Wikipedia @ 20, Stories of an Incomplete Revolution, Edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner, The MIT Press (2020), Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England, U.S. $27.95

Helen Hockx-Yu, University of Notre Dame

Wikipedia @ 20 is an edited volume put together by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner to celebrate Wikipedia’s 20th birthday, taking advantage of this significant milestone to pause and reflect on the key learnings of the last two decades. It “was produced in the -spirit of open collaboration, contains varied voices, and speaks to insight from hindsight and visions of the future.” (Preface).

“Wikipedia is a free, multilingual open-collaborative online created and maintained by a community of volunteer contributors using a wiki-based editing system.”1 Among its many facets, Wikipedia set out to connect people with knowledge, and its first two decades are precisely a story of connection, exemplified by the essays, showing “connections across disciplines and borders, across languages and data, and across the professional and personal.” (2)

34 authors from various backgrounds contributed to the book, including academics, journalists, librarians, educators, activists and artists, many of them dedicated Wikipedians. Joseph Reagle is a professor of communication studies and Jackie Koerner is a social scientist who studies bias, communities, and equity and inclusion. 22 broad-ranging essays were selected from submitted proposals and have gone through a process of peer, public and editorial review. The collection is organised into three sections, based on broad, non-mutually-exclusive themes.

Hindsight Section one, entitled Hindsight, includes 5 retrospective essays that form a mini . The two opening essays tell the story of how Wikipedia survived its many reported deaths, and how its perception by the news media evolved in Wikipedia’s first two decades. Yochai Benkler offers an analysis of Wikipedia’s success and limits, as a commons-based peer product model without market relations and hierarchies. An essay by Brian Keegan, discussed in more detail below, describes how the in 2001 resulted in Wikipedia’s breaking news coverage, and helped shape its identity. This section also has an essay by William Beutler covering the evolution of the somewhat controversial practices of “paid editing”, referred to as “Conflict of Interest (COI).

The main page of Wikipedia features categories of content and redirects users to highlighted articles. “September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack” appeared around 10th October 2001,2 under “special features: current news”, pointing to a landing page that contained links to articles covering a wide range of topics, including a list of casualties.3 According to Brian Keegan, author of An Encyclopedia with Breaking News, trauma-induced altruism led the community to create “approximately one hundred September 11– related articles...at a time when Wikipedia as a whole had only thirteen thousand articles.” (58) Wikipedia’s collaborative capacities no doubt enabled in-depth and comprehensive coverage of this historical event, but discussions and debates surrounding the actual doing also led to reflexive policies which have

1 Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia 2 The oldest version of the homepage on Wikipedia goes back to 26 January 2002. The earliest capture of the Wikipedia homepage with a link to September 11 attacks was on 10 October 2001. https://web.archive.org/web/20011010233257/http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/September_11,_2001_Terrorist_Attack 3 This was renamed “Current events” on 26 January 2002 , and eventually “In the News”, on 18 October 2002. persisted till the present. The existing “What Wikipedia is not” (WP:NOT) policy4 was expanded to state that Wikipedia is not a “news report” but supported the idea of “creating encyclopedia articles on topics currently in the news”. Another guardrail was the addition of “Memorials” to the WP:NOT policy, i.e “Wikipedia is not the place to memorize deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others who do not meet such requirements.” (59)

Keegan’s research into Wikipedia’s collaboration around breaking news over the past decade reveals large and swift temporary collaboration, supported by shared motivation and ability to engage, resulting in news articles of exceptionally high quality. Despite being the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit'' (62), Wikipedia does not seem to suffer from coordinated campaigns of misinformation that have plagued other online social platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. Keegan argues that Wikipedia’s collaboration model holds the key to this resilience. The blandness, or the absence of personalization is an overlooked critical difference between the user experience on Wikipedia and other social platforms, where heavy investment has gone into personalised advertisement and news feeds to grab users’ attention. On Wikipedia, every article is the same to all users, regardless of the demography, which allows the collective scrutiny to focus on the integrity of information. Another hypothesis is the absence of algorithmic content amplification. Users either navigate to an article arriving from a search engine or follow the highlights from the Wikipedia home page, which are explicitly vetted by hundreds of administrators and/or thousands of editors, making it hard to manipulate or compromise.

