Wikipedia as Rational Discourse: An Illustration of the Emancipatory Potential of Information Systems

Abstract

Critical social theorists often emphasize the control and surveillance aspects of information systems, building upon a characterization of information technology as a tool for increased rationalization. The emancipatory potential of information systems is often overlooked. In this paper, we apply the Habermasian ideal of rational discourse to Wikipedia as an illustration of the emancipatory potential of information systems. We conclude that Wikipedia does embody an approximation of rational discourse, while several challenges remain

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.