Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality

Front matter

_ Oe

WIKIPEDIA AND THE REPRESENTATION OF REALITY

Zachary J. McDowell and Matthew A. Vetter

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface

Wikipedia’s Pillars and the Reality They Construct Introduction 1 Wikipedia Is the Encyclopedia 2 Neutrality as the Language of Representation 5 Openness as an Ethic and Ideology 7 Wikipedia Is a Community 10 Wikipedia Has No Firm Rules 11

No Rules, But Lots of Hierarchy 12 Wikipedia as Cultural Hegemony 13 An archaeological Approach to Wikipedia 14

Preface

If you want to master something, teach it.

—Richard Feynman

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, [they are the] one who asks the right questions.

—Claude Levi-Strauss

This book came into being through years-long friendships and collaborations that emerged through our overlapping and mutual work with Wikipedia. We have utilized Wikipedia in education for nearly a decade — devoting countless hours employing Wikipedia in the classroom, in research, and in our social outreach. Our experiences as educators, as academics, and as Wikipedians have informed how we approach, understand, and critique Wikipedia. Connections through teaching turned into conference papers, which then turned into academic publications and volunteer outreach (often “Edit-a- Thons”).! The topics we cover in this book, as well as those of our previous presentations and publications, emerged through conversations about our different ways of approaching shared experiences in which we reflected deeper together on these topics. While much of our experience that engendered our reflections in this book emerged from interactions with students (whether formally in a classroom or in a volunteer space), what we have realized is that the experiences of students on Wikipedia are that of new users, in general. In our experience of facilitating and attending Wikipedia editing events and workshops, we also see the experiences of students reflected in those of more diverse groups of academics and other professionals. Although we often will laud the educational benefits of working with Wikipedia x Preface in the classroom (whether for learning to write for a general audience, learning information literacy, or otherwise), not only are these experiences indicative of learnings for Wikipedia users, in general, but the purpose of this book is to reflect on not just the process of how Wikipedia represents reality but also the experience of participating in that process. So to this point, when we discuss students in relation to Wikipedia we envision a student as the novice or the lifelong learner, not necessarily the traditional classroom student.

In the following pages of this preface, we discuss our experiences of teaching users to edit and learn about Wikipedia, as these experiences shaped how we began to understand not only how Wikipedia is supposed to work but also how it does work in relation to the experience of learning to participate in the Wikipedia community. As Feynman famously said, “If you want to master something, teach it,” and this is incredibly apt — not for the mastery of Wikipedia itself (who can say they have “mastered” Wikipedia?) but for the reflective moment to struggle with others in the understanding and explanation. These experiences helped to shape how we moved past simply understanding and explaining the stated goals, policies, and guidelines on Wikipedia. Instead, we read how Wikipedia “works” through understanding users’ experiences of Wikipedia, both in how users grapple with stated guidelines and policy, but also the experience of dealing with the interface and the community. As Levi-Strauss suggests of us as academics and social scientists, we attempt to “ask the right questions.” Writing on Wikipedia as a new user can be incredibly frustrating as the learning curve can be extremely high, and we have wrestled with numerous frustrations with those who we have guided. These frustrations come from all over, even with one of Wikipedia’s earliest editing guidelines, the directive to “Be Bold” because students (and indeed any novice to Wikipedia) often face challenges when directed to “be bold” just to begin participating. Students also struggle to understand “Reliable sources” (WP:RELIABLE)’ and “Verifiability” (WP:V)> — two key policies that shape how the community determines how raw data or information is filtered into knowledge. Furthermore, we know that newcomers to Wikipedia are also confused by “what counts” as knowledge — how do we determine what topics are notable enough in an encyclopedia with over 6 million articles? As if all of the above were not frustrating enough to keep all but the most diligent editors at bay, new editors also experience significant “gatekeeping” by seasoned editors, often invoking confusing and elaborate policy arguments which preclude novice participation. These discussions link to direct

Preface xi experiences we’ve each had, as we teach, train, and talk about Wikipedia with others in our immediate communities. They also link to the overall organization of this book, in which we provide a more nuanced exploration of how Wikipedia shapes its representation of reality.

