Abstract

In "Reviewing the Author-Function in the Age of Wikipedia," Amit Ray and Erhardt Graeff examine how wiki technology challenges traditional concepts of authorship and authority in knowledge production. The authors build on poststructuralist theory, particularly Roland Barthes's "Death of the Author" and Michel Foucault's concept of the "author-function," to analyze how wikis destabilize individual authorship in favor of collaborative, community-driven content creation.

The essay argues that wikis represent a fundamental shift from the Romantic notion of the solitary author-genius to what they term the "wiki writing process"—a dynamic system where traditional roles of reader, writer, and editor blur into a unified community of users. Using Wikipedia as a primary case study, the authors demonstrate how the platform's structure (article, discussion, and history pages) creates a "digital palimpsest" that archives all contributions while enabling continuous revision.

Through analysis of Wikipedia's editing patterns and community oversight mechanisms, Ray and Graeff show how wikis embody poststructuralist principles in practice, creating what they call "serial collaborations" that exist in perpetual flux. The authors conclude that wikis represent an evolved form of textual production that realizes Foucault's vision of discourse freed from traditional authorial constraints, offering new possibilities for collaborative knowledge creation while challenging established notions of intellectual authority and ownership.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publication Date

2008

Document Type

Book Chapter

Department, Program, or Center

English, Department of

College

College of Liberal Arts

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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