Expertise in Online Epistemic Communities Abstract Pierre Willaime “ENPOSS” August 24-26 2016 - University of Helsinki, Finland. This talk is about expertise in online epistemic communities. Such web communities often rely on a principle of anonymity and their epistemic agents have very limited informations about each other. These constraints make the detection of expertise quite tricky and interesting. Moreover, epistemic web communities are traditionally separated in two kinds: agent centered and group centered ones. They represent different social organizations of cognitive labor for the pursuit of knowledge. During this talk, I will focus on two of these epistemic communities on the web: Wikipedia and StackExchange. The first one is the paragon of the anti-individualist and egalitarian approach when the second one is based on an identification of some experts who will lead the community by holding administrator privileges. My purpose is (1.) to analyze what methods are used (implicitly or explicitly) to detect an expert on these websites and (2.) to wonder what kind of “expertise” we are talking about in these precise cases. To say the least, Wikipedia is not an expert-oriented website. Indeed, wikipedians favor the share of limited pieces of information by several individuals more than a comprehensive explanation by one very competent expert. According to the wisdom of crowds principle, “the many are smarter than the few” (Surowiecki 2004). One could think (for example: Sanger 2009) this participative and bottom-up epistemic system drives off experts – and support the idea that there is no decent place for what we call “agent” or “individual” expertise in Wikipedia. Our second case study, StackExchange, is a network of several experts-oriented thematic communities. The structure behind these StackExchange websites aims to internally evaluate the reliability of each member of the community. At the opposite of many experts oriented websites, StackExchange does not try to 1

import a previous expertise acknowledgement; agent expertise is evaluated only from interactions inside the web community. These two cases studies seems to be two opposite ways of building an epistemic community. However, with the help of a few examples, I will argue they are not so different. In a famous article, Alvin Goldman (2001) analyzes the possible rational reactions of a layman confronted to two experts in a disagreement. His solution is to judge, a posteriori, the experts about their past track records. The main idea is the opinion of one expert that are not yet likely to be accessible (for example: a prediction) will be probably available to the layman in the future. It is very difficult to judge complex arguments ; it is easier to recognize or deny the pertinence of a thesis with some distance. We must therefore analyze the past of experts rather than their (often esoteric) current positions. I will argue in this talk Wikipedia functions in the same way. A thorough analyze of rules, structures and behaviours governing the two examples shows that there are (mostly implicit) processes in Wikipedia aimed to detect individual expertise. In fact, even if the explicit epistemic system of Wikipedia is focused on the way to bring informations rather than on agents, individuals are implicitly evaluated by the community. Moreover, this expertise does not represent only the capability to fit into the community and to respect its rules but is a truly epistemic one. On StackExchange, the implicit processes of Wikipedia regarding expertise become explicit. In fact, the two epistemic communities are not so different. One consequence of my argumentation is that expertise must be internally formed inside the community to be accepted. Many experts-oriented alternatives to Wikipedia (Citizendium, Veropedia, . . . ) failed because they use an uprooted conception of expertise taken from another community (like the academic community). One other consequence of this case study is to question the philosophical framework needed to understand expertise. In my examples, it seems that expertise cannot be fully understood without a strong focus on epistemic agents and their specific features. Therefore, I will argue that a (social) epistemology which fully explains expertise must adopt an agent-oriented framework (like virtue epistemology or agent reliabilism) rather than a processes-oriented one (i.e. process reliabilism).

References Coady, David (2011), “An Epistemic Defence of the Blogosphere”, in: Journal of Applied Philosophy 28.3, pp. 277–294.

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Fallis, Don (2008), “Toward an epistemology of Wikipedia”, in: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59.10, pp. 1662– 1674. Goldman, Alvin I. (1979), “What is Justified Belief?”, in: Justification and Knowledge, ed. by George Sotiros Pappas, vol. 17, Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, Springer Netherlands, pp. 1–23, trans. by Emmanuelle Glon as “Qu’est-ce qu’une croyance justifiée ?” (Paris: J. Vrin, 2005). — (2001), “Experts: which ones should you trust?”, in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63.1, pp. 85–110. Greco, John (1999), “Agent Reliabilism”, in: Noûs 33 (Supplement: Philosophical Perspectives, 13), pp. 273–296, JSTOR: 2676106. Sanger, Lawrence M. (2009), “The fate of expertise after Wikipedia”, in: Episteme 6.01, pp. 52–73. Surowiecki, James (2004), The wisdom of crowds: why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations, 1st ed, New York: Doubleday, 296 pp.

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