William Beutler on Wikipedia

Posts Tagged ‘George Floyd’

Year in Review

The Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2020

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
on December 31, 2020 at 1:46 pm

It’s no overstatement to say that 2020 was a year where everything changed. Since March, ubiquitous semi-ironic references to the “Before Times” have served to euphemize the unfathomable. To date, COVID-19 has killed nearly two million people worldwide, reshaped the global economy, galvanized worldwide protests, and impacted politics, business and culture for years to come—including in ways we can’t yet see. 2020 gets all the hate now, but can we be so certain that the coming year will be meaningfully different?

2020 was also a time of change for Wikipedia, though these shifts occurred almost entirely below the surface: unless you’re an active participant in the Wikimedia movement, much of this list will come as news to you. This was a year where ambitious new projects were announced, small-scale tweaks took on larger significance, the relationship between human editors and the software supporting them became more fraught, differences in vision between the community and professional corners of Wikipedia emerged or were reinforced, and the future of the movement simultaneously became both clearer and more contentious.

Every year since 2010, The Wikipedian has offered its summary of the top ten Wikipedia stories—events, themes, and trends—of the previous year. In this installment we’ll do the same again, but with a little something extra. On Wednesday, December 30, I joined a recording of the Wikipedia Weekly YouTube livestream to discuss the big issues of the year that was. This list is informed by the “top ten” discussed on this show, although it is not identical. I hope you’ll read through my list, and then watch or listen to the discussion, which complements the topics covered below.

♦     ♦     ♦

10. Wikipedia approaches its 20th anniversary

Countless retrospective pieces will surely be published in the coming weeks to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia, which I am certain you do not need to look up to know was founded on January 15, 2001. That milestone has loomed large over the past year, lending additional significance to milestones and benchmarks recently passed.

Wikipedia’s 6 millionth article, maybe?

In January, Wikipedia hit 6 million articles in the English language, its largest and most widely-read edition. No one knows precisely which article was the true number 6,000,000, but the nod was given to Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, co-founder of the Women in Red project, for her article about a Canadian schoolteacher and temperance movement leader. 

In February, Wired published a story calling Wikipedia “the last best place on the internet”, using the site as a counterpoint to the neverending dumpster fire of today’s World Wide Web—the last refuge of the promise of the “open web” which has long since given way to the mundanity of knowledge workers never being offline, every day facing another onslaught of disinformation and unpleasantry. By the end of the year, BuzzFeed offered a different way of saying pretty much the same thing: “The Top 40 Most Read Wikipedia Pages Of 2020 Perfectly Capture The Hellscape That Was 2020”.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s impressive stature was affirmed yet again when Twitter announced it was considering using Wikipedia as a benchmark for which user accounts would be bestowed with the simultaneously coveted and scorned “blue checkmark”. It was likewise affirmed in a more serious way when the World Health Organization announced it would be licensing its information for use on Wikipedia.

All in all, not a bad way to mark two decades, right? Well, you should see what else happened.

9. Should Wikipedia fear a Section 230 repeal?

If the phrase “Section 230” doesn’t mean much to you, then you probably don’t spend much time following the United States Congress… or on Twitter. Section 230 is the portion of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that protects providers of internet platforms, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and, of course, Wikipedia, from being sued for content posted by users. Section 230 specifically allows these websites to moderate content—or not—as it sees fit. The internet as we know it today could not exist without it.

But in the last few years, 230 has come under increasing scrutiny, especially for websites alleged to permit sex trafficking (Craigslist), or terroristic threats (8chan), or disinformation (too many to count, but Facebook especially). What’s more, right-wing politicians and conspiracy theorists in the U.S. have viewed it as shielding the tech giants which they believe (or at least claim to believe) are censoring them. Meanwhile, “the internet as we know it today” is no longer seen as the frontier of possibility it was as recently as 2015. In the last week of December 2020, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tied a vote on the latest covid stimulus package to 230 repeal, a poison pill designed to derail modifications sought by Democrats (and of course Republicans’ own outgoing president). 

Although I hesitate to make any predictions about the world we live in now, full repeal seems exceedingly unlikely. But maybe I’m only saying that because the internet after 230 is impossible to imagine—it would spell headaches at best and doom at worst for the entire Web 2.0 ecosystem (including Wikipedia) and the tech giants who rely upon it. So while it’s probably not going to happen, it’s still worth worrying about.

8. Creating Theresa Greenfield’s Wikipedia article

November already feels like it was years ago, but barely two months ago a news story involving Wikipedia captured the attention of American political media for about 24 hours: why Theresa Greenfield, the Democratic nominee opposing Iowa senator Joni Ernst, did not have a Wikipedia article. It goes without saying that Wikipedia is a widely-read source of information by voters, so it seemed notable that Iowans (and the reporters covering one of the country’s most hotly contested racers) couldn’t even look her up on Wikipedia.