Keegan points out a significant risk, related to platforms such as , Facebook and YouTube using Wikipedia to provide “contextual information”, or repurposing Wikipedia content programmatically. They are not only evading the responsibility of content moderation, but also taking advantage of “common goods” to which they’ve contributed absolutely nothing, thus potentially reducing Wikipedia editors’ capacity to attend to other content related demands. This kind of integration in addition often lacks consistent attribution and places Wikipedia at arms’ length in controlling the quality and quantity of its content, potentially compromising Wikipedia’s reputation. Similar concerns are expressed in another essay, “Rise of the Underdog” by Heather Ford, who considers the use of Wikipedia knowledge by 3rd parties without credit its greatest existential threat to date (198), as it threatens the fundamental principle of verifiability. To survive, Ford calls on Wikipedia to “initiate a renewed campaign for the right to verifiability.” (189)5

Keegan is one of the few authors who alludes to Wikipedia being behind the curve technically: its archaic user interface, lack of support for synchronous editing, lack of scalability and automation. This however does not reduce Wikipedia’s usefulness, and may even be the exact ammunition against disinformation.

Connection Section two, entitled Connection, consists of 8 essays that demonstrate the impact of Wikipedia by telling the stories of how it challenges traditional notions, pushes boundaries, bridges divides and starts to have an enormous effect on scientific research. These essays also examine where the connections are not as close as they should be, cause conflict, or are even missing. The most interesting are several

4 “What Wikipedia is not”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_blog,_web_hosting_service,_soci al_networking_service,_or_memorial_site 5 At the time of writing this review, Wikimedia announced its plan of offering corporate enterprises programmatic access to its content through paid API packages. This should not only address the “rivalrousness” issue, but also provide a standard way of reusing Wikipedia content and thus increase its sustainability. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/03/16/introducing-the-wikimedia-enterprise-api/ essays that describe the troublesome relationship between Wikipedia and academia, and how it has evolved to become the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research.

Wikipedia was once viewed as “a degradation of academic rigor, competent research and the authority of experts.” (131). Essays in this section reflect its journey to legitimacy in academia. It is not surprising that libraries and librarians, with their congruent mission of curating information and connecting people with knowledge, became the earliest and most ardent contributors and advocates of Wikipedia. This is evidenced by Phoebe Ayers in Chapter 6, as well as initiatives such as the Working Wikipedia Collaborative (Chapter 7) and the Wikipedia Library (Chapter 8). Faculty’s acceptance however, was somewhat ambivalent. Unlike the librarians, they are closely associated with the traditional notation of expertise, the exact thing that Wikipedia has jumbled up and challenged. Dariusz Jemielniak, who struggles to understand the paradox of Wikipedia’s popularity and the negativity towards it among professors, reverts to role playing games to understand the uneasy relationship and make sense of his identity as an academic (Chapter 9). Robert E. Cummings explains how conflict arises when a faculty member tries to fulfill the roles of teaching, researching and providing service. The service role includes serving the public good. When engaging with Wikipedia, this is where the most conflict seems to reside. The prohibition of original knowledge requires faculty to set aside their role of experts, which can be hostile as well as exhilarating. During the past two decades, however, faculty have grown to see the value of Wikipedia for teaching and accepted it as a “front door” to the knowledge they create. They also use Wikipedia data for research that represents the public experience. Cummings argues that Wikipedia as an enabler reconfigures the fixed notions of faculty roles and will become more visible while shaping public knowledge into teaching and research practices. The real value of Wikipedia to academia over time is in that it has become a record of how knowledge is produced. This has already become apparent in the field of Wikipedia research, a new interdisciplinary field of study. Authors Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Shaw have collaborated since 2008, collecting data and analysing major trends to capture the state of Wikipedia scholarship almost every year. Their conclusion is that “Wikipedia has become part of the mainstream of every social and computational research field” they know of. (161) A single theme showed up consistently in their annual survey, that is the use of Wikipedia as a dataset or corpus, for studying a wide range of topics, including information retrieval and natural language processing. The authors encouraged the researchers to study Wikipedia in wider and broader ways, in the context of epochal transformations in human history.

