Wikipedia turns 20: Our core value of neutrality has served us well, says co-founder Jimmy Wales

[mood]

Wikipedia turns 20: Our core value of neutrality has served us well, says co-founder Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia will turn 20 years on January 15. Co-founder Jimmy Wales said that “The idea that Wikipedia shouldn't take sides on any major issue... is really a core value for us that's served us very well.”

 

Wikipedia is turning 20 this year, and now has over 55 million articles. (Image credit: Wikipedia)

 

Roughly 350 edits per minute. That’s how active the volunteer editors are on Wikipedia. But when Wikipedia started, nearly 20 years back in 2001, there was no password required for editors logging in to write these articles. That was a mistake that co-founder Jimmy Wales quickly decided to fix.

“I remember going all the way back to the very, very beginning when we were just on one server. In fact, in the early days of Wikipedia, there wasn’t even a real way to log in. Anybody could pretend to be anybody else. Well, that was never going to work. So very quickly I wrote a password system,” Wales told members of the media over a Zoom call.

 

Wikipedia has come a long way since then, and on January 15 will mark 20 years of the online encyclopedia. There are now over 55 million articles on the platform, available in 300 languages.

 

Underlining the core philosophies of the platform, Wales said the vision of “free access to the sum of all human knowledge,” has served them well. “We’ve never thought of ourselves as a wide-open, free speech or anarchy or democracy. We’re a project to build an encyclopedia,” Wales explained, adding that for Wikipedia, neutrality remains a core ideal.

“The idea that Wikipedia shouldn’t take sides on any major issue, we should explain the issue so that people can understand all sides is really a core value for us that’s served us very well,” he added. The Wikipedia co-founder also stressed on civility, adding that “no personal attacks” was one of the oldest rules of the platform.

 

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia in this file photo. (Image via Wikipedia)

 

“It’s particularly poignant today, given that we have so many places online that seem to be devoted almost exclusively to people screaming and yelling at each other and being a really kind of an unpleasant place to be. The idea of having a place that tries to present ideas in a neutral fashion is incredibly important,” he outlined.

Wikipedia and India

In India, Wikipedia sees over 750 million visits each month, and it is the fifth-highest number of views from any country. While Wikipedia is available in 24 languages in India, regional languages such as Punjabi, Odia, Malayalam have far more active communities on the platform, compared to say Hindi.

“Certain language communities are much more active than others…We know that the Odia community is perhaps a bit smaller, but quite active. The Punjabi speaking community is quite active in the Wikipedia world. And it is perhaps a somewhat unfortunate trend that we’ve recognized that the Hindi language Wikipedia is, relatively speaking, less active than some of these other languages that I’ve referenced despite being so widely spoken as a language,” Katherine Maher, CEO and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation said in the call.

 

Maher also spoke about Wikipedia’s investments in mobile editing over the past two years to encourage participation in India, given it is a primarily mobile-driven market.

“Now you can edit Wikipedia on your mobile phone and you do not need to use a desktop. And you have nearly exactly the same functionality as you would on a desktop. This is intentional because we recognise that this is where the majority of the world lives is in the mobiles in their pockets,” she said.

Wikimedia CEO Katherine Mahers. (Image credit: Wikipedia)

 

Wikipedia also launched an application on KaiOS, as they recognised it as one of the more common operating systems used across India.

COVID-19 and Wikipedia

While the COVID-19 pandemic ensured record-breaking increases in daily traffic for Wikipedia, it also contributed to new problems around misinformation. In October 2020, Wikipedia collaborated with the World Health Organization to ensure authoritative content on the platform around the pandemic.

 

Wikipedia now has over 7,000 articles related to various aspects of COVID-19 across all languages, including its impact on countries, events and people. The English Wikipedia article about the COVID-19 pandemic has gathered over 80 million page views so far. But creating this content was not easy.

“The access to good information that we have can very quite literally, be a matter of life or death. And so when the world was faced with all this uncertainty and people saw understanding, we saw Wikipedia shine,” Maher said in the call adding that the pandemic was one of only many high-profile topics, subject to scrutiny and attempts at misinformation.

 

In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic made the task a lot harder for even dedicated Wikipedia volunteers. One such volunteer editor is Dr Netha Hussain, who has been active on the platform for the past 10 years.

Sweden-based Dr Hussain is originally from Kerala, a medical doctor by training and now works as a researcher in clinical neuroscience. She writes articles in Malayalam, English and Swedish on the platform.

