Intro: 
 
 
Present us and myself: Mia Melvær, Norwegian visual artist and one of 4 core-members of the Brussels based  collective and non-profit Just for the record. As a collective we look into how gender is represented in online writing thourgh a series of topic-specific events that invite experts of all kinds to share their stories, such as linguists, programmers, performers, filmmakers, archivists and arctivists. 
 
This is a rewritten version of a collectively written text we as Just for the Record once prepared for a worksession that went by the name of DiVersions (organised by Constant VZW) based on the question of how to tackle diverging versions of history.
 
Similar to the lifespan of a Wikipedia article this text has taken many different forms and shapes. 
And now I present it to you, as  a visualisation exercise, with the goal that it perhaps could be a tool for a discussion about what kind of work spaces we occupy in cyber space.  A collection of examples to trigger your imagination, as there are different ways to analyse a problem, and as a group of visual arts based practitoners we would like to share one of ours with you.

 
 
The architecture of collective writing
 
*idea of images: video screenshot of navigating in the ''office'' article on wikipedia ---> read mode --->links (show link to the word ''room'') --> history page --> edit mode --> talk page --->
page architecture with example page architecture with example of the ''Ancient Roman architect Vitruvius described in his theory of proper architecture, the proportions of a man.'' ---> link with the circular loom?

 
If we look at Wikipedia as an enormous architecture and consider the different editing spaces as an office space, by default, we enter in this space by the reading room, the “read mode”, where we can read the last version of the article. This room has several doors: some that leads to other articles, the links; but also some that bring us to the back office of the article. If we open one of these doors, we might arrive in the archives, in the “history page”, where all the succeeding versions of the page, all its modifications, are stored. Another door leads to the redaction room, with desks where the editors are writing the article. The last “back office door”, leads to a meeting room: the talk page where the contents of the article can be discussed. 
    
We can start to imagine the working atmosphere of each room. Some talk pages are enjoyable meeting rooms where conflict is easily solved and negociation rule; others can be conflict-ridden spaces with edit-wars, exclusion and personal attacks.
 
Then we can wonder how are these collaborative writing spaces shaped, distributed and connected, in the wider Wikipedia architecture? The writing of an article and the discussions about writing are made in different spaces. The writing is always performed from one account, through the edit page. When doubt occurs, or when different edits are too divergent, the editors need to gather and discuss the article content in another space: the talk page, that serves as a meeting room. 
The doors of these rooms are open, yet the people who choose to enter and feel authorized to contribute are of a very specific kind.It is never clear who exactly is sitting around the table, nor how the people around the table are perceived. 
What are the power structures in this environement?
In Wikipedia, everyone starts as an unregistered user, and can climb the hierarchy ladder of the encyclopedia to become a registered user, an administrator, a steward… etc
When the discussions comes to an end and decisions are made, how does the content transition from a space to another? Who brings what was decided from the meeting room into the office space where the contents are actually written?
How do we visualize traces of this editing process in the reading room (read page) and in the archives (history page)?
 
Lets really try to imagine it. These spaces. The combination of community and solitude that contributing to wikipedia can be. What form do these collective working spaces take? Is it really a cubist office architecture made of boxes? Or are they overgrown gardens, interlinked, unkempt and full of weeds?
And what scale are we imagining it? Is this relatable to human scale? Do the rooms feel massive, crowded, empty? And where are you in this mass? Towering at the top, sucked into its belly or are you encompassing it yourself? Could you imagine it as small and personal as to fit into the puddle of saliva that your tongue is gently resting on top of right now?
 
Ok, let's take a step back. What is your preferred working space in real life? There has been a lot of ideas around what the perfect office should look like. 
Around 1925 Taylorism took the western corporate world with storm, with its ideal way to organise an office efficiently through grids and cubicles. Yet already in the 1950's the idea of open, organic meticulously planned offices were countering this idea under the name Burölandschaft, only to be taken back to cubicles in the 1970's and back again to the ideas of open landscapes of high profile offices in the early 2000s. 
This means that over the past 100 years the ideology of office architecture in the western world has been fluctuating forth and back between the grid of cubicles to the open office landscape with a pretty excact 25 year wavelength.
So imagine your preferred work space. How does it look like?What does it allow? 
 
Let's look for clues about what kind of space this is in how one is allowed to use it as architecture and actions are always interlinked. What is the code of conduct in this architecture of public space? What happens if the people in the meeting room don’t agree? 
 
Wikipedia welcomes divergence, but only to certain extents and at different levels. 
In its founding principles, to reach for what is arguably called a ''neutral point of view'', an article shouldn’t express only one side of a story, but all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.
In the process of editing, every change adds difference. Either a change is made in the existing content, or a whole new section is added, presenting a new point of view. 
Every change is recorded in a new version, suceeding to the previous one, in quite a linear mode. The history of an article form a single thread. No parallel versions, like forks and branches are allowed to exist, as they are considered attempts to evade the neutrality policy by creating a new article about a subject that is already treated in an article, often to avoid or highlight negative or positive viewpoints or facts. 
Removing content also adds difference. But too many removals, or too repetitive ones, can lead to being blocked. You cannot dissent too much, or too strongly in the process of writing. 
 
