The Problem of the Aggregate Author

Attribution, Accountability, and the Construction of Collaborative Knowledge in Online Communities

Stephen T. Jordan, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Abstract: This essay examines controversies surrounding content aggregation communities that permit anonymous contribution and editing by members (such as Wikipedia) in the context of historical representations of authorship and contemporary scholarship about the social construction of situated knowledge. I argue that neither the materially-focused portraits of the author offered in great literary statements and by noted book historians, which assume a discrete, sentient being with special talents (Wordsworth 1800, Eisenstein 1979, Woodmansee 1984), nor the post-structural theories that replace the individual author with a diffuse author function defined by textual and cultural conventions (Barthes 1968, Foucault 1970), nor the influential studies of collaborative writing practice in rhetoric and composition studies (Lunsford/Ede 1983, 1995), adequately account for the phenomenon of ongoing contribution to content aggregation sites. Bringing together the discourses of history, linguistics and rhetoricial studies, I theorize a new categorywhich I name aggregate authorshipby speculating about how such an interdisciplinary concept might shape ongoing conversations about the essential mechanisms of authorship on Wikipedia as they affect our understanding of how knowledge is made and circulated online. Keywords: Authorship, Online Communities, Wikipedia, Collaboration, Attribution, Accountability, Foucault, Chartier, Woodmansee, Legal, Censorship, Material, Encyclopedia, Database, Situated Knowledge, Social Construction of Knowledge

Introduction
N THE FALL of 2005, a biography of John Seigenthaler Sr., former administrative aide to Robert F. Kennedy and now a well-known journalist, was posted on the user-contributed encyclopedia website Wikipedia. The anonymous author of the Wikipedia entry wrote that Seigenthaler was for a brief timethought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven. In addition to this sensational revelation, the article detailed many other previously unknown facts about Seigenthaller, including that he lived in the Soviet Union from 1971 to 1984 at the height of the Cold War. The article was a complete fabrication. The author of the posting turned out to be, in the parlance of the site, a Wiki-Vandal who was simply playing a prank. Seigenthaller said later, [Only] one sentence in the biography was true. I was Robert Kennedys administrative assistant in the 1960s. Seigenthaller waged a four-month war with Wikipedia to have the inflammatory and untrue content removed. Eventually Wikipedia and several other web sites that had picked up the content took it down. Ignited by Seigenthallers USA Today editorial, bloggers, news websites, and the print media began a robust discussion around the ethics of unmasking the author. Eventually the New York Times revealed

his identity, but by then it was beside the point. The substance of the discussion had moved from the particulars of the Seigenthaller case to broader considerations of the Wikipedia model, to how it views authors and editors, and to speculations about where the responsibility for authorship and accuracy lies in such a forum. The Seigenthaller controversy, which was in the end a simple accusation of libel complicated by new technological interventions, brought into the popular press and consciousness a debate similar to the one that has been brewing in the academy since Wikipedia first announced its unique information aggregation model in 2001. Recently this debate has reached the pages of the largest professional journal for academics, The Chronicle of Higher Education, which published a cover story in October of 2006 in which the Wikipedia model is elaborately questioned not so much based on its potential for libelous postings, as for its credibility as a source for student papers, and its authority as a creator and repository of knowledge absent the participation of the academic community, which has largely avoided posting or editing Wikipedia entries even in areas where their expertise would undoubtedly improve the site as a resource. Wiki supporters defend the websites generative ethos: that content on Wikipedia, which can be revised by anyone, becomes more and more accurate over time. They assert that inaccuracies, even spuri-

