and America (172).

44. Watts, Divine and Moral Songs for Children, 39.

45. W. Butler, The Feminine Monarchie. Butler’s idiosyncratic examination included a musical score that approximated the sound of a hive about to swarm. Daye, The Parliament of Bees.

46. Osbourne and Shipton, A catalogue of the capital collection, 108.

47. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 25. The controversy over the book continued for the rest of the century, and successive editions of the text permeated literate society. In 1723 the grand jury of Middlesex “declared the book a public nuisance and [accused] the author . . . of a blasphemy so ‘diabolical’ that it had ‘a direct Tendency to the Subversion of all Religion and Civil Government’” (Bald, Banned Books, 106). Mandeville promptly published a pamphlet containing the jury’s presentment and added it to the next edition of the Fable. It was translated into French in 1740 and into German in 1761, igniting a fresh storm of criticism across the Continent. In his extensive study of Mandeville, E. G. Hundert has pointed out that Adam Smith referred to Mandeville in his 1756 review of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality for The Edinburgh Review, telling his audience that “whoever reads this . . . work with attention, will observe, that the second volume of The Fable of the Bees has given occasion to the system of Mr. Rousseau.” “Rousseau’s conjectural history of humanity, while strenuously denying The Fable’s conclusions, was perhaps the most influential single text which opening injected Mandeville’s expanded naturalism into the wider Enlightenment debate on the sciences of man,” Hundert wrote. “Within a generation, almost every significant Enlightenment intellectual, from Voltaire to Turgot, Gibbon and Smith had pronounced on the problem of the morally paradoxical nature of material progress” (Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable, 59). Smith continued to wrestle with The Fable throughout his life. While he does not reference it directly in The Wealth of Nations, editor Edward Cannan noted a number of places where Smith appears to have been influenced by Mandeville, most particularly in “On The Division of Labour.” Smith revised his attack on Mandeville in The Theory of Moral Sentiments until the end of his life (Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable, 16).

48. Horn, Bees in America.

49. St. Clair, “Metaphors of Intellectual Property,” 385.

50. J. Kennedy and Eberhart, Swarm Intelligence, xiv.

51. Ibid., xv.

52. Parikka, Insect Media, 49.

53. Tee for Two, 1945.

54. The Bears and Bees, 1932; Springtime for Pluto, 1944. In later decades a swarm with the collective name “The Bees” would appear in multiple Winnie the Pooh features.

55. The term daikaiju refers to any of the giant monsters that were typical of the kaiju films popularized by the Toho studio and since adopted by many other Japanese studios, as well as a few American ones.

56. “Q Who.”

57. Kelly, “The Electronic Hive,” 76.

58. Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration, 147.

59. Rheingold, Smart Mobs; S. Johnson, Emergence; Shirky, Here Comes Everybody; Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds.

60. Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration, 146.

61. Lanier, “Digital Maoism” and You Are Not a Gadget, 32.

62. Ibid., 143.

63. Mol, “Attacks on Humans”; Queoroz and Magurran, “Safety in Numbers?”

64. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 83.

65. Ibid., 113–14.

Chapter 4: Content Contributors, Vandals, and the Ontology of Curation

1. These mysteries were often difficult to communicate in writing because they involved tacit physical knowledge—for instance what the process of operating an optimally sharpened plane against a particular type of wood should feel like. For a fascinating popular account of mysteries associated with the woodcarving techniques of eighteenth century English artisan Gringling Gibbons and the difficulties of recovering them after the fact, see Esterly, The Lost Carving.

2. See also Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 31. While this was remarkable for the times, they still could find it within themselves to extend their egalitarianism only so far: women were never permitted within the English lodges (unlike the French and Swiss lodges), as Jacob and others have written extensively about, and this is a practice that continues to this day. Similarly, bonded men were never accepted.

3. Chambers, Considerations Preparatory, 3–4.

4. Ibid., 4.

5. This would also fit the trend of later editions: Abraham Rees’s enlarged 1778 edition claimed to add forty-four hundred new articles; the index listed a total of fifty-seven thousand articles classed under one hundred heads. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 66.

6. Chambers, Considerations Preparatory, 2.

7. The usual Internet parlance that describes site visitors as “users” has been studiously avoided by the collective from the very beginning. Instead contributors are called “editors.” This small yet welcoming rhetorical move immediately invited contributors to consider themselves a valued part of the system and is still the custom. I adhere to it here.

8. See Ayers, Matthews, and Yates, How Wikipedia Works: “Good articles and Featured articles are two levels of articles that the community has determined to be some of the best content on Wikipedia. . . . Only about 1 in 660 articles [is] listed as good and 1 in 1,200 [is] listed as featured” (227). A formal peer review process is required for articles to receive either status.

9. Wales, “[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Is an Encyclopedia.”

10. Priedhorsky, et al., “Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia.”

11. A wide range of results are reported on this topic. See N. Cohen, “Define Gender Gap?”; Collier and Bear, “Conflict, Confidence, or Criticism”; Lam et al., “WP:Clubhouse?”; Hill and Shaw, “The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited”; “Wikipedia Editors Study.”

