Wikipedia is the encyclopaedia anyone can write and edit (yes, even you!), but most people don’t think much about who performs those tasks. With half a billion people around the world relying on Wikipedia for information, we should.
More than 1.5 million people in practically every country have contributed to Wikipedia’s 23 million articles. Actually, that last figure isn’t quite accurate, since more than 12,000 new entries are created every day. Eight articles were created in the last minute. The authors are poets and professors, baristas and busboys, young and old, rich and poor.
It is crazy. An encyclopaedia is one of humankind’s grandest displays of collaborative effort, and Wikipedia takes that collaboration to new levels, with contributors from pretty much every ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic background, political ideology, religion and gender.
But beneath that surface diversity is a community built on shared values. The core Wikipedia editing community — those who are very, very active — is about 12,000 people. I have met thousands of them personally, and they do share common characteristics.
The first and most defining is that Wikipedians, almost without exception, are ridiculously smart, as you might expect of people who, for fun, write an encyclopaedia in their spare time. I have a theory that back in school, Wikipedians were the smartest children in the class, children who didn’t care what was trendy or cool but spent their time reading, or with the debate team, or chess club, or in the computer lab.
Wikipedians are geeky. They have to be to want to learn the wiki syntax required to edit, and that means most editors are the type of people who find learning technology fun. (It is also because Wikipedia has its roots in the free software movement, which is a very geeky subculture.) The rise of the dotcom millionaire and the importance of services such as Google, Facebook and Wikipedia have made geekiness more socially acceptable.
But geeks are still fundamentally outsiders, tending to be socially awkward, deeply interested in obscure topics, introverted and yet sometimes verbose, blunt, not graceful and less sensorily oriented than other people.
Nine of ten Wikipedians are male. We don’t know exactly why. My theory is that Wikipedia editing is a minority taste, and some of the constellation of characteristics that combine to create a Wikipedian — geeky, tech-centric, intellectually confident, thick-skinned and argumentative, with the willingness and ability to indulge in a solitary hobby — tend to skew male.
Although individual Wikipedians come from a broad range of socio-economic backgrounds, we tend to live in affluent parts of the world and to be relatively privileged. Most of us have reliable internet connectivity and access to decent libraries and bookstores; we own laptops and desktops; we are the product of decent educational systems, and we have got the luxury of free time.
Like librarians and probably all reference professionals, Wikipedians are detail-obsessed pedants. We argue endlessly about stuff such as whether Japan’s Tsushima Island is a single island or a trio of islands. Whether the main character in “Grand Theft Auto IV” is Serbian, Slovak, Bosnian, Croatian or Russian.
Whether Baltimore has “a couple of” snowstorms a year or “several”, whether the shrapnel wound John Kerry suffered in 1968 is better described as minor or left unmodified. None of this makes us fun at parties, but it does make us good at encyclopaedia writing.
As befits an encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, Wikipedians tend to be iconoclastic, questioning and curious. Wikipedia is a place where debate is a form of play and people are searching in good faith for the most correct answer.
The most contentious topics on Wikipedia are the same as those in the rest of the world, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global warming, “intelligent design”, the war on terrorism and people such as Adolf Hitler, Ayn Rand and Dick Cheney.
We believe it is not our job to edit Wikipedia so that it reflects our personal opinions; instead, we aim to be fair to all sides. Entries need to be neutrally stated, well-documented and verifiable.
Editors are asked to avoid stating opinions, or even seriously contested assertions, as facts; instead, we attribute them to their source. We aim for nonjudgmental language: We avoid puffery words such as “legendary” and “celebrated” and contentious words such as “racist” and “terrorist”. If we don’t know for sure what is true, we say so, and we describe what various sides are claiming.
Does this mean Wikipedia is perfect? Of course not. Our weakest articles are those on obscure topics, where subtle bias and small mistakes can sometimes persist for months or even years. But Wikipedians are fierce guardians of quality, and they tend to challenge and remove bias and inaccuracy as soon as they see it.
The article on Barack Obama is a great example of this. Because it is widely read and frequently edited, over the years it has become comprehensive, objective and beautifully well sourced. The more eyes on an article, the better it is. That is the fundamental premise of Wikipedia, and it explains why Wikipedia works.
And it does work. On December 17, 2001, an editor named Ed Poor started an article called “Arab-Israeli conflict” with this single sentence: “The Arab-Israeli conflict is a long-running, seemingly intractable dispute in the Middle East mostly hinging on the status of Israel and its relations with Arab peoples and nations.”
Today that article is 10,000 words long, with two maps and six other images and 138 footnotes. It has been edited more than 5,000 times by 1,800 people in dozens of countries, including Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, Denmark, Germany, Australia, Canada, Britain, the United States and Russia.
Since it was founded 12 years ago, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of the world’s information infrastructure. It is a kind of public utility: You turn on the faucet and water comes out; you do an internet search and Wikipedia answers your question. People don’t think much about who creates it, but you should.
–Los Angeles Times
Sue Gardner is executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia. She has made 3,000 edits on Wikipedia since 2006, mostly on topics related to media, gender and economics.