“I started editing Wikipedia in 2010 when I was a first-year medical student. The idea of sharing free knowledge with millions of people around the world sounded very exciting to me at that time and it excites me even today,” she said during the call.

 

When the pandemic started, Dr Hussain had to make sure that the information provided was reliable. “Writing about an ongoing pandemic was not easy. Misinformation about the pandemic spread like wildfire on the internet and many people believed in this, and also shared them to their loved ones out of ignorance,” she said.

 

She had to work on ensuring that the information was accurate and that it was easy for readers to see what was true. Plus the new scientific research coming out each day made it a challenge for Dr Hussain to keep up. “I had to present them on Wikipedia in a language simple enough for everyone to read and understand,” she told the media.

Future efforts

As part of its 2030 vision, the Wikimedia Foundation has developed a $4.5 million Equity Fund that will offer grants to advance more equitable, inclusive representation in Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. Maher acknowledged in the call that Wikipedia is still largely edited by men, and that’s something they wish to change.

 

Wikipedia is also announcing its first-ever multilingual initiative on Indian Sportswomen, where journalism students will participate in a hackathon to make Wikipedia and the internet a more gender-equal space. In addition, the foundation will hold dedicated online workshops to educate participants on the basics of using the online encyclopedia.

 

The Wikimedia Foundation will also hold a virtual event, hosted by Maher and Wales to showcase the contributions of Wikipedia’s global volunteer communities. The event will kick-off a year-long celebration themed “20 Years Human,” which is a nod to those who make Wikipedia possible. The livestream will be available on January 15 at 9.30 pm IST.

 

 

Source: Wikipedia turns 20: Our core value of neutrality has served us well, says co-founder Jimmy Wales

[Karlston]

Wikipedia Is Basically a Massive RPG

Sure, the metaphor is imperfect. But as the encyclopedia enters its 20th year, it's worth reflecting on the "rules of the game"—and how they might change.

Illustration: Sam Whitney; Getty Images

 

The first-ever edit to Wikipedia took place on January 15, 2001. Today, the online encyclopedia officially turns 20 years old, on the date known as Wikipedia Day. One of WIRED’s earliest stories about Wikipedia once compared it to the ancient library of Alexandria. For the site’s volunteer editors, however, there’s another metaphor that has long been popular: Wikipedia is a role-playing game. 

 

At first blush, there do not appear to be many similarities between editing the internet encyclopedia and playing Dungeons & Dragons. Yet proponents of the RPG metaphor see numerous resemblances to both table-top RPGs and their online counterparts. According to this humorous and continuously evolving essay composed by Wikipedians, the Wikipedia “game world” consists of 6.2 million “unique locations” (read: English Wikipedia articles), 40.6 million “players” (Wikipedia editors), and the common villains are the trolls who disrupt articles in “boss fights” (the edit wars that sometimes take place regarding the content published on an article). The “game designer” is Jimmy Wales, who started the site 20 years ago, and was reportedly a big fan of MMORPGs of the 1980s, like Island of Kesmai and Scepter of Goth. More recently, Wales sent across a box of D&D Beyond books and swag for his Christmas 2020 Reddit Secret Santa gift.

 

“Comparing Wikipedia to a role-playing game is useful, as it helps people understand why Wikipedians are so reluctant to recognize external expertise,” Dariusz Jemielniak, a professor at Kozminski University and author of Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia and coauthor of Collaborative Society, wrote in an email.

 

Consider this example: A new user logs onto Wikipedia, changes the content of an article, and writes, “I’m entitled to make this change because I have a graduate degree in this subject!” Not only would this person likely be perceived as a prig, but their reasoning is unlikely to succeed on Wikipedia. That’s because Wikipedians generally believe that arguments must stand or fall based on their merit and alignment with Wikipedia policies, such as whether the statement is verified with citations to reliable third-party sources.

 

Editors build their online street credentials—or, in gaming terms, experience points—by developing articles and increasing their edit counts. As Jemielniak explained, it feels very bizarre when somebody from the “brick-and-mortar world” swoops in and claims that they should have the same credibility in the Wikipedia RPG because of their credentials. That would be like a character in a D&D adventure suddenly proclaiming that they were in charge of the Medieval Literature dungeon because they happened to have a doctorate in the subject. Basically, it’s cheating by not recognizing the rules of the game itself.   