12. Simonite, “The Decline of Wikipedia.”

13. Auerbach, “Encylopedia Frown.”

14. Hern, “Wikipedia ‘Edit-a-thon’ Seeks.” In sponsoring the edit-a-thon, the Royal Society is also forced to confront its own historical bias, as it only began admitting women as fellows in 1945.

15. Klein, “Slipping Racism into the Mainstream.”

16. Lih, “Unwanted: New Articles in Wikipedia.”

17. Simonite, “The Decline of Wikipedia.”

18. “Wikipedia: Five Pillars.”

19. Hartelius, The Rhetoric of Expertise.

20. “Wikipedia: Five Pillars.”

21. Ibid.

22. For astute discussion of this issue in the context of academic contributors, see Hartelius, The Rhetoric of Expertise, 150–51.

23. Chappell, “Wikipedia Irks Philip Roth”; Doll, “The Internet Stain”; Gupta, “Philip Roth vs. Wikipedia”; Matyszczyk, “Wikipedia to Philip Roth”; J. Williams, “Philip Roth Goes Public.”

24. Roth, “An Open Letter to Wikipedia.”

25. Sanger, “Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-elitism.”

26. Jemielniak, Common Knowledge?, 151.

27. Wikipedia: “What ‘Ignore All Rules’ Means.”

28. The full exchange (and many others) can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Muhammad/images.

29. Wikipedians consider synthesis to be a subset of original research. “Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. Similarly, do not combine different parts of one source to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source. If one reliable source says A, and another reliable source says B, do not join A and B together to imply a conclusion C that is not mentioned by either of the sources. This would be a synthesis of published material to imply a new conclusion, which is original research” (“Wikipedia: No Original Research,” emphasis in the original).

30. “Wikipedia: Manual of Style/Images.”

31. “Sign the Petition to Request Wikipedia Editors to Respect Other Peoples’ Religion.”

32. “Conflicting Wikipedia Philosophies.”

33. Userboxes consist of predesigned badges that users embed to display their various affiliations (for example as deletionists or inclusionists), competencies (for example in various languages and at what levels of fluency), interests, and Wikiproject memberships (for example Notability Sorting Drive, Trivia Cleanup). They are commonly displayed along the sider of User pages.

34. Ayers, Matthews, and Yates, How Wikipedia Works, 349.

35. Ibid.

36. Lih, “Unwanted.”

37. Ayers, Matthews, and Yates, How Wikipedia Works, 473.

38. Broughton, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, 360.

39. “Wikiproject: Inclusion.”

40. “Wikipedia: Notability.”

41. Baker, “The Charms of Wikipedia.”

42. “WikiProject_Inclusion” and “Wikipedia: WikiProject_Deletion.”

43. “Wikipedia: Articles for Deletion: Contributing to AfD Discussions.”

44. Any editor can mark an article for deletion. After the article is tagged, it undergoes a five-day community discussion that provides space for contesting the deletion.

45. For more on self-selection and the Wikipedian community, see Bryant et al., “Becoming Wikipedian.”

46. The social process of creating the necessary consensus to move the project forward is central to Wikipedia, but outside the scope of this study. For more on Wikipedian community dynamics and negotiation, see Bencherki, “Mediators and the Material Stabilization”; Jemielniak, Common Knowledge?; Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration; and Zachry and Morgan, “Negotiating with Angry Mastodons.”

47. Ayers, Matthews, and Yates, How Wikipedia Works, 7.

48. Ibid., 349.

49. “Immediatism.”

50. Ibid.

51. It is possible to have more edits than total words in the article because of vandalism and resulting article reversions.

52. A false article in the 1974 New Columbia Encyclopedia provided a fake biography on one Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, who is described as a mailbox artist (Alford, “Not a Word.”). While this contemporary term did not enter the language until that year, the practice itself is much older.

53. Collison, Encyclopedias, 129–30.

54. See Gordon and Torrey’s 1947 book-length study on the topic, which includes examination of the original proof sheets for the Encyclopédie. Collison suggests that, based on their work, le Breton’s changes represented a levelheaded response to Diderot’s hotheaded tactics (Encyclopedias: Their History, 132).

55. Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” 7.

56. Viégas et al., “Studying Cooperation and Conflict.”

57. Ibid.

58. Halavais, “The Isuzu Experiment.” Halavais later published a plea that other readers not undertake the same sort of experiment, noting that several more prominent media outlets had also discussed similar experiments around the same time. “To correct an earlier statement: if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t. There are better, non-destructive ways to check Wikipedia’s accuracy. Please learn from my mistake and do not repeat it,” he wrote (“Please Don’t Do This”).

59. Anderson, “Wendy Davis Supporters”; Brown, “Wendy Davis’ Filibuster”; Burton, “The Internet Celebrates.”

Chapter 5: Production Collectives: Page and Screen

1. Nicotra, “Folksonomy,” 266.

2. Yeo, “A Solution to the Multitude of Books.”

3. While this arrangement was common, it is worth noting that alphabetization was used in English reference texts as early as James le Palmer’s fourteenth-century illuminated encyclopedia Omne Bonum (All Good Things).