While this book is not a collection of anecdotes about our experiences, our experiences as educators, academics, and volunteers provided the inspiration for our research. Between us we have trained thousands of students and other novices on how to engage with Wikipedia. Time and time again, we have experienced the struggles of new users, discussed these struggles, and helped to guide them through. Much of our understanding of the challenges faced by new users have emerged from these experiences, whether in a formal classroom or in a volunteer space as trainers. More often than not, our students were outside the typical demographic of Wikipedia editors and faced numerous obstacles and successes on their journeys to edit. Witnessing the incredible impact that Wikipedia has on our students, as well as that students have had on Wikipedia, we have each focused in different ways to engage Wikipedia as an open and collaborative knowledge production space. Students often have very little understanding of how Wikipedia works — most have never made an edit, let alone looked at a “talk” page* or non-mainspace page.° Students often assume that academics write Wikipedia, or that Wikipedia has professional writers. Despite an awareness that “anyone could edit Wikipedia,” they simply just did not think about how it came together. Furthermore, despite using it constantly (many admit that they use it nearly daily) they recall being told “not to use it” not only for school papers, but, in general, since it was so unreliable. Our interactions with other teachers and academics at conferences and elsewhere have furthered this understanding. Many of the myths and misunderstandings of Wikipedia persist among academics, even those who study education, writing, digital culture, communication, and other relevant fields. As we reflected on this circumstance, it seemed that everyone was using Wikipedia despite being told not to, and no one knew how it worked.

While the average editor on Wikipedia is white and male, our students are majority women, many of them are non-white, and many are often non-native English speakers. Their experiences of Wikipedia are undoubtedly different from many of the editors, which both brings new perspectives to Wikipedia as well as often challenges many of the assumptions of veteran editors about the person editing.

xii Preface Wikipedia’s Expectation for Editor Confidence

One of the earliest editing guidelines in Wikipedia, “Be Bold” (WP:BOLD) has become something of a mantra among Wikipedia editors and is frequently invoked in training and other initiatives to familiarize the public with the encyclopedia. “Be Bold,” asks potential editors to “Go for it.” “Wikis like ours,” the article further explains, “develop when everybody helps to fix problems, correct grammar, add facts, make sure wording is accurate, etc.” For the encyclopedia to grow and improve, editors should be active in correcting issues or errors they notice. Additionally, the guideline warns, “Do not be upset if your bold edit gets reverted.” Editors should “Assume Good Faith” (the good intentions of other editors) if and when their bold edits are removed.

At face value, “Be Bold” serves an important purpose in the Wikipedia community. The encyclopedia depends on volunteer editors to feel confident to constantly update, revise, and correct an already enormous (and growing) body of content.’ At the same time, the underlying assumption in the bold directive, that such a disposition is equally available to all potential contributors, demonstrates a somewhat exclusive and even gendered ethos at work throughout Wikipedia.®

We bring a few different positionalities to the table. First, as academics we come with considerable intellectual interest in Wikipedia as a subject of study and fascination. We are Wikipedians, to an extent, in that we each have editorial experience and have contributed to the project’s content.? But we are also educators and have spent years teaching Wikipedia-based assignments and helping students to become familiar with and contribute to the encyclopedia. It is this final role that has shown us, most explicitly, how the boldness directive fails to encourage or comfort new users. Because, of course, many new editors do not feel bold when first learning to edit, nor can they easily access that particular disposition.

We have had numerous interactions with students who have taken issue with the idea of being bold. One of our students likened the boldness directive to being “thrown in a pool without the ability to swim,” while another noted that they “ultimately felt more anxiety than boldness.” Students often felt like they were stepping on others toes, and were afraid to upset, anger, or disappoint the author of the original words. Feeling empathy for the original author’s work, they realized that they too might feel upset by their words changed. In our experience, this sentiment most often emerged in female-identifying students, but also manifested in many students from other marginalized identities and positionalities.

Preface xiii

As with reading Wikipedia, researching Wikipedia often means travelling down rabbit holes. As we continued to discuss and research, we discovered that Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, authored the original “Be Bold” page.!? He begins by simply stating that “Wikis don’t work if people aren’t bold,” which is indicative of the core expectation for editing Wikipedia. As one of the original “Editing Guidelines,” it insists that one must “get out there and make those changes” and not “worry about their feelings,” both statements which run counter to many students’ (and many people’s) sense of agency. To “Be Bold,” users are encouraged to put aside feelings of reluctance, unfamiliarity, or discomfort about publicly contributing to the project, reflecting a view of agency to write, and be included that is not shared by all.

This became a sticking point for us, as we recognized that this is just the first stumbling block before any other issues that Wikipedia has. It helped us recognize that many of Wikipedia’s inclusion issues lie in historical gendered systems that must be unfurled in their own right — Wikipedia is obviously a piece of this early internet utopianism and remains plagued by numerous masculinist ideals about participation. While many of the policies and guidelines of Wikipedia, particularly “Be Bold,” remain well-intentioned, they were conceptualized without a greater understanding of how to be actively (rather than passively) inclusive of diverse participation and ideas.

As we discuss in Chapter 4, Wikipedia’s “Be Bold” directive remains the first stumbling block, as you need to be bold enough to participate, and to continue to participate. In the end, we agree with the “spirit” of Be Bold. At a certain point, all editors have to take that final step and hit the “publish button” — but we have to also acknowledge that it remains double-edged like so many things on Wikipedia, as newcomers who are successfully emboldened can gain a sense of agency through their success, but newcomers who experience gatekeeping or hostility may experience a further lack of agency or feelings of failure from not being successful.