Wikipedia comes in nearly 300 languages, all written independently from each other, without much overlap in content coverage and sometimes containing conflicting information. Denny Vrandečić points out the dominance of the English language edition, which dwarfs the other editions in the number of articles and contributors, and proposes an Abstract Wikipedia. It is intended to be a common source that represents the textual content in language-independent manner, containing consistent elements of knowledge that individual language communities can fall back on. Vrandečić argues convincingly that an Abstract Wikipedia does not impede Wikipedia's knowledge diversity. It instead addresses the limited scalability of Wikipedia’s current technical architecture, allowing the communities to reuse common semantics and focus on creating only the grammatical and lexical knowledge of a given language.

Vision Section three, entitled Vision, is made up of 8 essays and speaks to Wikipedia’s Enlightenment-inspired founding vision of giving free access to the sum of all human knowledge. The essays describe efforts towards fulfilling this promise, including initiatives that addressed diversity and content gaps, reflecting the community’s deep self-awareness and self-criticism. Some of Wikipedia's discourse, such as “reliable sources” and “notability”, has been called into question (chapter 16, 17, 19, 20), because these concepts reflect the biases of a society where marginalised groups tend to be ignored, and significantly underrepresented in the published sources that are considered “reliable”. There is a general agreement that the barriers suppressing inclusive participation, from women, people of color, indigenous people, LGBTQIA, editors from the Global South, and other marginalised groups, harm Wikipedia's mission and do not represent its envisioned future.

I suspect that many people, like me, do not know about the existence of an off-line Wikipedia, intended for those who cannot easily access it—because of connectivity, costs, or censorship. Stéphane Coillet-Matillon, author of No Internet, No problem (chapter 18) and a seasoned Wikepedian, created in 2006-2007, the off-line Wikipedia reader for people without internet access. Initially stored on DVDs with Wikipedia article dumps, then downloadable - counting over 800,000 downloads in 2015, it went everywhere without any effort of or communication: Sub-Saharan , Botswana, DRC, even to and . Kiwix really brought knowledge to those in need, a need almost unimaginable for those living in the connected world.

Wikipedia has a bias problem and the community is fully aware of it. This is a common theme that has been addressed or referenced by many essays in this section and throughout the book - words such as “bias”, “gap”,“gender”,“equity”, “diversity”, “race”, “inequality” and “exclusion” make frequent appearances. Jackie Koerner offers honest and critical analysis of what went wrong: not listening to each other silences diverse voices, even those intended to address biases (Chapter 18). Matthew Vetter traced Wikipedia’s biases back to Western Enlightenment logic, “especially practices and policies related to verifiability and reliability that are rooted in print-centric notions of knowledge curation.” He argues that Wikipedia represents an epistemology in process. Its evolution and unfinished state help reconcile the tension between its encyclopedic promise and the failure to fully carry out that ambition (Chapter 19). The need for meaningful change is a strong message that persistently threads through all the lessons learned in the entire volume. This is the path to achieve Wikipedia's vision that motivated the contributors: the sum of all knowledge.

The Capstone The Capstone is a passionate, forward looking essay by Katherine Mahr, presenting an exciting vision of Wikipedia in 2030. Mahr is the executive director of the , the not-for-profit organisation that operates Wikipedia and the Wikimedia project.

The Wikipedians have formed a collective vision for 2030 after going through a global, collaborative process: ”Wikipedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us”. This ambition includes putting in place the critical social, technical and political support systems that serve open knowledge across interfaces and communities, focusing on communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. Mahr presents a point-by-point strategy for realising this future, focusing on people as well as technology. She hypothesises about user experi