4. Comenius, Orbis Pictus.

5. Yeo, “Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia (1728).”

6. Chambers, Cyclopædia, xxv.

7. Collison, Encyclopedias, 103.

8. Chambers, Cyclopædia, xxx.

9. See Heilbronner, “Do Machines Make History?”; Licklider and Taylor, “The Computer as a Communications Device”; Pacey, The Culture of Technology; Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture.”

10. For more on the social impact of printing technologies, see Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book; Johns, The Nature of the Book; Manguel, A History of Reading; and Ong, Orality and Literacy. For more on the impact of digital texts, see Bolter, Writing Space; Gurak, Cyberliteracy; Levy, Scrolling Forward; and Selber, Multiliteracies for a Digital Age.

11. Johns, The Nature of the Book, 104.

12. Maruca, The Work of Print, 17–18, emphasis in the original.

13. Ibid., 56.

14. This shift in capitalization was not yet widespread, but neither was it entirely uncommon. Jacobson wrote that by 1753, the printer Robert Dodsley had developed “a house style in which, according to Richard Wendorf, . . . he usually replaced Gray’s capitalization of nouns with lower-case letters. . . . Capitalization, even in the case of some personifications, is usually abandoned.” See Jacobson, How Should Poetry Look, 79. The widespread abandonment of Germanic capitalization did not occur until even later in the century. The changes made in the 1738 Cyclopædia precipitate Dodsley’s style by fifteen years, certainly making the text au courant. However, it was not cutting-edge: the long s carries over solidly into the second edition and was in common use until the 1870s, with a few exceptions. Its retention may indicate that the printer was not consumed with being cutting-edge, but rather trying to remain at the comfortable forefront of contemporary typography.

15. Reeves, “Temptation and Its Discontents.”

16. Eco, Magli, and Otis, “Greimassian Semantics and the Encyclopedia,” 718.

17. Wells, The World Brain, 69–74.

18. The Library of Congress had already transferred three million pages of books from the British Library by 1935. See Saffady, Micrographics, 15.

19. Wells, The World Brain, 69.

20. Ibid., 70.

21. Moschovitis et al., History of the Internet, 25.

22. Bush, “As We May Think,” 8.

23. See Nyce and Kahn, From Memex to Hypertext, which contains Bush’s relevant essays along with scholarship on connections between his work and then-current personal computing and information retrieval systems.

24. Nelson, Literary Machines 93.1, n.p.

25. Berners-Lee and Fischetti, Weaving the Web.

26. Moschovitis et al., History of the Internet.

27. Nelson remains widely acknowledged as the inventor of hypertext, although he accepts credit only for coining the phrase in 1965 and making use of the concept: “Hypertext is obvious. I do not claim to have invented hypertext. I merely discovered it. It’s like the telephone. The telephone, at the time, seemed to be an invention. To us, now, it’s a discovery because it’s obvious. Hypertext is like that. To me, it was simply the obvious next step of literature” (quoted in Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1, 287–88).

28. Leuf and Cunningham, The Wiki Way.

29. Cunningham, “Wiki Design Principles.”

30. Hypertextuality enables the intertextual nature of wikis, created when contributors embed a dense series of links within text to other pages within and without the wiki structure, as in Landow’s concept of lexias. See Landow, Hypertext 3.0, 13–22.

31. See Aigrain, “The Individual and the Collective in Open Information Communities”; Bryant et al., “Becoming Wikipedian”; Ciffolilli, “Phantom Authority, Self-Selective Recruitment, and Retention”; Viégas et al., “Studying Cooperation and Conflict.”

32. Leuf and Cunningham, The Wiki Way, 6.

33. Miller, “Expertise and Agency.”

34. Banks, Race, Rhetoric, and Technology.

35. The development of free software whose code can be accessed, modified, and rereleased by anyone with the chops to do so has a long and proud history that grew out of 1970s hacker culture. The free software movement of the 1980s, which demanded the freedom to modify and redistribute free copies of software, eventually gave rise to the Open Source Initiative in the late 1990s. The operating system GNU/Linux became the most prominent example of open-source software supported by a large and distributed development community. Relying heavily on the system tools that originated in Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the central operating system kernel originally developed by Linus Torvalds, the Linux operating system is the most widely ported OS in the world for both commercial and personal use. Since the central code may be accessed, modified, used, and redistributed by anyone, thousands of coders have contributed to its development since the initial release in 1991. It is hardly the only widely used system that has been built in this collaborative fashion. Other examples include the Apache Server, MySQL database software, and the PHP coding language. Bundled with Linux, these tools form the LAMP Stack, a combination of free, collaboratively developed components that anyone with sufficient skills can use to build a web server without working within the dominant articulation of proprietary software.

For more on the historical development of open source software, see Kelty, “Inventing Copyleft”; and Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. For careful theorization of the ways that free and open source software are rhetorically positioned as actors within the public sphere, see Benoit-Barné, “Socio-technical Deliberation.”