An historically mistrusted resource, especially in formal academic spaces, Wikipedia might be considered an odd platform to teach information literacy. Yet the encyclopedia has been both recognized and praised by many in recent years due to its ability, especially when compared to other digital communities, to ward off fake news and other types of problematic information.

xiv Preface

As educators in communication, writing, and literacy, we have seen firsthand the difficulty that students have in understanding proper sources, and Wikipedia’s construction of facts and truth through policies Reliability and Verifiability can be a struggle for many when faced with editing. On a basic level, students struggle with source evaluation and understanding when a source is credible, not to mention when a source is relevant and appropriate to use in the encyclopedia. However, it is through this struggle that students start to understand basic tenets of information literacy.

As is obvious, the information landscape has changed dramatically in the last two decades. The rapid rise of misinformation and disinformation in the contemporary media necessitates new approaches to understanding and processing information. Furthermore, rapid technological shifts in communication have made irrelevant our previous information literacy models. Students who were taught these models, further, are predisposed to evaluating sources, when they do evaluate them, in an isolated manner that focuses on the merits or weaknesses of a single text, without considering the larger context of that text both within and outside Wikipedia. Reliability in Wikipedia depends on independent, secondary, and high-quality sources, certainly, and those sources should be examined independently as part of a robust process of evaluation. However, it is ultimately communities, rather than individual authors or readers of sources that actually construct reliability. Wikipedia, while it may not be especially inviting at first, given the complexity and range of policy surrounding reliability, has developed such a community. Moreover, that community has a set of standards, processes, and policies that, taken together, demonstrate how the encyclopedia determines reliability. Asking students simply to begin to enter into this process and community is a worthwhile endeavor. Students transform their relationship to information through their interactions with Wikipedia, and in doing so, begin to understand reliability as a socially negotiated and distributed process.

Over the years, we’ve learned how to scaffold Wikipedia assignments so that students propose secondary sources and content additions before making edits to mainspace. This process allows us as teachers to review students’ proposals to ensure their relevancy, and in a broader sense, to help the student make successful and lasting edits to the encyclopedia. In doing so, we create a classroom community that enables feedback before students deep dive into the encyclopedia proper. We also provide what we hope is a more welcoming invitation into Wikipedia’s complex (and often intimidating) system for the evaluation of sources and content.

Preface xv What Counts as Knowledge

The past ten years have seen tremendous growth in the adoption of Wikipedia-based educational activities in higher education, in large part due to the consistent efforts of the Wiki Education Foundation. In the social sciences and humanities, many of the instructors engaging Wikipedia-based pedagogies are doing so out of a desire to improve Wikipedia’s content gaps, often centered around the gender gap or representation of other marginalized voices.

This emphasis on improving marginalized content in the encyclopedia often leads new editors (students, teachers, and novices, in general) to confront a specific problem related to notability. Marginalization of topics, and the related content gaps, in Wikipedia often comes about due to a kind of societal Catch-22. Articles may be less developed (or non-existent) because there are not enough verifiable secondary sources for Wikipedia editors to draw from. Lack of coverage of a topic in Wikipedia, in this iway, often reflects societal marginalization. When there is little to no secondary coverage of a subject outside of Wikipedia, there’s little to draw from to create or add to a parallel article in the encyclopedia.

How Wikipedia decides what counts as “knowledge” through notability teaches students about systemic biases and about the exclusion of marginalized voices. Often students wish to work on topics and people that are of interest to them, yet not enough has been published to meet the requirements of notability, which all but ensures that they need to pick another topic or face deletion.

Who Gets to Contribute

During the multiple conversations we had when writing this book, we often remarked on just how complex Wikipedia has become. The immense bureaucracy of the English language version alone has shown us that it is nearly impossible for any one editor to be completely versed in the numerous policies, guidelines, and unspoken norms that inform editing and interaction. At the same time, we also realized how certain editors in Wikipedia did become extremely literate in their understanding and application of certain policies, especially core policies such as “No Original Research” (WP:NOR). These Wikipedia editors are often those that also act as barriers to students or novices as they use their specialized knowledge.

Learning how to write on Wikipedia for a newcomer can be incredibly frustrating for a variety of reasons, and often results in turning xvi Preface would-be editors away. Wikipedia is incredibly complicated and much more difficult to write than most realize, particularly more difficult than writing essays. Every semester we have taught with Wikipedia, students reflect upon how they did not expect writing on Wikipedia to be so difficult — they not only struggle with sourcing and notability but also with writing neutrality, with organizing their pages properly, and with proper Wiki-style. Without an “assignment” to complete, as well as proper guidance, students often reflect how they would never have taken on such a task.