The reason owes to a perfect storm of three applicable circumstances: 1) Greenfield was not a well-known figure prior to capturing the Senate nomination, 2) Wikipedia doesn’t have a rule granting “Notability” to major party nominees, but 3) it does have a rule against creating articles about individuals known for just one event—in this case, the Senate race. This surprised me, because for years I had been under the impression that there was a rule automatically guaranteeing an entry for major party nominees, the same way there is for professional athletes.

As tends to happen in such cases, debate ensued and Greenfield was eventually granted a Wikipedia entry. Given how much news the race had generated, the article quickly grew to a level of detail that made the earlier obstinacy seem ridiculous. And then on November 3, she lost.

7. Scots Wikipedia and the trouble with small Wikipedias

Perhaps the actual biggest story involving Wikipedia this year, at least in terms of headlines generated, was the “fun” and “lighthearted” discovery that the Scots Wikipedia was basically a complete sham. For those whose only experience with Scots is thumbing through an Irvine Welsh novel sometime after seeing Trainspotting in the mid-1990s, Scots is either a language of its own or a heavy dialect of English spoken by the Scottish peoples. This blog last mentioned it in 2014 when Scotland voted on a referendum to leave the United Kingdom (lolsob emoji goes here) and it is one of the smaller language editions of Wikipedia.

If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!

Well… in August a Reddit user realized that roughly a third of its 60,000-odd articles had been written by a single user, who turned out to be an American teenager with scant knowledge of proper Scots grammar or terminology. In other words, by a kid using a bad Scottish accent. The story was too good to pass up for almost any outlet that considers itself remotely “online”, and they all had a good laugh. 

A month after the Scots Wikipedia controversy, it emerged that a significant majority of the articles on the Wikipedia edition written in Malagasy—the national language of Madagascar—had been written by a bot translating articles from other editions. And most of them rather badly. And the Malagasy Wikipedia is far from the only Wikipedia edition to be mostly written by bots—a Vice report in February pointed out that the Cebuano edition was largely written without human editors, albeit apparently with more success.

But bots are not the only challenge. In a different example, the Portuguese Wikipedia—containing more than one million entries with just shy of 1400 active editors—decided to ban IP accounts from making edits, because the vast majority of vandalism on the site came from these unregistered editors. According to the Wikipedia Signpost, vandalism went down, and new account creation increased. This is unlikely to be adopted on the largest editions, but it’s worth watching to see if other small language communities decide to follow suit.

5. Anticipation and apprehensions about Abstract Wikipedia

Wikipedia is as human-created a project as exists in the world, but its future increasingly looks to be dominated by computers, programs, and algorithms. Look no further than the newly announced project called Abstract Wikipedia, and its sister project WikiFunctions, which plans to do much the same as the bots on small Wikipedias, but at a much larger scale and with greater ingenuity. 

First announced in a Signpost editorial in April, and approved unanimously by the WMF board just three months later, Abstract Wikipedia aims to create Wikipedia articles independent of any one language, combining structured data and “functions” related to information within them, to make it feasible for machine translation to effectively translate articles from one language to another. It sounds so ambitious as to be reckless, but its pedigree couldn’t be better—creator Denny Vrandečić is a former WMF board member, former Googler, and the creator of another pie-in-the-sky project that has become wildly successful: Wikidata.

Father of Wikidata, and now Abstract Wikipedia

As Vrandečić pointed out, of all topics that exist across Wikipedia, only a third of them have articles in English. Further: “only about half of articles in the German Wikipedia have a counterpart on the English Wikipedia … There are huge amounts of knowledge out there that are not accessible to readers who can read only one or two languages.”

If Abstract Wikipedia succeeds, it points toward a future where Wikipedia is controlled less by those who can merely write articles, and more by those who can write code. Exciting as the project may be, anxieties exist, too. Will Abstract Wikipedia dictate the content of articles, or merely inform them? Local control matters a lot to Wikipedians and, as we’ll see in the next few sections, WMF bigfooting is of increasing concern to some community members.

But it’s also easy to see why it appeals to many Wikimedians: much like Wikidata and very much unlike Wikipedia, it’s greenfield, unencumbered by the old habits of the arguably hidebound, conservative editorial base that both keeps Wikipedia running while also preventing it from growing beyond its original vision. The building of Abstract Wikipedia is set to begin in 2022, and it’s expected to start integrating with Wikipedia itself in 2023.

5. WMF Board makes some suspicious moves

In the spring, as the far-reaching implications of the coronavirus pandemic became clearer, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees announced that it would postpone its tri-annual board elections, and the three trustees whose terms were set to expire would stay on for another year. At the time, it was seen as a regrettable if understandable concession to the dire circumstances, even for an organization that can operate exclusively online in many other ways.

But then in October, the Board unveiled a considerable overhaul to the committee’s bylaws, with eyebrow-raising changes to the terms of, well, board elections. Certain board seats were no longer described as “community-selected” but “community-sourced”, and the words “majority” and “voting” were removed. A number of community members raised concerns that it could spell the end of community-elected board members, thereby increasing the stratification between the “professional” and “community” parts of Wikipedia. WMF general counsel Amanda Keton conceded that the community had “found a bug” in the proposal, and promised they would address them in a revision that is still yet to come.