 

The ability to create an in-game persona or character is another similarity between RPGs and Wikipedia. The most prolific contributor to the English language version of Wikipedia is Steven Pruitt, a 36-year-old resident of the Washington, DC, area who has made over 3.8 million edits since 2006. But within the Wikipedia community, he is more often referred to by his username, Ser Amantio di Nicolao, the handle he took from a minor character in a Puccini opera.

 

Users may gravitate toward a particular type of role that they want to play, with the roles outlined in the WikiFauna, a taxonomy that’s heavily based on nerd culture and fantasy RPGs. Some editors, for example, identify as WikiEagles, using their keen vision to detect and fix small errors like misplaced commas, or WikiFairies that beautify Wikipedia by organizing messy articles or making stylistic improvements. For his part, Pruitt declares on his user page that he’s a WikiGnome, the kind of user who tends to make small, incremental edits such as adding categories to articles (e.g. the blue links that appear on the bottom of a Wikipedia page).

 

There is even an opportunity to choose one’s “quest” within the gameworld. When Jina Valentine and Heather Hart were undergraduate art students, they noticed that Black artists were treated differently in their art history courses. “If they covered Black artists at all, they were segregated to one week on the Harlem Renaissance,” Hart recalled. Later, they found that Black artists did not have Wikipedia pages due to the lack of historical coverage of minorities. Together they cofounded the project Black Lunch Table, whose mission is to fill in the holes of art history. The project has hosted dozens of Edit-a-thons, community events to expand Wikipedia’s coverage of Black artists.

 

Valentine and Hart identify as WikiEnts, a role that’s focused on improving Wikipedia and promoting peaceful interactions. But the Wikipedia RPG types are not all sunshine and roses. For instance, the cofounders have noticed that articles developed at Edit-a-thons about notable Black artists are sometimes fast-tracked for deletion by anonymous users. “It seems so destructive, rather than productive and constructive, which is what we are trying to do as a project,” Valentine said. She added that these drive-by deletions can leave new Wikipedia contributors feeling particularly discouraged. According to Wikipedia policy, editors should only nominate an article for speedy deletion under limited circumstances, such as pure vandalism, and not mark legitimate pages without good faith discussion. The heartless, slash-and-burn approach is more fitting of a WikiOrc or a WikiTroll, two villains of the site’s taxonomy. 

 

In the past year, especially, readers flocked to Wikipedia for a degree of informational accuracy that they were not able to find on social networks. The list of the most highly-trafficked English Wikipedia articles from 2020 reveals that people turned to the encyclopedia for information about the global pandemic, with the top three Covid-19 articles on the list receiving over 144 million collective pageviews. That number doesn’t even include the ways that Wikipedia information is used on platforms like Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant or to populate Google’s knowledge panels. In the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential Election, the Wikipedia editing community and the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation took significant steps to protect the site from being used as a tool for political misinformation.

 

Clearly, Wikipedia is more than a game, and the RPG comparison is at best an imperfect metaphor, but it’s nonetheless worth considering how the “rules of the game” might change in the next two decades, as the service relies less on manual edits and more on tools and technologies to streamline article creation and updates. Jemielniak also predicts that there will be further blending of human and machine systems on Wikipedia relatively soon. He expects that the power editors, those who are familiar with the website’s more advanced features, will have access to special tools to monitor disinformation and stave off bad actors.

 

As Jemielniak put it: “We will see the rise of a new paladin class—those who are not code sorcerers, and who are not writer warriors, but someone in-between—using powerful, pre-prepared spells to fight vandals and abusers, as well as to improve content overall.”

 

 

Wikipedia Is Basically a Massive RPG

[mood]

Wikipedia at 20: last gasp of an internet vision, or a beacon to a better future?

The naysayers said the user-written encyclopedia would never work. Now it boasts 55m articles and 1.7bn visitors a month

 

Wikipedia began as a tech startup with 21 articles in its first year, before deciding to allow users to write and edit. Photograph: Sascha Steinbach/EPA

 

Twenty years ago today, a tech startup called Nupedia launched a side project. The company had been hard at work producing a free online encyclopaedia, but it was slow going: its strict editing process, comprehensive peer review and focus on expert authors meant it finished only 21 articles in its first year.

 

The side project would do away with all of that. Instead, anyone would be able to write and edit articles. Nupedia’s founders were split over whether the trade-off – more content with a lower barrier to entry – was worth it, but by the end of its first year, the side project had amassed articles on more than 18,000 topics. Nupedia, by the time it shut in 2003, had finished just 25.