36. While volunteer efforts have had a considerable positive impact on the site, they have also posed challenges. When initial development began on the MediaWiki, volunteers had root level access to the platform’s infrastructure, which was always live. For a young, agile community, this was a strategic decision: “Our lenient access policy made us flexible, so changes could happen quickly. Also, the sites were smaller, had far fewer users, and large, fundamental changes could be made in production,” wrote technology administrator Ryan Lane (“Opening Our Operations with Wikimedia Labs”). The trouble with development work by nonexperts in a live environment is that innocent mistakes have the potential to lead to considerable systems downtime—something that is unacceptable for an information resource that millions rely on. These inadvertent yet perverse performances of agency were sufficiently significant that administrators made the decision to not grant root access to new volunteers. This secured the system but also created a bottleneck in development since operations were no longer scaled “to meet the needs of a large growth of developers,” reported Lane. “Furthermore, our access policy prevent[ed] volunteer developers from learning how our infrastructure works,” thus further limiting the potential for future volunteer labor as well as the potential for developing collaborative coding and shared expertise.

37. “MediaWiki.”

38. Johnson-Eilola, Datacloud, 51.

39. Ayers, Matthews, and Yates, How Wikipedia Works, 205.

40. “Free But Not Easy,” The Economist.

41. Banks, Race, Rhetoric, and Technology.

42. “Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report 2009–2010.”

43. Orlowski, “Revolting Peasants Force.”

44. “Wikipedia: WikiProject_Military_history.”

45. “WikiProject: Military_History.”

46. “Wikipedia: WikiProject_Categories.”

47. “List of Wikipedias.”

48. “Wikipedia: Page_Curation.”

Chapter 6: Automated Curation

1. Another potential reason that encyclopedias did not include this information was because gazetteers were devoted solely to this sort of specialized information.

2. For a careful consideration of rhetorical aspects of Narrative Science’s algorithms, see J. Brown, Ethical Programs.

3. McMillan, “Robots Now Outnumber Humans on the Web.”

4. Milde, “Can a Computer Be an Author?”

5. T. Butler, “Can a Computer Be an Author?”; Farr, “Copyrightability of Computer-Created Works.”

6. Cowan, Time and Its Measurement.

7. Rosheim, Robot Evolution, 2.

8. LaGrandeur, Androids and Intelligent Networks, 1.

9. See Sawday, The Machine Mind, 193–94.

10. Terpak, “Objects and Contexts,” 269.

11. Chambers, “Androides,” 87.

12. Terpak, “Objects and Context,” 278.

13. For more on this mechanism, see Rosheim, Robot Evolution, 23–27.

14. See Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine.

15. Miller, “Expertise and Agency.”

16. A complete account of Rambot’s development can be found in Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 88–106. My summary is drawn from this extended passage.

17. Ibid., 103.

18. “Category: All_Wikipedia_bots.”

19. “User: Rambot.”

20. “User: Rambot/translation.”

21. “User: SineBot.”

22. “Sandboxes” are a common feature of many wiki platforms. They exist to allow the user space to learn and experiment with wiki code. Content is not permanent; Wikipedia sandboxes are wiped every twelve hours.

23. “Wikipedia: Bots.”

24. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 177.

25. Broughton, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, 161.

26. Propen, Locating Visual Material Rhetorics, 122, 124, 156.

27. “Wikipedia: Bots.”

28. Cordiality is a basic requirement for bot approval. For example ClueBot, which reverts vandalism, leaves this basic message script: “Reverting possible vandalism by [insert name/IP address] to version by [insert name/IP address]. False positive? Report it. Thanks, Cluebot.”

29. J. Johnson, “Sociology of a Door-Closer,” 303.

30. Miller, “Expertise and Agency,” 208.

31. See Foner, “Entertaining Agents”; and Turkle, Life on the Screen, for relevant early case studies.

32. Miller, “Expertise and Agency,” 150–51.

33. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 104.

34. “User: VoABot II.”

35. “Darwin, Minnesota.”

Conclusion

1. Lunsford, “Writing, Technologies, and the Fifth Canon,” 170.

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Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below

Actual Survey of All the Principal Roads of England and Wales, An (Ogilby)

Ada Lovelace Day

Addison, Joseph

“Advertisement Touching upon a Holy War, An” (Bacon)

advertising

Aeneid (Virgil)

Aesop’s Fables

affordances: agency and

of bots

changes in

of digital technology

interface

of Internet

for preservation

of print technology

rhetorical action and

of socio-technological systems

technological

textual iterations and

in Wikipedia

of wiki platforms. See also constraints

Africanized bees

agency: attributed, and identity

automated

co-construction of

destructive

performance of

properties of

textual. See also authorial agency; rhetorical agency

Alanscottwalker (Wikipedia editor)

Albertus Magnus

Alembert, Jean le Rond d’

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

algorithms

alphabetization

Amatulić (Wikipedia editor)

ambience

American Library Association

animatronics

Anonymous (activist/hacktivist network)

anthropomorphism

antielitism

Antikythera Mechanism

AOL

Apache Server

apiaries

Apple

Arabian Peninsula

Arachnophobia (film; 1986)

archiving

“Areopagitica” (Milton)

arrangement

art history

Ashmole, Elias

Ashmolean Museum (London)