Beyond the daunting task of “being bold” the immense complexity of Wikipedia acts as a significant barrier to would-be contributors. Despite there being “no firm rules” Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines seem nearly limitless to novices, and even to many established Wikipedians. Beyond the tasks of understanding Reliability, Verifiability, Neutrality, and Notability, there are scores of policies and guidelines that govern every detail, and often in slightly contradictory and vague ways that only seasoned Wikipedians can understand and discuss.

Over the years, one of our favorite videos to show students is an Ignite talk from 2010 entitled “Why Wikipedians are the Weirdest people on the Internet” by Steven Walling, where (among other things) he notes that “no one knows what the hell we’re saying as we speak a secret jargon filled with over twelve thousand acronyms. No Wikipedian knows them all but we know enough to confuse the hell out of you.”!! While Walling’s presentation is ultimately both informative and quite humorous, it illustrates exactly the issue we run into — the barrier to participation is incredibly high for newcomers due to the complexity. Furthermore, those who are able to participate in these conversations on Wikipedia utilize language and knowledge that, intentionally or not, restrict access for those not fluent in “secret jargon.”

If all of these barriers to participating were not enough, we have all experienced active gatekeeping from Wikipedians wielding secret jargon and knowledge of obscure and convoluted policies. Whether just “quality snobs” (as Walling notes in his video) or actively prejudiced against students or their topics, some editors have taken it upon themselves to actively lambaste new users’ work, or even worse, simply delete it before it has a chance to improve. This can be incredibly discouraging and even disenfranchising to new users and has resulted in numerous long discussions with both students to explain what is going on as well as helpful Wikipedians to help translate and navigate these systems with us.

What we realized through these experiences with newcomers (both in traditional classrooms as well as volunteer settings) is that the

Preface xvii frustrations and barriers can be so immense that without a seasoned instructor and mentor, participation on Wikipedia is incredibly unlikely to all but the most diligent. Even with guidance, participation can be difficult and often discouraging, but without active mentorship, editing Wikipedia becomes nearly untenable. The community, while incredibly robust and strong, is not wholly experienced by the new user (especially when only online), and a single negative experience can spoil the potential for new and diverse voices to join the Wikipedia community. In essence, through teaching new users we realized that the complexity of Wikipedia combined with the secret jargon utilized (in combination with those who wield it) actively creates barriers to who contributes, which run counter to the idea of Wikipedia being “the encyclopedia anyone can edit.”

How It Actually Works

Knowing all of this, we realized two main things that we wanted to focus on: (1) how Wikipedia works for everyone (how it represents “reality” through its collection of knowledge and distributes it) and (2) how Wikipedia fails to work for everyone (how it excludes certain knowledge and information as well as it has discouraged many potential editors). Our experiences as educators, academics, and volunteers run counter to many of the grand ideas of Wikipedia in relation to what counts as truth, what counts as knowledge, and who gets to contribute. Exploring this became an obsession both personally and professionally, as all of us believed in Wikipedia and its potential — we wanted to “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge,” but to do so required a deeper critique, to ask better questions about, and a fuller exploration of how Wikipedia approached its representation of reality. In the end, this was what inspired this book — our combined love for Wikipedia and our hope to see it constantly improve through engagement, critique, understanding, and most of all, care.

1 “Edit-a-Thons” are public Wikipedia events, often themed around a topic, that encourage new and established users to write and edit Wikipedia articles, and are led by volunteer instructors.

2 “Wikipedia: Reliable Sources,” Wikipedia, last modified July 1, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Reliable_sources &oldid=965472450.

xvili Preface

“Wikipedia: Verifiability,” Wikipedia, last modified November 29, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Verifiability &oldid=991232984.

In Wikipedia, talk pages refer to behind-the-scenes discussion of an article or other page by interested editors.

In Wikipedia, mainspace (an abbreviation of “main namespace”) refers to the article content that directly covers a topic. The encyclopedia is also made up of a number of other namespaces, such as project space, user space, and talk space, to name a few.

Throughout this book, we will use the abbreviated prefix for Wikipedia “WP” when introducing project pages (those that discuss some aspect of Wikipedia policy and are outside mainspace encyclopedic content). For more information about the different spaces in Wikipedia, See Chapter 1. As we discuss in Chapter | during the writing of this book the English Wikipedia contained over 6.2 million articles.

“Wikipedia: Be Bold,” in Wikipedia, last modified October 21, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Be_bold& oldid=984736314.

On-Wiki, we currently edit and teach under the usernames Matthewvetter and Zach McDowell.

“Wikipedia: Be Bold,” in Wikipedia, last modified October 30, 2001, https:// en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Be_bold&oldid=238127. Steven Walling, Why Wikipedians Are the Weirdest People on the Internet, Ignite Portland, IP8: 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= UEKFS506KPNI.

1 Wikipedia’s Pillars and the Reality They Construct

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.

—Peter L. Berger, The Social Construction of Reality