 

That side project, Wikipedia, now has more than 55m articles across 300 languages. With 1.7bn unique visitors a month, it is the 13th most popular website on the internet, according to Amazon’s monitoring site, Alexa Internet, and the only one in the top 50 to be run on an entirely non-commercial basis (bbc.co.uk just outranks it among UK users).

 

The encyclopaedia’s foundational model attracted criticism from day one. Without experts writers or professional editors, many wondered, how could it ensure accuracy? By 2006, as the site celebrated its fifth anniversary, it was the subject of mockery in the mainstream press. One article cited the encyclopaedia’s claim that “David Beckham was a Chinese goalkeeper in the 18th century” to highlight a “comedy of errors”.

 

Even in 2006, that particular piece of vandalism was fixed within 11 minutes. These days, Wikipedia has a few more tools to prevent such abuse. The article about Beckham is one of many that is “semi-protected”, a status that prevents unregistered users from editing it – a concession to the reality that not everyone on the internet is interested in contributing to a collective endeavour.

 

Collaborative editing allows hundreds of people to work on pulling together an authoritative overview of breaking news, such as the attack on the US Capitol. Photograph: John Minchillo/AP

 

But as the site continues to flourish even as the online environment has transformed, it raises a different set of questions from those of its early doubters. Wikipedia, as one joke goes, works in practice, which is good, because it definitely doesn’t work in theory. Why has the site succeeded in building a positive online community where so many others have failed?

 

Jimmy Wales, its co-founder, cites two things as making the key difference. “First, everyone knows what an encyclopedia is. If I say ‘encyclopedia article about the Eiffel Tower’, we all know what that should be, so if we set out to write that, we know where we are going and what it should be like. Second, we never regarded Wikipedia as a wide-open free speech forum, it’s a project to build an encyclopedia. So we try to avoid (as much as we can, we are humans) the typical round and round flame wars of social media.”

“Wikipedia has issues in the same way that any large institution has issues, but it’s undoubtedly a remarkable achievement,” says Abigail Brady, a long-term editor on the site. “In some ways it’s a relic – it dates from a pre-social media era of the web where idealistic attempts to create large collaborative works were just starting.

“I think the key to its long-term success has been its lack of commercialisation. Jimmy Wales made a decision that Wikipedia should be non-profit very early on, and stuck to it. There are no ads (beyond the odd pledge drive), and no sense that your labour is being farmed by a company too cheapskate to actually pay people to do data entry. It is a genuine collaborative project.”

 

The Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales poses for a portrait in London this month. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

 

As Wikipedia has grown, it has moved beyond simple encyclopaedia-style articles. The community’s best points are now visible at times of great upheaval, when collaborative editing allows hundreds of people to work on pulling together an authoritative overview of breaking news events before the events have even finished.

 

At 6.34pm UK time on 6 January this year, one Wikipedia editor, with the username Another Believer, decided that events in Washington looked important enough to warrant an article. Tentatively titled “January 2021 Donald Trump rally”, the initial entry was brief: “On 6 January 2021, thousands of Donald Trump supporters gathered in Washington DC to reject results of the November 2020 presidential election.”

 

One minute later, the Guardian’s live blog reported: “House offices evacuated as Trump supporters storm Capitol barriers.” Over the next half-hour, Another Believer continued to update their article alone. Slowly, other administrators began to join in, and the article became the site’s key focus for those documenting the rapidly evolving events in Washington. By midnight UK time, the article was 3,000 words long, with a further 3,000 words of footnotes, and a debate was raging over whether to rename it from its latest title, “2021 United States Capitol protests”, to its current headline, “2021 storming of the United States Capitol”.

 

The collaborative encyclopaedia still has many barriers to overcome, from an ever-present funding crisis, only partially solved by its donation-driven revenue model, to its undesired role as a silent battlefield for professionally run influence campaigns to rehabilitate reputations, or excise controversy from the internet. And it still faces the same pressures that more conventional reference sources do, as it struggles to represent the history of the world with less of a focus on the white, male wealthy figures who make up so much of recorded history.

 

But 20 years on, it is difficult to deny that Wikipedia has proved the naysayers wrong. Whether it is the last gasp of a vision of the internet that has all but died out, or a shining beacon lighting the way to a better future, remains to be seen.

 

 

Source: Wikipedia at 20: last gasp of an internet vision, or a beacon to a better future?