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ous postings like the Seigenthaller biography, are eventually weeded out by a dynamic, semi-expert community engaged in a collective information vetting project, and argue that Wikipedias mechanisms and its participant practices constitute a new kind of peer-review which is increasingly more reliable with each revision. Detractors argue that the Wiki verification model is inherently flawed. They suggest that while ongoing collective review might produce an encyclopedic archive that is generally accurate, the work will nonetheless always contain individual errors with potential academic, ethical, and legal consequences. In this essay I review the major theoretical statements that have shaped our understanding of authorship in history against the ways in which stakeholders in this debate define and locate the authorship of Wikipedia entries, how they characterize accuracy, and where they locate responsibility or accountability within the controversy. I argue that early historical considerations of the author which assume a discrete and sentient being with special talents, later theoretical notions of authorship that attach an authorfunction broadly to text conventions, and contemporary analyses of writers collaborating all fail to adequately account for the phenomenon of ongoing contribution to Wikipedia, and I propose a new categorywhich I name aggregate authorship. I focus on how a hybrid of the major historical statements on authorship might be used to describe the authorship practices on Wikipedia, and then turn to a specific analogy of theories about the relationship between writer, reader, and constructed knowledge which seems to inform the Wikipedia model, reviewing the implications of these claims for our understanding of knowledge-building online and our comfort level as scholars and teachers with sites like Wikipedia.

readership than in writing have called them into question more recently on linguistic terms.

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Authorship as Craft

From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Elizabeth Eisenstein argues, authors were not regarded with any more special distinction than other craftsmen involved in bookmaking. She notes that there were many ways of thinking about writing as a profession, and uses the example of St. Bonaventuras analysis from the 13th century to illustrate. Bonaventura differentiated between the scriptor (one who writes down the works of others without making changes), complilator (one who writes the works of others with additions that are not of his own making), commentator (one who writes the works of others and his own work, placing the work of others in the primary position and commenting on them), and finally the auctor (who places his own writing in a principal place and adds the writing of others for confirmation). Obviously, the closest of these to the modern concept of authorship would be the auctor, but even he is engaged in a collaborative effort in this description. Finally, there is no hierarchy to the four methods. Transcription, compilation, commentary, and authorship seem to be of equal importance here (Eisenstein, 121-2 ).

The Romantic Period: Authorship as Genius

It is with this concept of the author that Martha Woodmansee begins her historical survey Genius and the Copyright, in which she suggests that particular economic conditions prefigured the emergence of the author as a proprietor of his own work. In the legacy of the Renaissance, Woodmansee argues, the author was first and foremost a craftsman; that is, he was master of a body of rules, or techniques, preserved and handed down in rhetoric and poetics, for manipulating traditional materials. In addition, the patrons who supported him largely dictated this journeyman writers work. He manipulated the traditional source materials, she notes, in order to achieve the effects prescribed by the cultivated audience of the court to which he owed both his livelihood and social status (36). Yet it was also the case, Woodmansee argues, that the role of craftsman was insufficient to explain every utterance in literature. When a writer seemed somehow to rise above the expectations of the patron or the requirements of the occasion, he was said to be inspired by some muse (a classical concept updated), or by God (a notion owed to the Reformation). William Wordsworth, already a prolific writer of verse, enters the discussion at this point with his

Authors and Authorship in History

Our contemporary idea of authorship is a relatively recent conception. The notion of the individual writer as creator of (and therefore owner of) a wholly original work imbued with his own unique sensibility, and arising out of what is often called his genius, has only really been around since the middle to late 18th century. While England, France, and Germany arrived at their legal notions of authorship on different time-tables, it is demonstrable that our current ideas of authorship derive not only from aesthetic analyses but also from intersecting concerns about professionalism, the response of the marketplace to certain kinds of writing, and the ability of authors to earn a living from their works. And while many of these ideas persist in our legal structures, contemporary theorists who see meaning being made more in

