Caught between the ethical and the instrumental: the value, challenges and contradictions of instigating the open wiki: radicalprintshops.org

This conference paper expanded upon the ethical issues raised in my book chapter 'Engaging past participants: the case of radicalprintshops.org' in Innovative Methods in Media and Communication Research. (Eds Kubitschko & Kaun, Palgrave 2016).

In the assembly of contemporary digital technologies, wikis are amongst those heralded for their democratic and ‘participatory’ potential. From the ambitious scale of Wikipedia to the more modest scope of the school classroom, wikis have been used to co-produce and share knowledge. In relation to the latter Robert Fitzgerald (2007: 680) argues that ‘the wiki approach’ to learning is consistent with the constructionist educational theory perspective that knowledge is ‘neither received or found’ but produced in interaction with other humans and tools. There has been significant research into the use of wikis in a variety of contexts, as the nine thousand pages of WikiPapers testify. Regarding the use of wikis in academic research, they are mostly utilized as a means for closed groups to manage research data rather than as a method for research. This paper describes an experiment to mobilize this potential through the instigation of an open access wiki, radicalprintshops.org. This wiki was conceived as adjunct to and part of the doctoral research I had recently undertaken. It was partly an attempt to balance the nature of the PhD process and final form with that which was more aligned to the collectivist politics and practices of my subjects. The aspiration was also that it would engender their interest and generate new empirical material to draw on. Without losing sight of the potential and actual value for the principled and instrumental aims of radicalprintshops.org, the developing challenges and contradictions the experiment raised will also be discussed throughout this paper.