Introduction
A global project, Wikipedia is now both the largest and most widely used encyclopedia in history. As you read this sentence, the encyclopedia “develops at a rate of over 1.9 edits per second, performed by editors from all over the world.”1 As of October 2020, there are currently 55,003,717 articles across more than 270 language versions. The English Wikipedia alone makes up 11% of that total article count, with “6,180,910 articles containing over 3.7 billion words.”2 The English Wikipedia averages over 9 billion page views per month, from over 800 million unique devices. Wikipedia is currently the 13th most visited website globally, and in the US, the 8th most visited.3 Significantly, only a third of those page views originate in the US, demonstrating the global reach of the English version.4
Wikipedia is both an archive and collection of the world’s information and history, but also incredibly current and timely. The top-viewed articles tool in the Wikimedia Statistics platform also provides a snapshot of the most topical information. For example, in October 2020 a few of the top-viewed articles included “Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” “Amy Coney Barrett,” “Shooting of Breonna Taylor,” “Dennis Nilsen,” and “Joe Biden,” as well as entertainment articles on subjects such as “Tenet (film),” “Mulan (2020 film),” and “Cobra Kai.”5 Beyond just archiving history, Wikipedia helps us to understand what the world is thinking about, reading about, and writing about.
For the purpose of this book, we will refer to the English Wikipedia version, given its size and reach, as well as its use of English as international lingua franca. This is not to dismiss the efforts of other Wikipedia projects, but instead to focus on the policies, procedures, and community of the largest Wikipedia project, with hopes that the lessons learned can be translated and applied elsewhere.
As Berger mentions in the epigraph, “knowledge about society is thus a realization in the double sense of the word, in the sense of apprehending the objectivated social reality, and in the sense of ongoingly producing this reality,” and if Wikipedia holds the largest knowledge repository, it is imperative to understand how this (social) reality is both apprehended and ongoingly produced on Wikipedia. In this book, we follow the structures of Wikipedia and how the encyclopedia functions to represent “reality” through the collection and dissemination of knowledge. These structures influence policy and guidelines, which then influence community behavior which write, govern, and arbitrate content on Wikipedia. This structure, the fundamental principles of Wikipedia, are known as the “Five Pillars.” They act as the basic structure of thinking about what Wikipedia is as well as providing a guide to assess how policies, guidelines, and behavior should flow from them, so that the differences between what should emerge and what does not emerge can be made apparent. In essence, the pillars can act as a baseline to help interpret what happens on Wikipedia, particularly in regard to community behavior and inclusion of content.
Although many in the Wikipedia community have had (and continue conversations) about issues surrounding Wikipedia, this book attempts to bring in others into these complicated discussions through exploring how Wikipedia functions. Wikipedia remains incredibly foreign to many and, despite being ubiquitous, there is a lack of critical engagements with the people, policies, processes, and personalities that govern what is included (and excluded) in Wikipedia outside of the (fairly small and insular) community.
Wikipedia Is the Encyclopedia
As the largest and most widely used reference source in history, Wikipedia is the encyclopedia, or as one scholar has called it – the “de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge.”6 For the English-speaking world, this role was formerly held by Encyclopedia Britannica, significant as the longest-running print encyclopedia in the English language. Britannica was continuously printed for 244 years. Its final print edition, the 2010 version of the 15th edition, spanned 32 volumes.7 To give some perspective on the depth and breadth of Wikipedia here, if Wikipedia were printed at the time of this writing, it would span over 2,657 (Britannica-sized) volumes.8 While Britannica continues to be available in the form of an online subscription, Wikipedia’s prevalence far eclipses Britannica’s. In fact, for many secondary and post-secondary students, Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia they have ever known, as an often-quoted 2010 tweet suggests: “Yesterday I asked one of my students if she knew what an encyclopedia is, and she said, Is it something like Wikipedia?”9
Millions upon millions of casual users mostly access and know Wikipedia by what the community knows as the “mainspace”10 – the actual encyclopedia articles, lists, and other “front page” content – with little knowledge of content beyond these pages. In addition to the mainspace, Wikipedia also organizes information into 11 additional namespaces, which include divisions for user pages, files and their metadata, interface texts, templates, help pages, category pages, reader-friendly portals, article drafts, TimedText for media files, and modules. Especially relevant to this investigation is what is known as the “Wikipedia namespace” or “Project namespace.” The Project namespace “contains many types of pages connected with the Wikipedia project itself: information, policies, guidelines, essays, processes, discussion, etc.”11 In general, the Project namespace outlines the way in which Wikipedia self-governs. This particular category of information can be identified easily because individual pages will always contain the prefix “Wikipedia:” (which may be abbreviated to “WP:” or “Project”). Throughout this book, we will frequently draw from pages in this namespace to discuss particular policies (e.g., “WP:NPOV” or “Neutral Point of View”), guidelines, or other “meta” information related to the project itself to assess, evaluate, and make sense of how Wikipedia shapes its content, and therefore the representation of reality.