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famous argument about authorial inspiration that prefaced the Lyrical Ballads of 1800. In the treatise, Wordsworth famously describes inspiration as a combination of intuition and intellect. The author may (in fact he should) choose to report ordinary events in the language of everyday life, but he throw[s] over them a certain colouring of imagination. And while he is possessed of more than usual organic sensibility he is nevertheless obliged to have thought long and deeply about the feelings that overflow spontaneously. Wordsworth decries the popular taste of the reading public, and the authors who would pander to it as well, arguing that the truly inspired have a duty to nurture their keen sensibilities: to endeavor to produce, or enlarge, this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a writer can be engaged (356-8). As Woodmansee notes, Wordsworth was engaged in a radical re-conception of the creative process, in the heroic self-presentation of the Romantic Poets (Woodmansee and Jaszi, 3). But Wordsworths argument concerns considerably more than aesthetics and the creative process. The famous preface was written at a time in history that saw rapid increases in the distribution and readership of daily newspapers and the first suggestions that writers might be able to support themselves solely with their craft. In fact, Wordsworth famously argued the case of individual copyright on several occasions, first in the 1790s when he favored perpetual ownership in the name of the author, and later when he compromised at a copyright term of 60 years (Woodmansee and Jaszi, 5). Obviously, Wordsworths notion that an author was unique, inspired of God, and the creator of something wholly new was an essential warrant in the argument that he be allowed to own what he produced. Wordsworth extended this argument, though, with premises from sociological and economic points of view. Authors, he argued, would be more likely to produce works of quality if they stood some chance of being able to support their families with the profits. Thus, Wordsworth is making an argument not only about the nature of creativity but also about social welfare, economics, and the politics of the marketplace. The economic model of copyright articulated by Wordsworth and others was not the only basis for considering authors the owners of their production. A model proposed on the basis of natural law was also suggested. Copyright, it argues, is merely the legal recognition that an individual has a right to control the fruits of his labor. This argument is supported by a number of others that strive to prove that, in fact, an authors work is one of uniqueinspired or notcreation. Two seemingly contradictory arguments are important to note. First, the very material-

ity of print comes into play; the existence of a printed book proves the labor of the writer and the right to ownership. Printed or published texts were fixed in such a way that they could be owned. The more important notion, however, was established as a point of law in Pope v. Curll, which established that rights in letters were in incorporeal texts rather than in physical objects. While anyone might own the physical object of a book, the author owned the text it contained in a transcendent sense.

Contemporary Language Theory: Authorship as Idea

The notion of the author as a creative genius and of the byproducts of his labor (or inspiration) as real property persist in US and international law copyright conventions, and have furthermore survived questioning in the legal context of technology. It is as possible to own an electronic text today as it is to own a printed one. But as the fields of linguistics and literary theory evolved in the 1960s, notions of the author have necessarily come into question in the theoretical realm. Roland Barthes often quoted essay The Death of the Author proposes the notion that meaning is made not primarily by the author (or by a critic who has discovered the authors intentions), but rather by the interplay between language and the reader. The author is not, Barthes insists, the patriarch of a text, preceding it on a temporal line. He is rather merely a conduit thorough which language passes. Barthes privileges language (unstable though it may be) over the author, and the reader above all in interpreting meaning. In fact, he argues that to give a text an authora particular, named individual with a biography and history is to impose a limit on that text (Barthes, 222). Authorship is a linguistic activity, the assembly of a code for which the authors history, biography, and ultimately even his existence become irrelevant. Barthes argument here is a contemporary version of the craftsman arguments that pre-date the Romantics. Skill with language may be noteworthy, he says, but this is not an indication of authorial inspiration or uniqueness. The mastery of the narrative code may possibly be admired, but never his genius. It is language which speaks, not the author; to write is to reach a point where only language acts (221-2). Furthermore, for Barthes as for the pre-Romantics, writing is not a generative act but rather an act of editing or arrangement. The text is a tissue of quotation drawn from the innumerable centres of culture, for Barthes, and the authors only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others in such a way as to never rest on any one of them (223).