Association for Deletionist Wikipedians

Association for Inclusionist Wikipedians

Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments

attribution

authorial agency

books and

contextual nature of

curatorial collectives and

distributed

material support networks and

nonhuman actors and

performances of

textual curation and

vandalism and

in Wikipedia

authorial signature

Authors Guild v. Google

authorship: cultural tropes concerning

curatorial

curatorial collec-tives and

of Cyclopædia

digital age and

distributed

encyclopedic genre and

metaphors for

naturalization of

print vs. digital

Romantic

sociality of

textual curation and

transformative. See also authorial agency

Autodesk

Automata (Hero of Alexandria)

automatons

awards

Ayrey (amanuensis)

Babylon

Bacon, Francis

badges

Banks, Adam

Barnstar Awards (Wikipedia)

Battle of the Books (Swift)

Bayle, Pierre

Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The (film; 1953)

beehives

bee metaphor. See honeybee metaphor

Bees, The (film; 1978)

beeswax

Benkler, Yochai

Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Harvard Law School)

Berman, Ric

Berners-Lee, Tim

Bettesworth, Arthur

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Birds, The (film; 1963)

Boerhaave, Herman

Bomis

borrowing

Bot Approvals Group (BAG)

Bot Guidelines

bots

agency and

compositional tasks performed by

emergency shutoff buttons for

historical precedents for

human creators of

human effort in collaboration with

identity and attributed agency

Wikipedia use of

boyd, danah

Boylan, Patrick J.

Boyle Lectures

Brahe, Tycho

Breton, André le

British Empire

British Library

British Parliament

Browne, Daniel

Bush, Vannevar

Business Insider

Butler, William

calculators

camera obscuras

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs

Cannan, Edward

capitalization

Cartesianism

cartography

categorization

Categorization WikiProject

Cato

censorship

Center for Collective Intelligence (MIT)

Chambers, Ephraim: amanuenses hired by

archival material lacking for research on

automatons and

bee metaphor used by

birth of

collaboration as viewed by

collectives participation of

Considerations

content contributions encouraged by

as Cyclopædia author

as Cyclopædia curator

daw metaphor used by

death of

education of

as Freemason

illnesses of

library of

public as conceived by

recognitions of

reference tradition adopted by

as Royal Society Fellow

taxonomy of knowledge of

textual curation as viewed by. See also Cyclopædia

Chambers, Nathaniel

Charlie Hebdo shootings (Paris; 2015)

China

Christianity

circulation

citizen journalism

City University London

Clark, Peter

Clavell, Robert

Clay, Francis

Clippy (MS Office Assistant animated helper)

coders

coffeehouses

collaboration: with bots

Chambers’s view of

distributed

in early encyclopedias

monastic traditions of

collaborative writing

collection

collectives, curatorial: aspects of

authorial agency and

of contributors

Cyclopædia supported through

defined

ethos of

production workers in

records of

rhetorical agency and

Collison, Robert

Columbia University

Comenius

commons-based movement

commons-based peer production

Compendium Philosophiae

computers

Computers and Writing Conference (2005)

Conger, the (publishing investment group)

connecting

Considerations (pamphlet; Chambers)

Constitutions of the Freemasons

constraints: agency and

of community

cultural

of genre

immediatism and

of NPOV

of printed text

relaxing of

rhetorical action and

technological

in Wikipedia. See also affordances

content contributions/contributors: challenges to

in Cyclopædia

vandalism and

in Wikipedia

Wikipedia deletionist/inclusionist debates over

Wikipedia eventualist/immediatist debates over

Wikipedia management of

controlled vocabularies

Cooper, Marilyn

copyleft movement

copyright laws

Cotton, John

Country Housewife’s Garden, The (Lawson)

Crane, Eva

Creative Commons movement

Creepshow (film; 1982)

cross-indexing

cross-referencing

crowdsourcing

Ctesibius

Cunningham, Ward

“Curating the Crowd-sourced World” (SXSW Interactive panel; 2009)

curation: automated (see also bots); certification in

digital

of library collections

museum

as rhetorical

use of term. See also textual curation

Curation badge (Wikipedia)

Curation toolbar (Wikipedia)

cyborgs

Cyclopædia: author’s article selection in

authorship of

automaton article in

bee-related topics in

business model of

Chambers as primary curator of

circulation of

compositional processes of

content contributions/contributors in

cultural context of

democratic philosophies/curatorial practices of

distributed contributions in

emergence of

historical precedents for

influence of, in print culture

interfaces in

language of

material support for

ontology of

as open-access encyclopedia

preface to

printers of

publication history of

publishing costs

rhetorical context of

serialized installments

subscription lists of

“universal” scope of

vandalism lacking in

Wikipedia and

daikaiju

Darby, John

Darwin (MN), Wikipedia article on

data dumping

Davis, Diane

Davis, Wendy

daw metaphor

Daye, John

De Copia (Erasmus)

Defoe, Daniel

dehumanization

deletionism

derivative work

Dewey, Melvil

Dictionary of the English Language (Johnson)

Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (Bayle)

Diderot, Denis

digital curation

digital encyclopedias. See also Wikipedia

“Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0”

digital literacy

digital technology: affordances of

ecology and

preservation and

vandalism and

Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Rousseau)

Disney World

distributed

diversification

Divine and Moral Songs for Children (Watts)

“document borrowing”

Dodsley, Robert

Donaldson v. Beckett

donors

Duncan, Robert Lloyd

Eberhart, Russell C.

