What Is Our Community Wisdom?
A Brief Primer on Wikipedia’s Polarities and Pluralities
Community wisdom can refer to two things: How to handle the community wisely, and what the community uniquely knows. In either case, it makes sense to first define what we mean by ‘community’.
In one version, the one heard most often, the community is loud and resistant to change, confident if not arrogant in their working ways, and defensive of the resources they’ve produced. This community exists, and you will hear from them, but you should know they are but one vocal slice of an immense, diverse whole.
This slice trends male, white, young, from North America and Europe, apolitical, meritocratic, libertarian and/or liberal, anonymous, anti-censorship, intellectual, hard-headed. They are the default, and the demographic majority internally. They are not the most friendly; and yet, they have also to date created most of the most popular language encyclopedias and their multimedia and structured data superstores in the entire world’s history.
They are workers and protectors — concerned with fundamental principles. With an in-group mentality, they are more likely to view diversity as a dangerous buzzword and an influx of newcomers as outsiders — threats to order, quality, and the values that made Wikipedia what it is today.
There is another slice of the community that you will meet too: the organizers. These folks are global, diverse, warm, optimistic, encouraging, personable. They like associating with Wikimedia’s affiliate groups. They like reaching out to newcomers. They want to be helpful, initiate programs, and come up with transformative models. They will talk about Wikipedia’s gaps and are open to change, at least with some with education. They suffer all of the real human problems of organizational politics and sometimes are tripped up by their own bureaucracy.
These two slices overlap in part. Not all ‘hard-core’ editors are unfriendly. Not all organizers are agreeable. Increasingly, our most outstanding volunteers live and exist in both worlds.
There is a very large slice of the community that is simply silent, because it is missing. Women by far, most of the global south, the economic poor, those without internet connections or large data plans, without free time to volunteer, or simply without awareness of Wikipedia’s projects and values.
There is a slice of the community that is trying to fill these gaps, through concerted activism. Groups like Whose Knowledge?, Women in Red, Art + Feminism, WikiMujeres, Afrocrowd and others are not afraid to call out our implicit and explicit biases. They are willing to question the pillar of neutrality and argue that the real world results of our principle fails to fulfill our mission of sharing all knowledge.
There is a quiet but essential part of our community that fixes thousands of punctuation errors, or adds categories and inter-language links. They do small, thankless work, often motivated by little more than an innate desire to fix, improve, and complete. Slightly obsessive in style, these people may fall into dynamics that hurt the community out of ignorance but very rarely malice or ego.
There is a practical yet ideologically pure part of our community that focuses on building the free software our content lives on. They approach that work with the mixed technical expertise of complete amateurs all the way through to pro Silicon Valley developers — but each with the ethos of Linux and an oceanic commons of reusable code.
All of these slices exist, and all are in fact vital to our health. It is good to remember that “community”, like “global south”, is both a monolith and a myriad of things.
So, what does the community know?
The community knows how to build a crowdsourced project. To accept uncertainty, resolve conflict through dialogue, create rules and norms to reduce chaos and disorder, to build tools that maximize efficiency, to run events that bring in and bond contributors.
The community knows the value of research and is discerning in evaluating sources of knowledge. The community readily spots bias and inaccuracy (within their capability*). The community is largely immune to bullshit, impatient with grandstanding, and quick-witted to retort. They do not suffer fools. This entails great skill, often comparable to a doctoral researcher or journalist in many cases. But it can also be a weakness when it defers to western, colonial versions of ‘prestige knowledge’ and reliability — shutting out regions, languages, and entire modes of knowing.
The community knows what mutual respect looks like. They want to be given a compelling vision, but they do not lack intrinsic motivation. They want to be meaningful partners who are consulted early and replied to honestly. What they respond to well is welcoming, clear, level-headed, and direct, non-corporate communication.
They can be swayed, and sometimes are only swayed, by research, surveys, facts, data, percentages, and charts — because these side-circuit their aversion to politics or dogma in contemporary discourse. Appeals to emotion, and stories of individuals overcoming obstacles are less effective for the ‘hard-core’ than the ‘warm-edges’.
The community knows the power of the individual who takes it upon him or herself to fix a problem rather than complain about it. The Wikipedia maxim to ‘Be Bold’ and the common phrase ‘So Fix It’ speak to this ethos of being a ‘Do-ocracy’. In this sense, the community is brave, while in others the community is also terribly uneven. Not everyone instinctively feels confident enough to be bold, and that trends along predictable gender and socioeconomic lines.
The community knows what works for them, what has worked, and who ‘they’ collectively are. They are not always or easily amenable to new modes of thinking or doing. This is not necessarily just short-sightedness or a lack of empathy; it is also the result of dozens of years watching things get royally f*cked up with poorly implemented software or mishandling of social issues — and then having to go in and clean up the mess themselves.
The community knows what a conflict-of-interest is, sometimes better than the organizations that fund them. They are pragmatic about self-interest and recognize ulterior motives in others. They are raised to Assume Good Faith, but learn over time to Trust But Verify.
The community is full of personalities while being almost entirely selfless. People build lives and spend huge chunks of their free time contributing for joy and fun, recognition and self-expression, curiosity and exploration. But there is a core of altruism, purpose, mission, and responsibility that explains how seriously people take this work.
They believe it is a gift to humanity, and a privilege to create, sustain, and expand it. This does not always equate to an appreciation of Wikipedia’s gaps in content and contributors, however, particularly around systemic bias, which strikes some as ‘political’ or ‘politicized’ in itself.
The community is a mix of amateur and professionals combined, with little advantage conferred to those having external credentials or rank. What may appear to be a random volunteer could be a leading expert in their field or have an advanced degree in library science, medicine, history, or philosophy. What appears to be a random volunteer may also be the person who started a successful community or innovative program from scratch. Amateurs and experts work alongside each other and bring complementary strengths.
The community is weird. There’s a lot of idiosyncrasy and quirkiness among those who build an encyclopedia, or a copyright-free media repository, or a linked fact database by choice. This weirdness is a feature, not a bug: it is something to be treasured.
The community is hostile — sometimes at its core, and sometimes only in the vulnerability of its openness. What is a deeply fulfilling hobby for some is a nightmare of harassment and exclusion for others. What some consider proper intellectual combat, others experience as just more subjugation and oppression.
The community is transformative and evolving. As a movement, we are growing our skills and our awareness of how many people we have yet to reach and empower. Of how much we know, but also how much yet there is to know — or to make known online. Of how deeply inequity runs on the internet, and the charge for us to take on that monumental challenge as eagerly and earnestly as the first Wikipedians who wrote loose biographies of every random topic they could imagine.
The community is connected — to world-class museums and city libraries, to national governments, and NGOs, and other movements for civil and digital freedoms and rights. The community is full of people who build bridges to institutions with nothing more than the words, ‘I edit Wikipedia.’
The community is vast, with a billion monthly devices visiting our sites and tens of millions of registered accounts. But our community is also fragile in its core, with only a fraction-of-a-fraction of people ever editing, no less regularly editing each month, or meeting in person, or contributing code, or organizing events and running programs.
The community is strong, and it is also sick. It is smart, and it is also blind. It has already changed the world, and it is yet afraid of change to come. It is principled, and at the same time reinforces a subpar status quo.
The community is part of us and we are part of it. There is nothing about the community that we cannot say the same of ourselves. If we want the community to change, we must change with it.
