Talk:Mario Carpo

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 29 August 2018 and 22 December 2018. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Dhaifalotaibi.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 11:04, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

March 28, 2022

I am the person to whom this biographical entry appears to refer. This Wikipedia page was born in April 2008 as a student experiment in a class on digital media I was then teaching. After a seminar discussion we concluded that, in compliance with the spirit and the letter of Wikipedia, the content of this entry should be limited to verifiable biographical and bibliographical data, drawn from published sources. Consequently, the original entry plainly listed my academic affiliations, and some of my main publications (books). That was all. The entry did not contain any comment, nor descriptions of any sort. We had no notion that we were doing anything wrong at the time and most likely, based on Wikipedia's terms of service in 2008, we were not.

The entry stayed that way, and kept its original format, until very recently. It grew organically over time with occasional additions; when needed I updated my academic affiliations and added the titles of new publications. Whenever I updated my entry I did it under my own name (see the page "history"); I just noticed that in a few occasions I was editing while logged in anonymously, but when that happened I generally spelled out my name (i.e. I authored my edits) in the comment line appended to each edit. I never thought that I was doing anything wrong and most likely I wasn't--even pursuant to Wikipedia's more recent and stricter terms of service.

Then, one day in the fall of 2021, a Wikipedia Administrator decided to rewrite this entry in full. In the process, some bibliographical data were deleted. When I noticed that, I reinstated the original entry--the one that had been online for 14 years. The administrator immediately reinstated her or his copy; when I tried to edit it again he or she sent me a "cease and desist" personal message; when I tried to delete the new entry I received a notice of "vandalism"; in the end, my partial deletion stayed, but the Wikipedia Administrator flagged the entry with a "maintenance template"--a warning posted on top of the entry denouncing my intervention and the possible conflict of interest.

This is, I think, unwarranted in this instance. But this also flags a more general issue concerning the spirit and the mode of functioning of Wikipedia. As many "open source" projects that preceded it, Wikipedia still works--mostly--by aggregating the wisdom of crowds. It does so by allowing many anonymous contributors to endlessly correct each other. But crowdsourcing needs a crowd; there is no crowdsourcing when the participants are just a handful of stakeholders. Equally importantly, there can be no crowdsourcing when one stakeholder is granted editorial privileges--above and possibly against all others. This converts Wikipedia into a traditional authorial or curatorial project, which goes counter to its original spirit--and to its very technical logic.

For this reason, I would prefer to limit my own biographical entry--which is of only moderate interest to a small constituency--to the two lines to which it is now reduced; simply stating my profession and my current academic affiliations. I would however recommend that the warning notice added by my Administrator, which denounces my edits to my own biography as a violation of the "neutrality" policy of Wikipedia, be removed. By reviewing the history of this entry, anyone can see that I never tried to conceal my edits; and anyone can see that the entry as it stands today (see below) does not show any bias or partiality (nor did it ever).

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This is the entry as it stands today (March 28, 2022), and to which I refer:

Mario Carpo is an architectural historian and critic, and is currently the inaugural Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London,[1] and Professor of Architectural Theory at the Institute of Architecture of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.[2] References[edit] 0.	^ "Prof Mario Carpo". The Bartlett School of Architecture. December 21, 2016. 1.	^ "Mario Carpo". i-o-a.at. Archived from the original on 2021-10-05.

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M. Carpo (talk) 17:28, 28 March 2022 (UTC)