Wikipedia’s Crisis of Identity: The Trouble with Abstract Wikipedia
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by Anne Drew Hu
In the more than 20 years that Wikipedia has been online and freely editable, I think that it has, overall, made the world a more informed and educated place. As a child who grew up in the K-12 school system at a time when Wikipedia was new and feared, I found it to be an incalculable asset that has given me access to a more diverse set of perspectives and expanded my curiosity. For example, as I learned more about the deep history of white supremacy in the United States, Wikipedia served as a tool to aggregate knowledge from numerous sources about the bombing of Black Wall Street and the lynching of Emmett Till. After hearing about historical events like these through undergraduate classes, social media, classmates, and colleagues, I would look them up on Wikipedia to freely explore the details, effects, and context surrounding these events. Without Wikipedia, I would not have learned as much (or even at all) about topics that history curriculum in America often avoids, and my perspective as an advocate of racial justice would be more limited.
Critically, it is the social aspects of Wikipedia that have made it a success, not the technology. The technology to edit text distributed on the internet has been around for as long as the world wide web, but it started gaining popularity through the advent of Web 2.0/social media in the early 2000s. Admittedly, Wikipedia was ahead of the curve on collaborative editing, which didn’t become a mainstream experience on the internet until the popularization of Google Docs. However, the idea that anyone should be able to freely edit (almost) any page and that collaborative editing would lead to the best encyclopedia possible is radical. From a psychological perspective, I see Wikipedia as one of the purest manifestations of social constructivism: we shape our understanding of the world together by collaboratively correcting and improving our conceptualizations of the truth. In short, Wikipedia is nothing without its community of editors.
I also acknowledge all of the flaws in the Wiki movement, most notably the systemic biases in its coverage of topics ranging from biographies of women to indigenous peoples worldwide. Wikipedia is rife with epistemic tension: what is the truth and how do we prove that what editors put in Wikipedia is true? When editors take different epistemic perspectives, they may disagree about what is true and how we verify statements. For example, how should indigenous place names be included in Wikipedia? Some editors argue that indigenous names refer to a different concept than colonial settlement, so they should not be listed. Or, they may argue that an entry in a list of indigenous place names is not notable enough compared to the tons of references to the colonial place name available on the internet. Additionally, the editor base of Wikipedia is not reflective of the population it serves. The 2011 community survey found that Wikipedia editors across all language editions were 91% male and mostly from Europe and North America.
While these flaws are real and currently causing harm, I believe that they can be remedied through changing the policies and demographics of the community. Rules can be changed to make content from marginalized communities less likely to be removed. Outreach can increase the diversity in the editor pool and mentorship programs can help support those new editors and keep them contributing. Ultimately, the social aspects of Wikipedia are what made it successful, therefore the solution to its problems needs to be social as well.
The WikiMedia Foundations stated goals are to increase free access to information for everyone worldwide. I argue that the best way for them to achieve this goal is through increasing outreach and reforming the culture in the editor community. But instead of investing in the social side of Wikipedia, they have invested millions of dollars into the technical side, through a project that may fundamentally change the way people edit its wikis called “Abstract Wikipedia.” The project is still in its early stages, but its goals are lofty: to use machine translation to copy language-independent versions of Wikipedia articles into many different languages. Ideally, this technology would allow for information to be disseminated across a wider range of languages, increasing global access to Wikipedia by making more of it available to more people, without requiring English proficiency.
At a high level, the project will connect data stored in a database (WikiData) using functions (WikiFunctions) that explain the relationship between those data, and then translate it into various languages. See the diagram below created by Maria Keet, who is both a contributor to the project and one of its critics.
Image credit: Maria Keet from Some reflections on designing Abstract Wikipedia so far using the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Italy License.
She has argued that there are many challenges to equitably executing this project, starting with the fact that the project is biased towards Indo-European languages. As a linguistics professor in South Africa studying isiZulu, she has raised concerns about how designing the project mainly around Western languages in the short term will create more work in the long run and delay the goal of increasing access to Wikipedia for users who speak languages historically underrepresented on Wikipedia. I highly recommend skimming her blog post where she gives more detailed examples from her experience.
When I heard about this project, I thought about how the technoskeptical questions from the Civics of Technology framework might help us identify the challenges here. In particular, I want to focus on the question “Who is harmed and who benefits from the technology?” First, who is harmed? Answering this question revolves around how editors from historically underrepresented languages will interact with Abstract Wikipedia. Proponents argue that this project will allow marginalized editors to make changes that will propagate throughout all Wikipedias, not just their language. However, given that the vast majority of Wikipedia editors write in European languages, I find it more likely that the edits from the Global South will be drowned out by a tsunami of edits from the Global North seeking to reinforce their own worldview. Furthermore, it’s not clear how editor conflict will be moderated across language barriers. If a Tamil speaking editor and a German speaking editor start an edit war, how will they discuss their grievances and resolve the situation? The most likely answer is that they will communicate through a lingua franca like English, but this seems to defeat the point of Abstract Wikipedia if high level English proficiency is the barrier to entry.
Next, who benefits from the technology? The goal of Abstract Wikipedia is to dramatically increase the amount of quality encyclopedia entries available in as many languages as possible. Theoretically, this should benefit global readers who do not speak English, but there is a tradeoff to introducing content translated largely from Western languages into a Wikipedia created and curated by speakers of a non-Western language. As it stands, there are many small non-Western Wikipedias, and although they may not be as big or have as many citations as English Wikipedia, their perspective reflects the community that they serve. Introducing content translated from Western languages will change the mix of perspectives represented in the content. This isn’t always a bad thing; as I said earlier, ideally creating a diverse community of editors should lead to the best encyclopedia. However, that situation only works when editors can socially construct the content by collaboratively editing and working out their differences through discussion. The language barrier between these groups of editors makes discussion effectively impossible, so instead of a diverse group of collaborators, it’s more like two factions warring for editorial control.
Abstract Wikipedia may seem like a necessary innovation to sustain Wikipedia as a free source of knowledge worldwide. Luckily, Wikipedia and the WikiMedia Foundation are not in danger, at least not right now. Funding for the WikiMedia Foundation has increased over the years thanks to donation drives, and English Wikipedia is still being frequently edited, although down from its all time high. However, so-called “generative AI” does potentially pose a threat to the readership of Wikipedia if more readers start going to chatbots for answers instead of Wikipedia. Unfortunately, Abstract Wikipedia won’t fix this problem either, and I argue that no technology can. The question of whether to trust ChatGPT or Wikipedia more is a question of information literacy, which is best solved through education. In fact, Abstract Wikipedia may make this problem worse by degrading the public’s trust in Wikipedia through introducing machine translated text into Wikipedia.
Times are changing, and no matter what choices Wikipedia editors and the WikiMedia Foundation make, the role that Wikipedia plays on the internet and in society will never be the same as it was. As for Abstract Wikipedia, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about what it will look like and how it will integrate into this 20 year old community. That means there is still opportunity for change, and for editors from around the world to make their voices heard.