On Wikipedia

Ask any historian what were the fundamental characteristics of human societies that aided in the exponential progress of mankind ever since their evolution in the African Savannahs and the advent of collective learning is bound to figure as one of those enablers. Collective learning is the ability to consolidate individual knowledge in a society and pass it on to the subsequent generations that can then build upon that base to expand the knowledge even further. Arguably, communication has been an integral aspect that augmented and enhanced collective learning. A honey bee which has narrowly escaped the enticing trap of a Venus flytrap may have learned to avoid the plant next time, but it can’t pass on that knowledge to its offspring. Significant developments in communication began with the invention and systematization of language, script and later with the dawn of the printing press. At the end of the 2nd millennium, this has culminated in digital media. Although mind-boggling number of bits of data have been amassed in the relatively short span of less than 100-year history of digital technology, in many ways the potential of collective learning and its future course are best reflected in today’s Wikipedia.

The precedent for Wikipedia has been set by encyclopedias. Encyclopedias are repositories of mostly factual information organised in a thematic or alphabetic manner. They are supposed to one-stop authoritative sources of essential information which represent the best and latest of the sum of entire human knowledge. The first encyclopedia of the world is perhaps Pliny’s Naturalis Historia. Encyclopedias have evolved so much ever since that today it’s hard to arrive at an agreeable definition of what exactly constitutes an encyclopedia. Of noteworthy in this regard are the commercial encyclopedias of the 20th century (which were mostly in print editions). Encyclopedia Britannica and later Microsoft’s Encarta became household names for decades. These were written by subject matter experts who laboriously gathered accurate and relevant factual information and compiled them into neat little volumes of books. Because of this due diligence, they commanded a great deal of reliability – so much so that encyclopedia articles could be cited as references in research work. With the introduction of personal computers and later internet, these traditional encyclopedias tried their best to keep up with the state of art in technology. For instance, online versions of encyclopedias sprang up which could host multimedia making the text-only versions of earlier times to come alive. However, the real challenge to these encyclopedias was not the digital revolution itself as was realised very soon. The foundations of the existing encyclopedias were shaken when Wikipedia was launched with an alternate thesis of crowdsourcing knowledge. The tide of Wikipedia so rapidly washed away the centuries-old encyclopedias into obscurity in less than a decade.

Wikipedia is today the 5th most popular website on the internet. Of course, a key and defining attribute of Wiki is that it’s collaboratively built by volunteers and almost all of the articles are editable by anyone at any time. The unfettered open access to edit content on the site has rightly created a lot of doubt in sceptics’ minds about the platform’s reliability in the long term as an encyclopedia. This dimension, in fact, is still not completely addressed to this day. Wikipedia articles are not considered as valid primary sources for credible research work. And by the admission of Wiki itself, “Wikipedia is not a reliable source“. Nevertheless, most denizens of the internet still consider Wiki as their first and sometimes even the only source of factual information. Fortunately, more often than not, the trust reposed in Wiki pays off. This level of reliability has been earned over time and is only poised to get better with time.

A typical page on Wikipedia

All of us are familiar with the minimally designed user interface of Wikipedia that has changed little since its inception in 2001. A typical article would – begin with a title, have a leading section that gives an overview of the topic, be followed by a sequence of sub-sections with detailed information about various aspects of the article and ends with a list of references and some links for further reading. The content itself is interspersed with inline citations, cross-links, information boxes and sometimes relevant multimedia as well. What most people don’t notice are the extra tabs associated with each page. Every article has a talk page (to discuss how to improve the article), an edit page (where the article is actually edited) and a view history page (that logs the entire history of edits to the article). Pick any random article and a glimpse through its history will give you an idea of the variety of users who’ve contributed to giving that article its current form. And then one could begin to wonder, who are all these contributors?

The answer is of course very simple. They’re just like you and me. They are the anonymous public who happen to have spare time, an interest and willingness to contribute (for nothing in return) and hopefully some reliable information. They fondly call themselves Wikipedians. But wait? If it could be anyone, could they also not be vandals, trolls and groups with vested interests? The answer is, sadly, yes. And it is this lot of users that pose a persistent challenge to the credibility of Wiki and force Wiki to self-declare itself as neither a final nor completely reliable source. But over time Wiki has created a deluge of norms, processes, guidelines and other frameworks to guard itself against disrepute and deterioration.

