As a high school and college student, I heard the instruction many times, from nearly every teacher I wrote an essay for: Use academic sources, not those that are only published online, and not — emphatically not — Wikipedia. As an instructor, I now find myself giving the same advice, suggesting that students choose peer-reviewed, academic publications over informal articles and depositories of information such as SparkNotes and Wikipedia. While the move to embrace technology and new media in the classroom has turned tweets and blog posts into viable objects of critical analysis, a bias toward the stable, authoritative voice of texts that are privately written, published and purchased remains in academia. This is the form of knowledge that allows a voice to speak with the authority of the intellectual, state-sanctioned academy, knowledge that, as Michel Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish, “presuppose(s) and constitute(s) at the same time power relations” (27). Such a voice must be fixed as a referent; it offers a complete thought with a position that is assumed rather than negotiated. It invites neither collaboration nor interrogation.

It is clear, then, how sources such as Wikipedia that can be cooperatively edited, that bring together competing voices, and that do not and never will exist in a stable, final form fail to access the authority that is particular to academic constructions of knowledge. In “The Encyclopedia Must Fail! – Notes on Queering Wikipedia,” an article published in online, open-access, open-peer-reviewed journal Ada, Noopur Raval addresses issues of how even sources of knowledge like Wikipedia may continue to enforce ideological limits on who produces knowledge and what information should be accessible. The content of Raval’s argument raises important questions about just how open collaborative sources like Wikipedia truly are, but the form that argument takes provokes pressing questions as well. Raval’s article appears in a context that, like Wikipedia, lacks the permanence and imposing presence associated with professional publication. The source is solely online, targets a “diverse and fundamentally interdisciplinary readership,” and allows online, open peer review through its review website (Ada). It is neither specialized nor professionalized in the manner of those reassuringly academic sources my past professors and I have recommended to students.

Raval’s article calls our attention to the importance of analyzing “the transactions, the people, and conditions of knowledge production that facilitate or create challenges to diversity programs within any movement.” In her critique of problems she believes Wikipedia must address, Raval reiterates the issues that exist in traditional forms of knowledge: only some voices are represented, information can be suppressed, and access is not universal. If these are problems a source like Wikipedia cannot fully resolve, we can easily imagine the attack Raval might mount on traditional forms of academic knowledge. The expensive, highly specialized books and journals that are produced and reviewed by a small field of scholars who possess authority do little to increase diversity, access, or freedom of expression in the production of knowledge.

Given the content of Raval’s article, publication in Ada seems well suited to her engagement with collaborative, open access bases of knowledge. However, the article’s publication in such an open format emphasizes to me the fundamental problems that still exist in how we construct, access, and reference information from collaborative and variable sources. Though Raval addresses failure as a means of critiquing through commentary and collaboration, her depiction of failure as a “subversive process” that “gains transformative potential as a strategic tool in history writing and permanently etches difference in its grain” can also speak to the form of her article. I wrote earlier that sources like Wikipedia and, perhaps, like Ada, fail to represent academic authority. If we assume such failure in Raval’s article, can we read it as a form of subversion? If so, how effective can that subversion be within a wider field of academic discourse?

Though I agree that the extremely limited ability for diverse groups to access and contribute to academic knowledge is problematic, I wonder whether shifting to the open format of Ada and articles like Raval’s is a tenable option. Reading Raval’s article, I found myself wondering whether I would be willing to cite it in my own work. Whether because of the author’s work, the open review process, or its transposition to the website, the article contains several errors in grammar and style, and its online context does not engender a sense of reliability. I realize that the neat and resolved image of academic perfection and finality to which I’m comparing the article often acts as a barrier that prevents us from engaging with knowledge that doesn’t fit our arbitrary standards, but those standards are safeguards as much as limits: they allow us to assess the quality of information we bring into our own work. Even if those standards are not wholly rational or effectual, their undeniable influence makes it difficult for me to conceive how we can foster academic engagement that truly melds professionalism and accessibility.

Speaking from within the discipline of English literature, I struggle to imagine methods of interrogating the advent of fixed and authoritative knowledge in both content and form as Raval does without sacrificing the very authority that allows such an argument to be taken seriously. Yet perhaps my very perception of what kind of response would constitute a serious reception is limited by my academic training. Perhaps Raval’s article and the format of Ada step toward targeting a wider audience, with goals beyond the academy that can be enacted through our publications themselves, rather than through post-publication packaging of concepts or academic hashtagging that attempts to make our ideas meaningful to the public. Most troubling, perhaps my very resistance to integrate my idea of academic professionalism with the open forms of knowledge Raval discusses is indicative of an ideologically driven instinct to privilege sanctioned forms of knowledge over diverse, accessible, and less regulated media forms. As individuals within academia, we are often made poignantly aware of the systems that, like the Wikipedia policies Raval describes, “can be instrumentalized to systematically include or exclude factual information.” My academic training has made me cognizant of how such systems exclude certain groups, perspectives, and realities as well as particular facts. Yet despite this awareness, questions of how to combat those intellectual structures of exclusion in the present and especially in relation to the open production of and access to knowledge are often overlooked. Even when disciplines focus on granting a voice to the oppressed or critiquing social structures, they face the difficulty of breaking down academic barriers while speaking from behind them. Thus, I close this post still considering the question of how we can truly engage with issues of accessibility and openly confront the instability of knowledge in the form as well the content of academic work.