Eco, Umberto

École du Louvre (Paris, France)

ecology/ecologies: agency and

collaborative development of

of communities

digital technology and

genre

information

mechanization and

nonhuman actors and

economic alliances

Ede, Lisa

Edinburgh Review

edit-a-thons

editors

Egypt, ancient

Eighteenth Century Collections Online

“Eikonoklastes” (Milton)

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L.

Elémens de la Philosophie de Newton (Voltaire)

Ellis, Hattie

e-mail

Emergence (Johnson)

Encarta

Encyclopædia Britannica: authorial signatures in

business model of

compositional processes of

development of

digital edition of

distributed contributions in

Wikipedia and

encyclopedic genre: articles in

authorship and

business models of

collaboration in

compositional processes in

constraints of

digital (see also Wikipedia); etymology of

expertise establishment in

features of

historical precedents for

material support for

mechanization schemes proposed for

open, as moral contributions

page as interface in

print vs. digital

rhetorical context of

textual curation in

use of term

vandalism in. See also specific encyclopedia

Encyclopédie (ed. Diderot/Alembert)

Encyclopedist: cultural construct of

metaphors for

recomposition as privilege of

English studies

Enlightenment

Erasmus

Essay on the Regulation of the Press (Defoe)

eunoia

Evelyn, John

eventualism

expertise, establishment of

Ezell, Margaret J. M.

Fable of the Bees, The (Mandeville)

Facebook

fact tagging

factuality

Feminine Monarchie, The (Butler)

Fennec (Wikipedia editor)

file-sharing communities

film

filtration

Five Pillars (Wikipedia policies)

Fleet Street publishing community (London)

Flickr

folksonomies

Forbes

Ford Foundation

Foucault, Michel

Franklin, Benjamin

Freedman, Aviva

Freemasons. See also United Grand Lodge of England

free software movement

French Revolution

fund-raising

games

Gedde, John

gender gap

genre ecologies

Gentleman’s Magazine

George II (King of England)

Georgics (Virgil)

Germanic capitalization

Germany

Global South

GNU/Linux operating system

Godzilla films

Gojira (film; 1954)

Google

Google Drive

Google Wave

Gosling, Robert

Gray’s Inn library/archives (London)

Greco-Roman antiquity

Greene, Robert

Groatsworth of Wit (Greene)

Grumbling Hive, The (Mandeville)

Gunn, Joshua

Gurak, Laura J.

hacker culture

Halavais, Alex

Halley, Edmund

handbook tradition

Harris, John

Hartelius, E. Johanna

Harvard Law School

Harvey, Ross

Hasim221990 (Wikipedia editor)

Hawhee, Debra

Hellstrom Chronicle, The (film; 1971)

Henry III (King of England)

Henry VIII (King of England)

Here Comes Everybody (Shirky)

Hero of Alexandria

Herrad (Strasburg abbess)

Historia Naturalis (Pliny the Elder)

Hitchcock, Alfred

hive mind

honey

honeybee metaphor

authorship and

collective aspects of

economic appeal of

historical background of

negative connotations of

scientific appeal of

Hooke, John

Horn, Tammy

Hortus Delicarum (comp. Herrad)

Howard, Rebecca Moore

HTML

Huang Ian

Human Stain, The (Roth)

humorous edits

Hundert, E. G.

Hurricane Katrina (2005)

hybrid

hyperlinks

hypertext

Iktinos

illustrations

image-sharing applications

imitation

immediatism

inclusionism

individualism

Industrial Revolution

information architecture

Innys, John

Innys, William

Instagram

intellectual democracy

intellectual property rights

interest-based communities

interface(s): human writer and

mechanized schemes of

printed page as

print technology and

screen as

textual curation and

wiki

in Wikipedia

Internet

Internet Studies

interwiki links

invention

invisibility

iPhone

Islam, Wikipedia controversies involving

jackdaw metaphor. See daw metaphor

Jackson, Harvey

Jacob, Margaret

Jacobson, Jean Alice

Jaquet-Droz, Pierre

Jefferson, Thomas

Jemielniak, Dariusz

Jews, as Royal Society members

Johns, Adrian

Johnson, Mark

Johnson, Samuel

Johnson, Steven

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan

Johnston, Andre

Jones, Scott

Journal of the Patent Office Society

Julia (MUD softbot)

juxtaposition

kaiju films

kairos

Kallikates

Kanuss, Friedrich von

Kelly, Kevin

Kennedy, James

killer bees

Killer Bees (film; 1974)

Kirschenbaum, Matthew

Kitab ‘Uyum al-Akhbar

Knapton, James

Knapton, John

Kropotkin, Peter

LaGrandeur, Kevin

Lakoff, George

LAMP Stack

Landow, George P.

