“Realizing the limits of working memory, we know that a person plus an external representation is smarter than the person alone” – Donald Norman.

Over the past few years, our reliance on Wikipedia as a repository of all the world’s knowledge has escalated. While some critics like Nicolas Carr and Richard Foreman have argued that widespread and instant connectivity to the Internet impair our ability to reason and synthesize knowledge, cognitive scientists like Donald Norman and Andy Clark affirm that external bodies of information like Wikipedia can be used to enhance our cognitive abilities.

This paper looks at the types of cognitive learning being exercised when we visit Wikipedia. It asks: can Wikipedia be seen as an extension of our mind?  What type of learning are we engaging in when we turn to Wikipedia?

In the book Things That Make Us Smart author Donald Norman argues that “cognitive artifacts” (objects outside of our mind) can be used as external aids that enhance our mental abilities. In our daily lives we constantly rely on these objects to remember information for us: we externalize our memory whenever we add appointments to a calendar, take notes during a lecture or record monthly expenses on a spreadsheet. The notion that these artifacts are constructed prior to our interaction with information, and by other people, is what Edward Hutchins refers to as “precomputation”. This type of externalization is used to explain the method of how modern societies pass down cognitive artifacts and profit from the distributed knowledge of others. In the case of Wikipedia, the collection of information has been distributed across hundreds of years and millions of people.

There are many differences between between Wikipedia and the physical publications of the past in regard to how we acquire knowledge. For example, Wikipedia contains over fifty times the amount of articles as the binded edition of Encyclopedia Britannica; the wiki format allows readers to search, connect and navigate through millions of articles effortlessly, and mobile phones have brought us an “always-connected” encyclopedia that fits in our pocket wherever we go. Is it possible that Wikipedia, as a cognitive artifact, has become an extension of our minds?

The concept of the The Extended Mind, introduced by Andy Clark & David J. Chalmers (1995), proposes that artifacts outside of our mind can be utilized in such a way that they are seen as extensions of the mind itself. According to Clark and Chalmers, external resources can form part of the long-term storage of beliefs and knowledge in a manner that is functionally equivalent to information retrieved from long-term bio-memory. In their seminal paper The Extended Mind they establish three criteria for classifying an object as a legitimate extension of the mind:

1) The resource must be available and typically invoked

2) Any information retrieved must be more-or-less automatically endorsed and should be deemed as trustworthy as our own memory

3) Information contained in the resource should be easily accessible when required

If we applied these criteria to the Encyclopedia Britannica we’d see that it instantly fails to meet #1 and #3. As Clark once remarked, “There would be little value in an analysis that credited me with knowing all the facts in the Encyclopedia Britannica just because I paid the monthly installments and found space in my garage.” When considering whether Wikipedia meets all the criteria we might first consult a 2005 paper by Clark where he measured “mobile access to Google” against these criteria only to decide that it “would fail condition 2″: involuntary trust. But surely in 2010 millions of people consult Wikipedia as their first and only source for information. In this respect wouldn’t Wikipedia pass all three criteria and be considered an extension of the mind?

This paper argues that Wikipedia can be seen as an extension of our mind. It questions whether rote memorization is necessary when all the world’s knowledge is readily available at the click of a button. It goes on to discuss which learning skills we exercise when using Wikipedia (knowledge vs. comprehension and synthesis), which are being externalized, and which “New Media Literacies” (e.g. distributed cognition, networking and collective intelligence) will be the most valuable if, in fact, Wikipedia can be understood as an externalization of our minds.

Abridged Bibliography

Clark, Andy; Chalmers, David, The Extended Mind (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1998).

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