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Acknowledging the role of the reader, but discontent with Barthes outright dismissal of the author as dead, Michel Foucault proposes an alternative conception of the author in What is An Author? For Foucault, the central question to be looked at is not the cultural situation of the individual author as an organic being but rather the writers relationship to the text. In a specific criticism of Barthes proposition, Foucault argues that the old conception of the author as the primary controlling force, the center of meaning, has been replaced by the notion of the work as the center of meaning. This he finds as dissatisfying as a theory centered on authorship, mainly because there is no theory of what constitutes a work. And so, for Foucault, language (the work) holds less stability perhaps than it does even for Barthes who suggests that the meaning is at least partly comprised of the text as it appears to the reader. Foucault distinguishes between the individual personage of an author and what he calls the authorfunction in culture. Foucaults author-function is a set of assumptions surrounding the production, classification, and distribution of texts through a society. The author-function, among other things, allows a society to organize texts in a meaningful fashion, and to understand them through reference to the authors name. For Foucault, the authors name is not merely the designator of a personage (as in William Shakespeare) but also a descriptor of a certain kind of production (as in the works of Shakespeare or have you studied Shakespeare?), which is imbued with historical, critical, cultural, and literary assumptions by those who would hear it. The authors name, then, serves to characterize a certain mode of being in discourse and the authorfunction determines the functioning of certain discourses within a society (Foucault, 228).

The electronic medium, threatens to bring down the whole edifice [of authorship] at onceThe author is no longer an intimidating figure, not a prophet or a Mosaic legislator in Shelleys sense. The authors art is not a substitute for religious revelation and authors do not lay down the law. The electronic author assumes once again the role of a craftsman, working with defined materials and limited goals (153) What then does Bolters analysis suggest about the computer as mediational means in the Wiki model? Is Wikipedia itself the author in any sense we might find meaningful for analysis? Certainly Bolter, Poster, and others have suggested that the computer itself may indeed have agency in such circumstances, while others question this idea on philosophical grounds. To anthropomorphize computers is to commit a moral category error, notes Weizenbaum for example, leading people to misplace decision making authority and moral responsibility (qtd. in Miller, 63). But one may indeed reasonably ask in this context if Foucaults example the plays of William Shakespeare as an author-function might not be instantiated in, say, Wikipedias biography of John Seigenthaller. Additionally, scholars including Warnick have proposed a model of source evaluation that accepts the features of technology as constitutive of ethos online. Since it is impossible to assess the ethos of the author in any modernist since, Warnicks argument goes, we might well use design, image quality, usability, information structure, comprehensiveness, absence of self-interest, usefulness, or a host of other website characteristics to assess credibility, once again placing the technology itself into the position of authoror author function (264). And while Wikipedia has recently placed certain safeguards against libel and inaccuracy into its process, the site remains committed to what it calls radical collaboration, that is to say that anyone can post or revise any content on the siteanonymously. The result of this, of course, is that in the process of evolving into a better resource, the Wikipedia approach inevitably entails instability. And so if the romantic notion of a singular author led us to focus on the who in the question who writes? and the Foucaultian notion of the author-function led us to consider instead what? gets written, then the notion of aggregate authorship suggests a new question entirely: is the material evidence of writing, if it is knowledge at all, only a representation of a moment of community knowledge on Wikipedia? And what consequences, if any, does this question pose for content aggregators, for students, and for knowledge production in the academy? The complete analysis of that question is too lengthy to deal with in this space, but one part of the

Wikipedia: Authorship as Aggregation

Wikipedia proposes what might at seem at first to be an altogether new kind of authorship, the aggregation of many voices into a constantly evolving text. But this idea may, I believe, be explained by a hybrid of these historically situated prior conceptions of authorship. Part late 20th century author-function of Foucault in the sense that the Wikipedia name itself is becoming an author by which we categorize texts, yet clearly drawing on the multi-tasking roles of authors as commentators, scribes, and translators as well as creators which dates as far back at the 13th century, and ultimately subsumed by the text in the Barthian sense, the author of a Wikipedia entry may be described by elements of all these theories. Jay David Bolter acknowledges that the idea of authorship is taken full circle [or temporally backward, at least] by technology, as he notes in Writing Space:

