Provenance, Power and Place: Linked Data and Opaque Digital Geographies

The ability of search engines to shape our understandings of the world by controlling what people discover when looking for information is well known. We argue that the power of search engines has become further entrenched in the wake of the current move to restructure the Web according to the logics of ‘linked data’ and the ‘semantic Web’. With the goal of sharing information according to structured formats that computers (rather than humans) can easily process and analyse, linked data engineers are abstracting information from fact sharing websites like Wikipedia into short, uniform statements that can be more efficiently shared, compared and analysed. In response to this enhanced power by search engines and the corresponding loss of agency by ordinary users, some Wikipedians have challenged the ways in which data from the encyclopedia has been used (often without credit) by search engines like Google. Using the capabilities approach first developed by Amartya Sen, we interrogate exactly what some Wikipedians believe they are losing when they complain about how Google represents facts about the world obtained from Wikipedia and other sites.