When I taught at a tech school back in Minnesota, I had the honor of
teaching a critical thinking class to a number of unique individuals
who represented different genders, ethnicities, ages, and educational
backgrounds and capabilities. The text we used for the class was The Freedom Writers' Diary
and in the class we attempted to examine the ideas of freedom and what
that idea meant to the students. One our first day I asked my students
to draw a picture with crayons representing their own ideas of freedom
and I received a wide array of different beliefs. One of the
younger male students with a physical disability showed himself jogging
out in a park, and another student showed herself shopping.
Interestingly though, two of the older students in the class showed a
more grim picture. One of the middle aged students was from Belarus and
her drawing showed a person chained down by heavy weights with the
caption "freedom is an illusion."
I had expected there may be some different ideas around this particular
concept, but I wasn't prepared for someone outright denouncing freedom.
Despite my own preparedness for these ideas, the wide span of beliefs
particularly surrounding the concept of freedom is not unlike the
landscape we see in Wikipedia.
There are a number of questions worth asking in this regard including "why are the ideas of freedom different on Wikipedia?" and "does Wikipedia promote a certain freedom ideal?" but perhaps it's most worth analyzing the answer to the question "how is the elusive concept of freedom utilized on Wikipedia?" Obviously the answer to this question could take up significant space and covering it would take at least the same amount of time it has taken to cover the articles we read, but I think I will be able to give the ideas at least some justice in the space below.
It seems one of the big questions co founder Jimmy Wales has had to face is this: how much freedom is enough/too much for the users of Wikipedia? Jimmy Wales has occasionally come under heavy criticism for imposing restrictions since that seems to violate his claim that wikipedia is a place where essentially everyone has the ability to contribute equally. Just as Mark Graham notes in his article, "Wiki Space," "Wikipedia is often described as an exercise in both anarchy and democracy, where dominant narratives and representations are deconstructed and an array of opinions and interpretations of the world are made visible" (296). It seems that Wale's usage of restrictions then aims more to stomping out certain anarchies, but that doesn't necessarily mean his approach is democratic. Perhaps it's easier to define how freedom functions within wikipedia to look at the other ways that users exercise their abilities through specific interactions.
In one article, "The Lives of Bots" by Stuart Geiger we see freedom as a function of creating programs to do editing for you. Of course, other users rejected some of these programs and then exercised their own freedoms to block or stop the usage of the bots. Forking functions as another freedom, to split off and even leave or replicate Wikipedia in a way that is more fitting in the eyes of the new creator whether that's through the inclusion of ads or meeting a different language paradigm. In that regard, we may see that freedom actually exists through the ability to exercise control, which seems inherently contradictory. And the other way freedom is expressed which furthers this same idea is through editing/rejecting comments or recommending certain users be blocked. The users themselves though, who are predominately Western males, also define the presentation of freedom and bring into question whether or not they're shaping the idea and usage of freedom for everyone else.
Maybe before we can really get to the core of Wikipedia's sense of freedom, we have to be willing to examine Wikipedia's ontological nature and within that the ontological nature of freedom itself and freedom in the digital sphere. If things take on a different state of being or Being online, then does that too shape the idea of freedom and whether or not it can exist on a broad or idiosyncratic scale through Wikipedia? It's hard to say. The one thing we can probably guess for sure is that people, just like the members of my Critical Thinking class, will continue to bring their own ideas of freedom to this site and continue to promote and shape different paradigms with equal power.