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answer comes in a specific analogy I want to make between Wikipedia as a site of inquiry and a theoretical understanding of meaning-making which has become almost pass in contemporary scholarship, namely the idea that meaning is contained not in language as a vessel or vehicle, but in the interaction between writer and reader. With its origins in linguistics, the idea of meaningmaking as a communicative action permeates linguistic, literary, and rhetorical scholarship of the past several decades. And because the idea has been fairly aggressively applied to electronic texts as well it doesnt seem unreasonable to play it out against the backdrop of Wikipedia. Speaking in the early 1990s, Bolter had this to say about the then relatively new medium of electronic text: Electronic authors work with the necessarily limited materials provided by their computer systems, and they impose further limitations upon their readers. Within those limits the reader is free to play. The text is not simply an expression of the authors emotions, for the reader helps to make the text. (153). This is an instantiation of an idea not invented in the computer age, certainly, but obviously applicable to hypertext and the like, about which Bolter is arguing. I want to suggest that the Wikipedia phenomenon may be seen as one material instantiation of a theory that weve been comfortable with for some time concerning meaning-making and the nature of knowledge. In rhetorical scholarship we theorize about a collaboration between writer and reader in making meaningin practice, Wikipedia depends upon it. We suggest it as a cognitive process, or an interpretative paradigmthe Wiki model instantiates it in the material world. Reading Bolter with Wikipedia in mind, he becomes almost humorously prescient: The reader may well become the authors adversary, seeking to make the text over in a direction that the author did not anticipate the computer makes concrete the act of reading or misreading as interpretation and challenges the reader to engage the author for control of the writing space. (154) And indeed it is the ongoing (not theoretical, but actual) struggle for control of the writing space that Wikipedia supporters suggest results in ever-improving entries. If we have posited for many years now that the author is really the interaction between writer and reader, and that the knowledge made in that interaction is imperfect and fluid, might we now become comfortable saying that Wikipedia merely

makes that process material, visible, and available to the researcher?

The Materialization of Unstable Knowledge

In addition to instantiating the author-as-interaction model, Wikipedia challenges us to accept as material that which has thus far been only theoretically proposed about knowledge itself as well. The idea that knowledge is unstable, contextual, and interaction dependent runs across disciplines and discourses. From the field of linguistics to rhetoric, contemporary ideas of knowledge making assert not the autonomy of a text, but rather of a process, in making meaning. Scholars like Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede have studied meaning-making in collaborative groups, noting that especially in online interactions: Reader/responder and author/writer often merge, voices collapse and multiply, often belonging to no single source, or even to a person, and familiar notions of textuality and especially of where meaning resides are all called into question. (What Matters Who Writes?) And social-cognitivists like Linda Flower have observed that the product of those interactions what we often call meaning is not a fixed destination, but is rather a constructive, negotiated, and ongoing process. Meaning is always, in Flowers words, only our current understanding. Even the contemporary view of genre proposed by Carolyn Millerthat genre emerges in social action, (or, I as I am arguinginteraction) entails a dynamic theory of knowledge making. What Grabill and Simmons famously pointed out in their work on risk communication seems fairly benign across the all the fields of language and rhetorical study today: knowledge, they note, is not an accumulation of facts that progress toward the Truth, but is rather collection of perceptions that are agreed upon by a discourse community (424). In our theorizing at least, it seems that were comfortable with the position that positivist notions of meaning are dead, and much of our understanding of knowledge-making is solidly informed by this idea. But when such a theory plays out in real time with real texts, we get very uncomfortable. As the Chronicle article notes, even Wikipedia itself is not immune to this discomfort, and is planning to roll out specially designated stable-versions of some entries that have been vetted by academics of particular expertise. Moreover, it is also clear that different kinds of knowledge come into play herethe biographical facts of a living individuals life, for example, are a quite different kind of knowledge from that of most academic fields, which of course them-

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selves differ from each other in levels of concrete description and abstract interpretation.

