Abstract:

Diderot and d'Alembert's encyclopedic project sought to compile all human knowledge and promote its dissemination in the Enlightenment spirit of transforming thought. As a hegemonic, universalising movement, the categorisation of knowledge also produced normativity while claiming neutrality. Wikipedia emerged from a similarly democratising impulse, developing community mechanisms to promote knowledge, often at the cost of excluding ambiguity, indeterminacy, and fuzziness - important elements for activating imagination.

These issues sparked the ParVO project, which emerged within the Breaking the Code project as a "hack" of the encyclopedic algorithm. By mobilising subversive strategies and tactics within the Wikimedia ecosystem, the researchers (un)learn and challenge encyclopedic normativity in favour of situated knowledge and environmental and intersectional concerns in Arts Education and Research (AER). However, decyclopedisation remains superficial if it does not engage in the history of its own struggle.

The central questions are: What normativity lines link these projects' central role in organizing knowledge, from Diderot-d'Alembert's Encyclopédie to Wikipedia? How can we teach with the Wikimedia ecosystem beyond the encyclopedic normativity?

This presentation showcases ParVO, a wikibase digital platform prototype for AER that embraces error as a pedagogical and investigative catalyst - within this framework, encyclopedic artifacts are archived to historicise the gesture of totalising knowledge, compiling knowledge, and establishing the universal. And features three cases: Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), and Wikipedia. Together with the platypus, a creature that challenged eighteenth-century taxonomies, these objects will serve as lenses for examining normative structures and their exclusionary processes. These lenses also serve as catalysts for teaching methods designed to help learners work with semantically structured data and the MediaWiki ecosystem.

Methodologically, the project adopts an alternative epistemic framework that challenges normativity and treats error as a condition of knowledge production. ParVO incorporates error as a methodological and pedagogical tool, challenging epistemic normativity and inviting users to explore non-standard classifications.
Technologically, ParVO relies on a semantic data structure that deliberately introduces ambiguity.

Observing these three cases through this methodological lens helps researchers and students better understand the historical encyclopedic structures that shape us today. This is achieved by subverting the very digital infrastructure that supports Wikipedia, and by examining the implications of this gesture for teaching, particularly in the arts field. In doing so, teachers and researchers open a space to explore the encyclopedic apparatus as a place for artistic practice, discussing the controlled vocabulary required for decyclopedisation and the semantic structuring it entails, and outlining an archiving workflow in both technical and conceptual terms.

Ultimately, this project reimagines digital archives as spaces for artistic intervention and epistemic critique. The ParVO framework for historicising encyclopaedic apparatuses, develops students' skills in situated knowledge, critical literacy, taxonomic awareness, reflection on classification, and algorithmic normativity.

Keywords:

Digital Humanities, Arts Education, Archive, Situated Knowledge, Wikimedia.