Lane, Ryan

Lanier, Jaron

Latour, Bruno

Lawson, William

lawsuits: Authors Guild v. Google

Donaldson v. Beckett

Napster decision (2001)

Patrick Cariou v. Richard Prince

LeFevre, Karen Burke

Leibnitzianism

lending

Lexicon Technicum (Harris)

Liber Excerptionum (comp. Richard of St. Victor)

Library of Congress

library science

Lih, Andrew

linear reading

links

Linux operating system

literacy

Literary Magazine . . . by a Society of Gentlemen

living subjects, textual curation of

Locke, John

logos

London (England): Freemasons in

publishing community in

WWII bombing of publishing houses in

Long, Pamela

Longman, Thomas

Longman publishing house

Longo, Bernadette

Los Angeles Times

Lovelace, Ada

Lundberg, Christian

Lunsford, Andrea A.

Macbean (amanuensis)

Maeterlinck, Maurice

Magli, Patrizzia

Mandeville, Bernard de

Maruca, Lisa

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Mechanica (Hero of Alexandria)

Mechanisms (Kirschenbaum)

mechanization

MediaWiki

Meelar (Wikipedia editor)

Melville, Herman

Memex

metadata

Metropolis (film; 1927)

Mew, William

microfilm

Microsoft (MS) Office Assistant

Midwinter, Daniel

Midwinter publishing house

Military History WikiProject

military-industrial complex

Miller, Carolyn R.

Mills, John

Milton, John

misinformation

Moby Dick (Melville)

monastic traditions

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)

Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia

Muhammad (Prophet), depiction controversies

museums, public

museum studies

MySQL database software

Napster decision (2001)

National Defense Research Council (NDRC)

natural philosophy

negotiation

Nelson, Ted

neutrality

New Columbia Encyclopedia

New Conger (publishing consortium)

“New Encyclopedism, The” (Wells)

New General Atlas, A (Ogilby)

New Method of Chemistry, A (Boerhaave)

Newstead, Barry

Newton, Isaac

Newtonian science

New Yorker

New York Times

Nicotra, Jodie

Night of the Creeps (film; 1986)

nonhuman actors

agency and

authorial agency and

collectives and

historical context of

human collaboration with

interfaces affected by

in print production

rhetorical agency and

in Wikipedia. See also bots

nonsense edits

notability

Nupedia

Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD)

Ogilby, John

Olson, Christa

Omne Bonum (Palmer)

One Hundred and Fifty of Ancient Histories and Fables

open-access movement

Open Source Initiative

OpenXanadu

Oracle illusion

Orbis Pictus Sensualium (Comenius)

Ortelius, Abraham

Osborn, John

Osborn, Thomas

Other, The

Otis, Alice

Oxford English Dictionary

Paecepta Ad Filium (Cato)

Page Curation interface (Wikipedia)

Palmer, James le

pan-historiographic approach

panoramas

pantograph

Parikka, Jussi

Parliament of Bees, The (Daye)

Paternoster Row publishing community (London)

Patrick Cariou v. Richard Prince

PayPal

PearlTrees (curation app)

Pemberton, Henry

Pemberton, John

Pennsylvania Gazette

performance

persuasion

Phaedrus (Plato)

Phase IV (film; 1974)

Philosophical History and Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Science at Paris

Philosophical Transactions (Royal Society journal)

photography, professional

PHP coding language

Piranha (TV film)

Piranhaconda (TV film; 2012)

“Piranha Effect, The”

piranha metaphor

pirating

plagiarism

Plato

Pliny the Elder

Pliny the Younger

Plomer, Henry R.

Pneumatica (Hero of Alexandria)

Portland Pattern Repository

preservation

Priedhorsky, Reid

Principia

print culture

print economy

printing houses

printing press

printing technology

print texts: affordances of

constraints of

interfaces in

as socio-technical system

vandalism in

private societies

Propen, Amy

property rights

Protagoras (Plato)

Protestant work ethic

public, concept of

public memory

publishers

racism

Rambot (Wikipedia bot)

Ramsey, Derek

Rasa’ulu Ikhwan al-Safa

“rational beekeeping”

readers

reading

Reagle, Joseph

recomposition

recursion

Rees, Abraham

Reeves, Joshua

remix culture

Republic (Plato)

reversion

Reyman, Jessica

Rheingold, Howard

rhetoric

rhetorical agency: in collaborative writing

collectives and

distributed nature of

nonhuman actors and

performative/social aspects of

textual curation and

rhetorical studies

Rhetoric of Intellectual Property, The (Reyman)

Richard of St. Victor

Rickert, Thomas

“Rip, Mix, Burn” campaign (Apple; 2001)

Rivington, Charles

Robinson, Ranew

robots. See also bots

Rose, Mark

Rossum’s Universal Robots (film; 1920)

Roth, Philip

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

Royal Society: archives of

Chambers as Fellow in

Chambers’s networks and

edit-a-thons sponsored by

female Fellows of

founding of

Freemason connections of

Freemasons as officers in

membership of

natural philosophy community in

as Newtonian science evangelizer

Philosophical Transactions of

scientific explorations of

Senex as Fellow in

RussBot

St. Clair, William

al-Safa, Ikhwan

sandboxes

Sanger, Larry

Saturday Night Live (TV comedy show)