As noted earlier what most viewers see on a visiting any Wiki page is just the tip of the iceberg. And it couldn’t be understated how small a tip of the underlying iceberg it really is. Admittedly the article itself is the end goal of any Wiki page but the associated metadata and other pages are what actually give strength to each individual article. Since the primary goal of Wiki is to allow any willing contributor to quickly (wiki literally means quick in Hawaiian) edit an article, a user doesn’t even need to make an account in order to make changes. And then the bastion of Wikipedians stand guard and makes sure that any inaccurate and disruptive edits are reverted in a reasonable time frame. In fact, way back in 2003, an IBM study^[1] concluded that “vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly—so quickly that most users will never see its effects”.

How to become a Wikipedian?

If you were to take up the cause of Wikipedia and decide to become an active Wikipedian you might find yourself at a loss. Wiki strongly encourages you to Be Bold and make edits whenever you notice something inaccurate (which could be something as simple as a typo, grammatical or punctuation error) or if you have any missing information about the article. I made my first edits on Wiki several years back and only recently have I begun to comprehend the enormity of the Leviathan-like structure of the Wikipedia community. An ideal springboard for a new Wiki volunteer to acquaint themselves with the platform is The Wikipedia Adventure. After a brief tour of the basics of Wikipedia through that walk-through, one could visit the Wikipedia Teahouse where it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the positive and enthusiastic help one receives from fellow Wikipedians. If you’re more of just a reading individual, you can just start with this introduction instead.

Foundations of Wikipedia

In order to achieve its goal of neutral and accurate articles, the elaborate policies and guidelines evolved over time are summarised into what are often called as Five Pillars of Wikipedia.  These are –

1. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
   This means articles should have only factual and relevant information about mainstream and noteworthy topics.
2. Neutral Point of View
   Articles with multiple points of view should give due weight to all perspectives and a balance should be striven for.
3. Free to use, edit, and distribute
   No individual contributor owns any article. Copyrighted content should be respected. Plagiarism shall not be tolerated.
4. Treat each other with respect and civility
   Assumption of good faith is default even in case of perceived vandalism or prima facie malfeasance.
5. No Firm Rules
   Exceptions where justifiable to existing rules are allowed. The principles and spirit of rules matter more than the rules themselves.

The last pillar pertaining to the flexibility of rules is quite telling of the core strength of Wikipedia – that of decentralisation. It’s important to note that the rules are made over time by Wikipedians themselves and they are subject to change after due discussions and deliberations. For a new editor on Wikipedia, there’s a lot to learn. Since it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the complexity and jargon, old Wikipedians embrace of the policy of being Welcoming to new Wikipedians. New editors also quickly realise that there’s much more to contribute to Wiki than just editing articles. Maintenance and clean up of existing articles are as important as adding on more information. If you can’t wait to start contributing, you can visit the list of pending tasks.

Wikipedia Community

Wikipedians are the brick and mortar of Wikipedia. Even more so than the actual brick and mortar that houses Wiki servers or the handful employees of Wikimedia Foundation. With the stated primary objective of the yearning to give free access to the sum of all knowledge to every person in the world, Wikipedians serve a noble cause. Statistical data on demographics of Wikipedians is scant. One glaring insight from the available data is that as much as 85% editors on Wikipedia are male.^[2] Out of about 35 million registered users only around 150,000 actually remain active contributors at any given time. A far lesser number of them participate in discussions. An unknown but significant number of contributions are also made by unregistered anonymous users.

One limitation for the Wikipedia community to grow is that the platform is not a social network. In fact, users interact with each other on user pages which are just like any other Wiki article. I encourage you to check out the user pages of some of the most active Wikipedians from this list. The sheer details, exchanges and jargon used on those pages give an idea of almost cult-like status that the community has developed. This is part of the iceberg lurking beneath the surface that has been referred to earlier.

In order to protect some important pages from frequent vandalism, pages have different protection levels. For example, one cannot edit Barack Obama’s page without having special rights (which itself requires sufficient experience of editing on Wikipedia). Compared to the total number of articles of Wikipedia, such protected articles are almost negligible. But its also important to guard these important pages as they are frequently targeted by groups or parties with an interest at stake. In principle, even these pages will be de-protected once they become less vulnerable to frequent disruptive edits. Users are also given special permissions with time and experience in order to differentiate them from the rest and give them special powers and responsibility. There is no hierarchy in these user groups with the exception of Administrators being at the very top. A lot of them also do bureaucratic work (with an actual user group Bureaucrat as well). It is now well known that Wikipedia itself doesn’t have a single employee under its payroll. The parent organisation Wikimedia Foundation has a handful of employees who indirectly contribute to Wikipedia. It’s phenomenally remarkable that so much has been accomplished by just volunteers.