If too much divergence emerges, discussions should be engaged in the talk page, where doubts or disagreement about the content of the article can be expressed with other editors. They can mark their agreement or disagreement, in quite a binary way, adding arguments. Or they can discuss in more organic ways.
 
Even though these discussions seem arbitrary at times, talk pages are still incredibly detailed records of diverging points of view. One example of a page where we can see the changing room structure and atmosphere from conflicting to something closer to an agreement in a meeting room can be found on the talk page of the article on Femicide. Femicide is a term for the murdering of women, a term from the field of gender-based hate crime. The controversy on this page has been centered around: questioning whether it was written from a neutral point of view, questioning whether the article was keeping to an encyclopedic tone and a request to merge this article with  the article on Gendercide. The arguments made to question or merge the  article has mostly been met with a calm tone that insists on a respectful debate where users also admit mistakes. The meeting room of this talk page also seem to represent how the article develops into something very carefully organized, a stubbornly well-constructed article that gets harder and harder to attack for its technichalities. This is rare to see about sensitive issues like this one, as an example (apologies for the binary representation of gender, as we retell the discussion that happened) : At some point a user argues that there is a math problem in how the article focuses on the fact that 40 percent of the murders of women are due to domestic violence. The person argues that since in total only 20 percent of all homicide happens to women, the 40 percent of murders that are due to domestic violence only makes up 8 percent of the total of homicides and are therefore not a a large gendered problem. Whereas men make up 80 percent of all homicides, of which "only" 8 percent die from domestic violence. Therefore if you look at the total numbers of homicides 6,4 percent are male victims of domestic violence and 8 percent are female victims of domestic violence. These numbers of course look a lot more similar than when you
look at it from a gendered perspective, where male victims are 8 percent due to domestic violence and women 40. This argument was simply met with a detailed explanation in the article itself and a simple answer saying that these statistics do not bear out the claims. There is no math problem. The meeting room stays calm and friendly.
 
So is it even possible to work on the base of consensus in such a heterogenous space? In a project called Rehearsals - 8 Acts on the politics of listening Sophia Wiberg and Petra Bauer played with the experience they had gained through 7 years of arranging public meetings for the town council  in Stockholm. The main lesson from this experience was that if you try to make a platform and a voice for minorities and other silenced groups, it has no purpose unless one simultanously teaches people to listen and to be aware of how they listen. During these reharsals of political listening, which were acts of information exchange between people that normally would not find themselves in a room together with a set of listening-rules to adhere to, the first thing they noticed was how slow and insecure the pace was, and that was making them uncomfortable. 
 
A genealogy of this method can be found in discussion groups developed in the late 60s, called  “consciousness raising”. Starhawk describes these meetings in those terms in The Five-Fold Path of Productive Meetings:
-  We would sit in a circle, and each woman was given a protected time in which to talk about her own experiences. If she had nothing to say, we all sat silent for her ten minutes. Because women were so often silenced, interrupted and shut down, we did not interrupt, respond or ask questions. When every woman present had been given a chance to speak, we would have an open discussion about what was similar or different in our experiences, and what it meant.
Could we imagine that something as simple and radical as silence, be accounted for in talk pages on wikipedia? Would we need to redraw the architecture, refurbish the rooms?
 
So based on this I, and Just for the Record are wondering, 
 
 
This is of course not an exhaustive list of propositions and meant as inspirations for the open possibilites to think about the problematics we have exposed together.
 
 
So what do you see when you imagine Wikipedia's architecture?
A building taken back by nature?
A high security office building?
A roundtable?
Or masses of raw material yet to be utelised?
in between point of view
silence
tricotin, gathering
other 3d object flat plans, from 2d to 3D, see connection from another perspective
what scale? cf man scale ? cf power of 10?
it should be A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
(Ursula Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction)


Parts to integrate?
In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf was one of the first critics to point to the masculine bias of the literary canon: “it is the masculine values that prevail... This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle field is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists” (77). In her case, whether or not it was true for all the moderns, Woolf ’s endeavors to make “the accent [fall] differently from that of old,” as she puts it in “Modern Fiction,” have much to do with shaping an unheroic narrative in which “there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style” (CR1: 150). How could these throughts intersect with how we look at writing history?

Like Le Guin, Woolf also describes the novel as a container for emotions and meanings, only Woolf tends to use architectural imagery. In A Room of One’s Own, for example, she describes the novel as a 
structure leaving a shape upon the mind’s eye, built now in squares, now pagoda shaped, now throwing out wings and arcades, now solidly compact and domed like the Cathedral of Saint Sofia a at Constantinople. This shape... starts in one the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it. But that emotion at once blends itself with others, for the ‘shape’ is not made by the relation of stone to stone, but by the relation of human being to human being. (74)
 
However, interestingly, Le Guin describes “home” as “another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people” and the shrine or museum as containers for the sacred (152). Architects themselves talk about buildings as containers creating certain shapes and sequences of spaces that evoke certain feelings and enable certain kinds of activities within them. The meaning of the architecture is discovered, and in part created, by the user.1 Woolf often says similar things about the novel—that its meanings are not conveyed directly, expositorily, but rather the reader apprehends through reading, through experiencing the text and putting the pieces together.
 
- “THE REAL WORLD”: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND ECOFEMINISM 
by Diana L. Swanson