Felipe Ortega and Joaquín Rodríguez, El Potlatch Digital: Wikipedia y el Triunfo del Procomún y el Conocimiento Compartido, Ediciones Cátedra, 2011
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17181
application/pdf
2038-3460
17181
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en
Lucía Liste Muñoz
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Felipe Ortega and Joaquín Rodríguez, The Digital Potlatch: Wikipedia and the Triumph of Commons and Shared Knowledge, Ediciones Cátedra, 2011
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
5
Book Reviews
2014-07-14
2023-06-13
2014-07-14
2023-07-24
216-219
TS
Lucía Liste Muñoz
2014/07/14
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17181
216
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
2038-3460
1
en
219
Felipe Ortega and Joaquín Rodríguez, The Digital Potlatch: Wikipedia and the Triumph of Commons and Shared Knowledge, Ediciones Cátedra, 2011
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17181/16082
5
216                                                               Tecnoscienza 5 (1)

of warfare, the rise of the United States as scientific superpower, the shift
of funding from physics to biology in the second half of the century, and
what Agar calls the “missing stories”. This term refers to the historio-
graphical gaps that characterize the existing historiography, from the
many connections that are not pursued, to the scientific ideas that are not
mentioned because they died out quickly, to neglected analytical tools
such as those that reveal the specificities of national research systems. But
missing are also those stories that did not break through post-war regimes
of secrecy, what Peter Galison called the: “classified universe…[which]
very probably is much larger than…[the] unclassified one” (p. 508).
    While always effective and highly readable, Agar’s narrative is, per-
haps inevitably, uneven in terms of originality and depth. This has to do
with expertise as well as the current status of historiography – which is
very sketchy for some areas, e.g., the most recent trends. Agar is at his
best when discussing post-war digital computing and the many paths not
taken – which is hardly surprisingly given his own groundbreaking work
in this area. But the specialist reader will find other insightful and though
provoking sections, such as the discussion on science and social move-
ments in the 1960s.
    Agar has produced a truly impressive piece of scholarship, synthetiz-
ing a vast amount of secondary literature – this alone would make for an
invaluable contribution to the history of science. But this book is not just
interesting and useful as a survey. Most intriguing is the way it provokes
the reader into reflecting on the possible modes and implications of scal-
ing up the level of our analyses to identify larger patterns in contemporary
scientific life.

References
Shapin, S. (1996) The Scientific Revolution, Chicago University Press, Chicago.



                                      ***


Felipe Ortega and Joaquín Rodríguez
El Potlatch Digital: Wikipedia y el Triunfo del Procomún y el Conocimien-
to Compartido [The Digital Potlatch: Wikipedia and the Triumph of
Commons and Shared Knowledge]
Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2011, pp. 212

Lucía Liste Muñoz Norwegian University of Science and Technology

  Wikipedia is an unexpected miracle. The contemporary experiment of
management by the common has turned into a very efficient and success-
Book Reviews                                                            217
ful socio-technical venture. This book investigates the collaborative en-
deavors and practices around Wikipedia. It aims to understand the par-
ticular logics behind one of the greatest and most interesting examples of
collective action, creation and free dissemination of knowledge. In con-
crete terms, the authors intend to shed light on the motivations of Wik-
ipedia editors. In order to do so, they combine qualitative perspectives
with quantitative approaches.
    The book begins with an introductory chapter in which Ortega and
Rodríguez present some of the central notions and arguments of their
work. The departure point is their concern over the reasons why people
engage in digital collaborative projects. The authors argue that no single
motivation can account for the variety of economic practices and behav-
iours that take place in the Internet, not even within the subset of those
who form and sustain the Wikipedia community. Rather, there are multi-
ple, and even contradictory, causes behind such efforts; for instance, al-
truism, entertainment, obsession, addiction, quest for recognition and,
even, vandalism – which is frequently counteracted by digital patrols
aimed at detecting attacks and restoring originals. Yet, among this diver-
sity and heterogeneity, Ortega and Rodríguez aim to identify a homoge-
neous ground or underlying explanation that will allow us to understand
the reasons for practices that exclude immediate material or monetary
reward, and are therefore alien to our universe of everyday and one-
dimensional economic performances. At this point, the potlatch notion
enters the scene as a useful example of an economic practice that contra-
dicts the pervasive capitalist logics of accumulation and distribution. This
notion is further explored in the next section.
    What are the necessary conditions for collaboration and cooperation
to be not only possible and recursive, but also interesting, appealing and
desirable? In their pursuit of a theoretical framework to help us under-
stand the different economies of practices that can be observed in the In-
ternet, the authors guide us through untenable theories and sites of altru-
ism and cooperation. In the second chapter, “The Digital Potlatch”, Or-
tega and Rodríguez review several contributions from the scholarly litera-
ture. The authors argue that some existing theoretical resources – such as
the prisoner’s dilemma, the drama of the commons, etiologic perspectives
and classic postulates of liberalism – provide unsatisfactory explanations
of the phenomena, due to their excessive focus on monetary-based logics
and their lack of attention to individual factors and the contexts in which
cooperation is enacted. The authors draw on the notion of potlatch to
overcome these insufficient accounts of altruism.
    Ortega and Rodríguez describe the general features of the original
potlatch ritual, a complex behavioural ceremony practiced in various
forms by many North American tribes, in which distribution of property
and gifts allows persons to affirm or reaffirm their social status. This ex-
ample illustrates how, in certain contexts, gifts of material and/or intan-
gible capital allow persons to gain acknowledgment, recognition and re-
218                                                           Tecnoscienza 5 (1)