Sawday, Jonathan

Scalich, Paul

search engines

search functions

Sellius, Gottfried

Senex, John

serialization

Seu Orbis Disciplinarum (Scalich)

Sex and the City (TV series)

Shakespeare, William

sharing

Shell, Tim

Shirky, Clay

Simmons University

SineBot

Siri (intelligent personal assistant)

Slate.com

Slattery, Shaun

Sloane, Hans

Sloan Foundation

Smart, Graham

Smart Mobs (Rheingold)

smartphones

Smith, Adam

social media

Sopranos, The (TV series)

sorting

sourcing

South by Southwest Interactive Festival (2009)

spam

Spectator

SpellBot

spell-check

Spinuzzi, Clay

Springtime for Pluto (cartoon; 1944)

Stallman, Richard

Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series; 1987–1994)

Star Trek: Voyager (TV series; 1995–2001)

Stationer’s Guild

Statute of Anne (1710)

stereograph cards/viewing devices

Sterne, Laurence

Stewart, Trevor

Storify (curation app)

strategic linking

stubs

subject/object divide

subscriptions

support networks: for Cyclopædia

for Wikipedia

Surowiecki, James

Swarm, The (film; 1978)

swarms metaphor

“sweat of the brow” doctrine

Swift, Jonathan

symbolic-analytic tasks

Symon, Edward

synthesizing

Tatler

taxonomies

technical communication

technical forums

technology: affordances of

constraints of

fear of. See also digital technology; printing technology; specific technology

telegraph

television

templates

coding of

Terpak, Frances

Texas Senate

texting

textual curation: authorial agency and

authorship and

bots and

Chambers’s view of

collaboration in

defined

invisibility and

living subjects and

material problems of

rhetorical agency and

rhetoric and

social negotiation of

in Wikipedia

textual curation metaphors: cultural context of

daw metaphor

honeybee metaphor

piranha metaphor

property-based

swarms metaphor

Them! (film; 1954)

Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith)

thieves

Thomas Aquinas, Saint

Time magazine

topical arrangement

towns/cities, Wikipedia articles on

Treatise on the Management of Bees (Wildman)

Tristram Shandy (Sterne)

Twitter

Two Treatises of Government (Locke)

typographic conventions

UCLA

United Grand Lodge of England: archives of

founding of

Freemason connections of

membership of

natural philosophy community in

as Newtonian science evangelizer

United States Census Bureau

Universal Arithmetic (Newton)

universality

Universal Lexicon (Zedler)

Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure

userboxes

vandalism

authorial agency and

bots used for

bots used to police

content contributors and

in print encyclopedias

reversions of

types of

in Wikipedia

Vaucanson’s Duck (automaton)

Viégas, Fernanda B.

View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, A (Pemberton)

Virgil

virtual reality devices

Visual Editor interface (Wikipedia)

VoABot II

Voltaire

Wales, Jimmy

Ward, Aaron

water clocks

Watts, Isaac

Wealth of Networks, The (Benkler)

web, the

web comic artists

Wells, H. G.

Wendorf, Richard

wiki code

wikification

WikiLove

Wikimedia Foundation

Wikipedia: ad-free nature of

authorial agency in

author’s article selection in

authorship and

Barnstar Awards

bot use in

compositional processes of

consensus dynamics of

content contributions/contributors in

content management in

criticism of

cultural context of

Curation toolbar

Cyclopædia and

deletionism/inclusionism debates in

distributed contributions in

diversification needed in

editing in

emergence of

Encyclopedia Britannica vs.

eventualism/immediatism debates in

expertise rejected in

factuality and

Featured articles in

fund-raising by

Gender Gap Task Force

growth of

historical precedents for

identity and attributed agency in

interest-based communities in

interfaces in

material support for

media coverage of

metaphors for

nonhuman actors in

NPOV policy of

ongoing updates in

ontology of (Five Pillars)

as open-access encyclopedia

original research banned in

page template in

policing of

precursors of

publication history of

readership of

rhetorical agency in

rhetorical context of

start-up/maintenance costs

technological infrastructure of

textual curation in

translation projects of

vandalism in

volunteer efforts in

Wikipedia Revolution, The (Lih)

WikiPhilosophies

wiki platforms: development of

distributed contributions in

early use of

historical precedents for

interfaces in

iterative potential of

open structure of

philosophy of

technological affordances of. See also MediaWiki; Wikipedia

WikiProjects

WikiWikiWeb

Wildman, Thomas

Wilkins, John

Windows

Wired

Wisdom of Crowds, The (Surowiecki)

women: as Cyclopædia subscribers

first encyclopedia produced by

as Royal Society members

as Wikipedia editors

Woodmansee, Martha

WordPress

work ethic

World Brain, The (Wells)

World War II

World Wide Web

Worms, Laurence

Worshipful Company of Wax Chandlers

Wren, Christopher

writers

writing, collaborative

writing automatons

writing studies

WYSIWYG (Wikipedia editing interface)

Xanadu (digital encyclopedia)

Yeo, Richard

Zachry, Mark

Zedler, Johann Heinrich

zograscopes

zoostylistics