Insights as an editor

Regardless of the nature of the contributions on Wikipedia, with time one would quickly learn to appreciate the elaborate framework that has been built on the platform. And a great many of these insights are actually quite relevant to the practical life as well. One of the first things one would be forced to come to terms with is the assumption of good faith principle. Even in cases of seemingly outright vandalism, one must assume that the vandal may have meant to constructively add to the article in order to improve it. With this assumption (which requires a great amount of patience and open-mindedness in some cases) you would get to experience first hand the collaborative nature of improving articles on Wiki. This becomes particularly relevant in case of editing articles that have controversial points of views. Edit wars are not too uncommon on Wikipedia, especially for pages that tend to be polarising (for example pages on controversial topics or on famous personalities). The dispute resolution mechanism for edit wars teaches you that you should think about the poor children dying of hunger in the underdeveloped world rather than split your head over whether a line has to be written in this way or that way. The principle of neutrality is another avenue which teaches a great deal. Of course, it’s not easy to determine what is a neutral point of view in a given situation. And thus neutrality itself may first get discussed before consensus is reached on how to improve the article.  In my own experience as a rationalist trying to write an article on a pseudoscience topic, I got carried away in a mission mode to present a criticism of the theory. I had to come to terms with the fact that an encyclopedia is not a place where activists could present their impassioned arguments.

Another critical aspect of Wiki that often leads to many conflicts is the policy on Verifiability. Everything written on Wikipedia must be verifiable. Also summarised as Verifiability, not truth, this means that each and every line of any article must be backed by a reliable source. This comes off as a big surprise to many new users. Say there’s an institution in a remote town that’s visited by hundreds of people every day and the thousands of inhabitants of that town are obviously aware of it. There’s no place for mention of that institution on Wikipedia if no other published source refers to its existence! This is because of the No Original Research policy. Even if you are cocksure of something, if there are no published sources that can back your claim, then you best not mention that fact on Wiki. This may sound like an unreasonably high standard of authenticity, but then again, Wiki is an Encyclopedia and moreover given the vulnerability of Wiki to vandalism and information corruption, this standard of verifiability makes up for robust high-quality articles. A widely quoted peer review published in Nature in 2005^[3] compared 42 science articles from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia and found the accuracy level of both to be more or less same.

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Humans had a tradition of literally etching their names on stone tablets, cave walls and more recently on concrete walls. This is perhaps an expression of an innate urge to give due emphasis to the importance of our lives and leave a mark. For what it’s worth, it does the trick. Individual legacy may be only heralded in a few cases but the collective legacy survives through such artistic endeavours and indeed their names echo through eternity. One of the fundamental protocols of Wikipedia is to not delete anything. Every single change made to a page i.e., the entire history of the evolution of the page is preserved forever. This may sound nightmarish for most modern media but since Wikipedia is mostly restricted to text, the data storage requirements and processing power needed are fairly modest. In fact, Wikipedia takes this policy so seriously that even deleted pages don’t actually get deleted (they’ll be deleted for the public but administrators can still access them and in some cases revive them back from death). Attached to this bandwagon of the trace of the evolution of every single page is a lot of metadata. Most importantly, a chronological log of usernames who modified a page is also saved. This seems to me to be a modern reflection of that same old urge to leave our mark. And true to the spirit of collective effort so little importance is given to each individual name but at the same time, the integral importance of every single user’s contribution is also acknowledged in its right place.

Still from Shawshank Redemption (1994)

In order to keep this essay itself neutral, I must mention the fair share of criticism that Wikipedia receives. Apart from the gender gap alluded to earlier (which leads to inadequate attention to women-oriented articles), systemic bias is frequently alleged on Wikipedia. And of course, the primary criticism remains to this day about the unreliability of factual information on it.

Wikipedia has been called as The Good Cop of the Internet and that’s a just way of labelling its character notwithstanding the criticisms. Wikipedia is an epitome of crowd-sourcing and no other project in foreseeable future is going to be able to inspire similar awe at the profound simplicity combined with the sheer scale and the noble ambitions.