nown from the community. This form of generosity brings enormous so-
cial prestige. Thus, the sacrifice of economic capital results in symbolic
capital gains, which opens the possibility of effective power over the tribe.
     Wikipedia is a collaborative venture that aims to create and dissemi-
nate knowledge. In this vein, the project shares its commitments with sci-
entific practice. In the third section, “The Genesis of the Field of Scien-
tific Production or an Example of Instituted Collaboration”, the authors
explore the relationship between science and the Web 2.0. The authors
reflect on the similarities and differences, as well as the opportunities and
emerging constraints and challenges, enabled by the interplay. Science
works as a resistant collaborative network, although pressures and chal-
lenges form both inside and outside. Reputation, impact and diffusion are
the main characteristics of the logic of symbolic capital accumulation in
science.
     In the fourth section, “An Ethnography of Wikipedia”, the authors
report the findings of their qualitative and quantitative analyses of prac-
tices around Wikipedia. The investigation thoroughly examines organiza-
tional, managerial and operational patterns, and the data point out the
parallelisms between Wikipedia behaviour and the potlatch model. The
phrase “digital potlatch” refers to practices through which assets (e.g.
knowledge) must be given away in order for more valuable capital (name-
ly recognition and popularity) to be obtained. Wikipedia offers a proto-
typical example of a community that develops common policies, articu-
lates its internal recognition and monitoring mechanisms and coordinates
its controls, without monetary flow. What is more, it illustrates how valu-
able capital in a certain habitat is not necessarily material, but can be
symbolic. Arguably, the main argument of the book is that meritocracy
and effort recognition are the main driving forces of those who partici-
pate in collaborative ventures such as Wikipedia. Although the example
is not generalizable for all Internet communities, the authors argue that
the success of Wikipedia exemplifies the triumph of shared knowledge
and collaborative practices over individualistic strategies.
     Ortega and Rodríguez summarize the main findings from their quanti-
tative and qualitative analyses in the fifth section, “The Digital Social
Contract.” The initial disinterest – the generation of freely accessible
shared knowledge – is rewarded with some kind of recognition, and the
accumulation of this symbolic capital is the fundamental principle for the
acquisition of status in the community. However, Wikipedia is not a ten-
sion-free project. For instance, there is ongoing debate over the organiza-
tion of a system of acknowledgment. Furthermore, meaningful participa-
tion seems incompatible with long-term involvement. In the sixth section,
“Notes on the Political Dimension of the Shared Knowledge. Towards a
Politic Anthropology of the Future More Participatory and Open Demo-
cratic Governance”, the authors briefly reflect on the democratic oppor-
tunities that this kind of collaborative undertaking might entail for gov-
ernance.
Book Reviews                                                             219
     In the last section, “Twelve Ideas to Avoid the Tragedy of the Shared
Knowledge”, Ortega and Rodríguez outline some ideas for tackling what
seems to be an inevitable and progressive abandonment of participation
in collaborative ventures. The authors point towards several potential ini-
tiatives, such as: redefining the notion of work in our societies and reduc-
ing the time devoted to it; dedicating released time to the common, such
as by creating shared knowledge; thinking differently and challenging the
dominant ideas of production and economic growth; facilitating universal
free accessibility to the Internet; encouraging, acknowledging and re-
warding collaboration with symbolic capital that can be converted into
other forms of capital; and organizing self-managed governance agencies
to promote, monitor and evaluate the involvement. Finally, the authors
include an appendix in which they provide an account of the methodolo-
gy employed in the investigation.
     Ortega and Rodríguez do an admirable job of attempting to under-
stand how a collaborative endeavour like Wikipedia operates. This book
could be very interesting for anyone aiming to understand the logics of
collective action and those concerned with new ways to manage the pub-
lic. Furthermore, it introduces new questions and touches upon issues of
interest in different fields. This investigation of the hybrid assemblage
known as Wikipedia could be a thought-provoking contribution not only
to STS scholars, but also to historians wondering about the origins of
practices, economists studying economic practices, sociologists dealing
with communities of practice, legal scientists examining questions of
property, anthropologists enquiring about the persistence of gift culture
and even political scientists captivated with the rebirth of the public
space. Lastly, the book is well documented and a valuable contribution to
the scarce scholarly literature on Wikipedia in Spanish.


                                   ***


Claire Waterton, Rebecca Ellis and Brian Wynne
Barcoding Nature. Shifting Cultures of Taxonomy in an Age of Biodiversity
Loss
London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 212

Giuseppina Pellegrino University of Calabria

    Making visible the density of the ongoing changes which articulate the
relationship between (techno)science and society is not an obvious task.
The three authors of Barcoding Nature. Shifting cultures of taxonomy in an
age of biodiversity loss succeed in such an enterprise, being participant ob-
servers and engaged witnesses of a complex turning point in one of the En-
