The State of Wikipedia in 2020
Back in 2010, the world was still skeptical of Wikipedia. High school teachers and college professors warned students to never, ever use it for research. If you ever tried to cite it in an argument, your opponent would mock it as unreliable. Late night hosts like Stephen Colbert would enlist their audiences to flood a specific Wikipedia page and vandalize it. Celebrities and major companies would treat it as a vanity project, editing their own pages while making absolutely no effort to disclose their conflict of interest.
Flash forward to 2020, and Wikipedia certainly has more respect. The Wikimedia Foundation, which acts as its official steward, has tens of millions of dollars in the bank. While college professors don’t view it as a primary source for research, they’ll sometimes endorse it as a starting point for said research. And nearly everyone recognizes it as one of the most influential websites on the internet.
But though tens of millions of people use Wikipedia every day, most only have a passing understanding of how a core group of a few thousand volunteer editors perform the vast majority of contributions to its articles.
One of those editors is Bill Beutler. For the past decade, Bill has consulted with hundreds of brands, helping them to edit their Wikipedia pages without running afoul of the platform’s strict rules. I recently interviewed Bill about the problems that have plagued Wikipedia for the past decade and the issues its community will need to address in the decade to come.
To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player, or you can play the YouTube video below. If you scroll down you’ll also find some transcribed highlights from the interview.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity
Educators establish a truce with Wikipedia
For years, some of the harshest criticism against Wikipedia was lodged by educators who often warned their students away from ever trusting the encyclopedia. But after nearly 20 years since Wikipedia’s founding, tensions have cooled, though most teachers still wouldn’t let students cite Wikipedia in papers:
I do feel like this is one of the success stories of Wikipedia: acceptance into what I like to call the global information infrastructure. In various ways Wikipedia really does fill this niche that no one else even comes close to doing. Education was one of the most prominent holdouts to say, ‘Hey, kids, stay away from this untrustworthy, scurrilous hodgepodge of random jokers on the internet posting things you can’t trust.
There’s even an organization called the Wiki Education Foundation that has, over the last several years made great strides in creating partnerships with universities and helping to teach classes, all of which has made teachers come to stop seeing Wikipedia as something to be feared.
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Wikipedia’s shrinking editor base
During the 2010s, there were periodic articles that noted Wikipedia’s base of active editors was shrinking. Wikipedia relies heavily on this base for the development of new articles and the maintenance of already-existing ones. So this left people wondering whether Wikipedia was dying, or if this was just natural attrition.
Bill said that it’s likely the latter, and he cited statistics showing that the editor decline eventually leveled out. There are even signs that it’s growing once again:
There’s a whole new generation of students coming out of high school and college who grew up with Wikipedia and it’s just part of their lives. And so we are seeing a second wave perhaps of Wikipedia editors who are really getting their start editing Wikipedia.
The shrinking gender gap
Surveys have consistently shown that Wikipedia’s editor base is predominantly male, and some have pointed to this fact when arguing that not enough notable, accomplished females have their own Wikipedia pages.
The Wikimedia Foundation, explained Bill, has worked hard to create a better gender balance:
The Wikimedia Foundation has poured a lot of effort into various initiatives to get women’s groups involved in trying to learn how to edit. They call these editathons. It’s based on the same concept of the hackathon, and you get together, get some coffee and some cookies, and you pitch in and start working on Wikipedia pages.
I actually went to one such event hosted by a friend of mine at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum a few months ago. It was a day dedicated to creating and improving articles on women who had worked in the air and space industry over the last 50, 70 years. There are a lot of these efforts where they’re trying to generate some interest around editing, and the truth is we just don’t know how successful they have been, but I have to think that these efforts had to have had some impact, we just don’t know how much it’s improved by.
Jimmy Wales’s new business ventures
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales probably draws the distinction of being the most successful internet person who isn’t a billionaire, though lord knows he’s tried to become one. He launched a wiki search engine back in the aughts. He tried to create a wiki-based news organization. Just recently, he debuted a wiki social network.
It’s got over 400,000 users, and it just launched a couple of months ago, so that’s not bad for growth. The website’s kind of clunky. I don’t see what is greatly different about it from Reddit, to be totally honest, but I have not really spent a great deal of time there, and I doubt that I will. Maybe the fact that it’s a smaller community will help it. Who knows, maybe they will develop a perspective that is unique to that community and the more people join, the more they buy into it. I hope that’s the case. That would be wonderful.
Wikipedia has more money than you realize
Every Wikipedia user can probably recall a time when they’ve landed on an article during one of Wikipedia’ fundraising drives. You’re hit with a pop-up message that tries to guilt you into paying for this resource you currently get for free. Well, as it turns out, the Wikimedia Foundation has been a pretty good fundraiser, meaning you can probably forgo your $3 donation this year.
I haven’t looked at the numbers too recently, but I’m pretty sure they have over a hundred million dollars banked at this point. I think the problem is that what that money can be used for is entirely divorced from the day to day work that actually goes into building Wikipedia, because the foundation is not allowed to put any money toward paying editors to write articles. They have to stay out of content. They can try to lure new editors indirectly by hosting editathons, but they can’t pay them directly.
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.
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