Author: Warren Pearce, University of Sheffield
Alongside interviews with key advisors and policymakers, and our witness seminars which facilitate discussions between people with historical experience of the ethical advisory landscape, the project team are examining how cultures of expertise become configured in an important site of publicly accessible knowledge: Wikipedia.
The website’s importance to the topic of ethical advice may not be immediately obvious, especially in comparison to the first-hand accounts we draw upon elsewhere in the project. However, Wikipedia is what Heather Ford (2022) calls critical knowledge infrastructure, not only as a primary source of knowledge which appears prominently in search engine rankings and which millions of people depend on for decision-making, but also as a key source of training data for large language models which power tools such as Chat GPT (McDowell, 2024). As such, Wikipedia constitutes an important site for understanding the public development of expert knowledge in our case study of ethics in AI and healthcare.
A folk philosophy of science
In a recent analysis of a Wikipedia article on climate change, Olivia Steiert (2024) argues that Wikipedia editors employ a ‘folk philosophy of science’ (John, 2018). an idealised view of science as neutral knowledge which self-corrects over time, and should be free from personal opinions, political agendas or advocacy. This philosophy is both a source of strength – informing Wikipedia’s core principle of maintaining a Neutral Point of View – and a source of tensions where public demands for actions inevitably bring science and politics into contact.
This is highly relevant to our case study, as confronting the ethical dimensions of science and technology can provide a tension with well-established norms of scientific objectivity, particularly in public fora such as Wikipedia where citizens may provide contributions in a wide range of topics and styles (Brown, 2009). We also identify a tension between the topic of ethics and Wikipedia’s inability to recognise care work, stemming from its historic gender biases (Ford et al., 2023).
Digital methods to map Wikipedia
In October 2024, members of the project team gathered in Birmingham for a mini ‘data sprint’, enabling interdisciplinary research between experts in the issue and/or platform at hand, co-located in a short form, intensive project (Omena et al., 2022). We employed digital methods, an approach which takes a platform’s “digital objects” as a starting point for analysis, referring to things which are native to the platform and could not exist outside of it; for example in the case of Wikipedia, article edits, interwiki links to other Wikipedia articles and citations of sources outside of Wikipedia (Rogers, 2024, p. 24).
A key affordance of Wikipedia for this research is the presence of linked article versions in different languages, allowing a comparison of “cultural particularism” related to a given issue (Rogers, 2024, p. 119). For questions related to science and technology, this presents an opportunity to investigate the impact of civil epistemology, notably the “institutions and practices that condition receptivity towards public knowledge claims of any kind” (Jasanoff, 2011, p. 135).
Data collection using a variety of tools enabled us to explore a number of objectives around conceptual linkages, epistemological configurations, visual representation, temporal dynamism and geographical comparisons. In the next part, we will present some of our preliminary findings.
References
Brown, M. B. (2009). Three ways to politicize bioethics. The American Journal of Bioethics, 9(2), 43–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265160802617811
Ford, H. (2022). Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age. MIT Press.
Ford, H., Pietsch, T., & Tall, K. (2023). Gender and the invisibility of care on Wikipedia. Big Data & Society, 10(2), 20539517231210276. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231210276
Jasanoff, S. (2011). Cosmopolitan Knowledge: Climate Science and Global Civic Epistemology. In J. Dryzek, R. B. Norgaard, & D. Schlosberg (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society (pp. 129–143). Oxford University Press.
John, S. (2018). Epistemic trust and the ethics of science communication: Against transparency, openness, sincerity and honesty. Social Epistemology, 32(2), 75–87.
McDowell, Z. J. (2024). Wikipedia and AI: Access, representation, and advocacy in the age of large language models. Convergence, 30(2), 751–767. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241238924
Omena, J. J., Gobbo, B., Cano-Orón, L., & Flores, A. M. M. (2022). What are data sprints for? ¿Para qué sirven los data sprints? 22. https://doi.org/10.7203/drdcd.v1i8.253
Rogers, R. (2024). Doing Digital Methods (2nd edition). SAGE Publications.
Steiert, O. (2024). Declaring crisis? Temporal constructions of climate change on Wikipedia. Public Understanding of Science, 09636625241268890. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625241268890