As a whole, this book contends with Wikipedia’s dominant status in the global knowledge economy. As the most influential encyclopedia, Wikipedia plays an important role in shaping and arbitrating public knowledge, as well as our epistemological reality (discussed further in this chapter). As we recognize this, however, it’s also important to keep in mind that Wikipedia, despite the ways in which it challenges traditional notions of authorship and authority, is part of a long encyclopedic tradition. Such membership is demonstrated to the Wikipedia community and public readership in what is the first among Wikipedia’s Five Pillars, the “fundamental principles” describing and governing the encyclopedia. This pillar reads simply: “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.”
Such a statement feels obvious, of course, but bears repeating: “Wikipedia combines many features of generalized and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, and indiscriminate collection of information, or a web directory.”12 With this statement, the Wikipedia community affirms their project’s belonging in a long-standing and distinct written genre, as well as an idea. The encyclopedia is both a space for “the sum of all the world’s knowledge,” as well a concept more related to its etymology (from Greek enkyklios paideia), a “circle of learning.”
While reference works akin to encyclopedias have existed long before the first usage of the word encyclopedia, e.g., Pliny’s Natural History (first century), Vincent de Beauvais’ Speculum Maius (thirteenth century), the encyclopedic genre as something distinct and encompassing begins to emerge more clearly in Western cultures in and around the Enlightenment period with Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (seventeenth century), Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (eighteenth century), and Encyclopædia Britannica (nineteenth century).13 By the time Wikipedia came on the scene in the twenty-first century, the genre of the encyclopedia was well-established and already contained specific epistemological assumptions. Foremost among these assumptions is the notion that the collection and curation of human knowledge is even possible, a product perhaps of the scientific rationalism and optimism of the Enlightenment.14 In fact, if we compare descriptions of Wikipedia with descriptions of one of its Enlightenment-period predecessors, Diderot’s Encyclopédie, this epistemological assumption is present in both. In 1775, Denis Diderot wrote the following:
Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race.15
Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia as an experimental appendage of Nupedia,16 has explained the project in the following terms: “Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.”17 Wales’ statement would later become formalized on Wikipedia itself, which now includes the following descriptions of the project: “Wikipedia has a lofty goal: a comprehensive collection of all of the knowledge in the world,” along with “Wikipedia’s purpose is to benefit the readers by acting as an encyclopedia, a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge.”18 Wikipedia’s community strives for the incredibly lofty goal of collecting all the knowledge in the world (and distributing it to everyone for free). As becomes apparent in a comparison of these descriptions: the ideological facets of the encyclopedic genre precede and inform Wikipedia, especially in terms of its ambitious goals and lofty rhetoric. Such rhetoric is significant because, as we will explain in the next section (and indeed throughout this book), Wikipedia’s epistemological ambition to gather the sum of all human knowledge has specific ontological effects. Achieving (or even attempting) this lofty goal remains incredibly complicated and raises questions around access to knowledge, whose knowledge is included,19 who contributes, and what counts as knowledge. Wikipedia shapes reality through its representations of the known...