Conclusion
It is important to note that in the technical, legal sense, Wikipedia and sites like it cant be held liable for anything like the Seigenthaller case. Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act (1996) holds that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or the speaker And of course Wikipedia is a terrible source of academic citation. But in my undergraduate days, my professors said the same thing about The Encyclopedia Britannica. In every composition or research course I know of, we teach students how to evaluate sources, and that encyclopedic sources are not scholarly, so why all the fuss now when one goes online? What I have hoped to show in this essay is that the prominent critiques of Wikipedia are simply asking the wrong questions. By paying attention to

the sensational stories of libel like the Seigenthaller case, or worrying about persistent errors of factsuggesting, for example, that students will be irreparably damaged if they learn that the Habsberg dynasty was not actually deposed in the late 19th century, but rather in 1918 (as the Chronicle reports when citing a Wiki blunder)we miss the central irony of our own scholarly endeavor to understand how interlocutors make meanings, and we overlook the potential of Wikipedia as a resource for those of us interested in how rhetorical interaction constitutes knowledge. Weve theorized to death (or to the death of the author as it were) where meaning gets made, and now we are threatened that it is actually happening in a medium that is dynamic enough to record it. Properly re-conceived by the academy, Wikipedia might become less a pariah of inaccuracy and academic slovenliness and more a site of inquiry from which to study users making dynamic meanings like those with which weve been preoccupied theoretically for so long.

References
Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang. 1977. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space. Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates. 1991. Ede, Lisa, and Andrea A. Lunsford. Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship. Publications of the Modern Language Association 116.2 (2001): 354-69. Ede, Lisa and Andrea A. Lunsford. Singular Texts/Plural Authors. Carbondale and Edwardsville. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge Eng. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Foucault, What is an Author? in The Book History Reader. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, Eds. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp 225-31. Flower, Linda. The Construction of Negotiated Meaning. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. Foucault, What is an Author? in The Book History Reader. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, Eds. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp 225-31. Grabill, Jeffrey, and W. Michele Simmons. Toward a Rhetoric of Risk Communication: Producing Citizens and the Role of Technical Communicators. Technical Communication Quarterly 6.4 (1998): 415-41. Lunsford, Andrea. What Matters Who Writes? What Matters Who Responds?: Issues of Ownership in the Writing Classroom, http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.1/features/lunsford/title.html, 2002. Miller, Carolyn. Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech 50 (1984): 151-67. Miller, Carolyn. Writing in a Culture of Simulation: Ethos Online. Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life: New Directions in Reseaarch on Writing, Text, and Discourse. Eds. Martin Nystrand and John Duffy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. 58-83. Poster, Mark. The Mode Of Information: Post-structuralism and Social Context. Chicago: U. Chicago Press. 1990. Read, Brock. Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade? The Chronicle of Higher Education LIII: 10. October 10, 2006. A3136. Seigenthaller, John. A False Wikipedia Biography. USA Today. November 25, 2005. Warnick, Barbara. Online Ethos: Source Credibility in an Authorless Environment. American Behavioral Scientist 48.2 (2004): 256-65. Woodmansee, Martha. The Author, Art, and The Market: The Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Woodmansee, Martha, and Peter Jaszi. The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads in Abrams, M.H. Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. (New York: Norton, 19xx). Pp. 356-62.

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About the Author

Stephen T. Jordan Stephen T. Jordan is pursuing the Ph.D. in Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University, where he conducts research in academic and professional publishing, rhetoric and public policy, scientific and medical discourse (especially about HIV/AIDS), the rhetoric of community and social change, and contemporary rhetorical theory. He is also a professional writer and editor, and has directed the publication of numerous textbooks and monographs in the disciplinary categories of rhetoric and communication studies.