On Altpedias: partisan epistemics in the encyclopaedias of alternative facts

This article considers how online alternative encyclopaedias, or ‘Altpedias’, create and maintain their own universes of “alternative facts”. We consider a selection of Altpedias that reject Wikipedia’s celebrated ‘neutral point of view’ as an artefact of liberal consensus politics whilst regarding their own epistemics as inherently partisan. As opposed to disregarding objectivity or truth, Altpedias’ ‘alternative facts’ may thus be understood as the product of competing normative standpoints concerning the use value of knowledge. In competing with Wikipedia, Altpedias ultimately attempt to give their partisan viewpoints universal standards, both in tone and in their very nature as wiki platforms. Empirically, the article uses visual network analysis and natural language processing in order to represent the vernacular worldviews of several far- and extreme-right Altpedias: Metapedia, Infogalactic and Rightpedia. Theoretically, the article frames these Altpedias’ fractious approach to the study of knowledge in relation to Lyotard’s ‘general agonistic’ and his speculations concerning the impact of computation on epistemics in the postmodern condition.