Compounding matters, the timeline set for the change was considered too short, while Board members expressed different opinions about how far along in the process the proposals really were. Furthermore, apt questions were raised about the wisdom of sweeping changes when the board had three members who, in normal times, wouldn’t even be there. Perhaps it was merely an oversight, but it certainly exacerbated tensions that already existed.

4. Wikimedia debates Jimmy Wales’ permanent board seat

But that wasn’t the only discordant note involving Board governance this year. Shortly after the new bylaws were proposed, prominent Wikimedian Liam Wyatt suggested another change: discontinuing Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’ permanent “Community Founder Trustee Position”—in short, eliminating his board seat after nearly 20 years. As Wyatt put it, “Now that the WMF is a mature organisation, I do not believe it is appropriate any longer for a single individual to have an infinitely-renewable and non-transferrable position on the board.”

Jimmy Wales, man of the people—really!

Wales himself replied in short order, expressing a not intractable opposition to the idea at some point, but arguing that the reason it should not happen now is because of the self-same tensions ongoing. As Wales put it, it is actually he who represents the community among the professional set. And in fact, Wales’ positions on the board have been largely pro-community, including expressed opposition to curtailing community voter supervision of the board.

And while it seemed a “modest proposal” in its initial offering, the idea was soon hotly debated, with community members taking it very seriously and arguing the pros and cons. Mike Godwin, former WMF general counsel, even took to the Wikipedia Weekly Facebook group to argue for Wales as the connective tissue back to Wikipedia’s original purpose, concluding: “in my view, he shouldn’t be kicked out of the traditional position before he’s ready to go.”

The debate never really focused on Wales’ leadership, but rather the wisdom of having such a position in the first place, and it doesn’t seem likely to be taken much further for now. In a year where many statues around the world fell, it seems like the Wikimedia community decided it should at least consider whether to topple one of its own.

3. Covering COVID-19 and the George Floyd protests

It feels sort of wrong to put COVID-19 and the George Floyd protests into just one list item, but they are very much of a piece, and together they highlight what Wikipedia’s community is better at than any other editorial body: documenting far-reaching global happenings. The old saying about journalism being the “first draft of history” made sense when it was first expressed, but now that role clearly belongs to Wikipedia.

This blog covered both efforts when they first arose, in the early part and middle of the year, respectively, with posts more thoroughly researched than imaginatively titled: “How Wikipedia is Covering the Coronavirus Pandemic” and “How Wikipedia Has Responded to the George Floyd Protests”. Both subjects gave rise to dozens, if not hundreds, of new articles apiece, and several were among the most-read Wikipedia pages all year long. Quartz recently assembled a calendar depicting the most-read articles for each day of the year, and the month of June is dominated by relevant topics, including Killing of George Floyd, Juneteenth, and Edward Colston.

George Floyd protest in Brooklyn

The George Floyd protests also created opportunities for organizing around social justice issues, which have been close to the hearts of many Wikimedia affiliate groups for a long time. A virtual Juneteenth edit-a-thon was well-attended, WikiProject Black Lives Matter took shape, and the AfroCrowd initiative built a following.

To this day, the main page of the English Wikipedia retains an information box in its top right corner directing readers to critical information about the pandemic.

Activism on Wikipedia is a tricky thing: as the Neutral point of view policy spells out clearly, articles should not advocate for a particular perspective on the topics covered. But which articles Wikipedians choose to edit shows a lot about what they think is most important.

2. Effects of the global pandemic on the Wikimedia movement

How much could Wikipedia be affected by a global pandemic, anyway? Everything it does is about putting information on the internet, while the lockdowns and restrictions most affected those who couldn’t simply move online, such as restaurants and the travel industry.

In the first place, its professional class realized how much it actually depends on travel. Although all the editing necessarily happens online, in every other year dozens of regional and global meetings take place. The Wikimedia Summit, formerly known as the Wikimedia Conference and scheduled for April, was the first to be canceled. It didn’t take long for the main annual event, Wikimania, to be “postponed” from its August date in Bangkok, Thailand as well. Rumor has it that Wikimania 2021 will not happen either.

Some events, with more time to prepare, moved online: Wikiconference North America went ahead with a scaled-down virtual program in mid-December. And Wikipedia’s community has long made use of online tools from the esoteric like IRC and Etherpad to the commonplace like Zoom and Google Hangouts. A new wikiproject even sprang up to catalog the various online-only events, and to offer advice to those wanting to host their own. But virtual conferences are a split proposition: the lack of obligation to appear in-person made it easier for some to participate remotely, while removing a lot of the reason to show up in the first place for others.

I’ll add one more possible effect of the pandemic, and I suggest this very delicately: COVID-19 might have actually been a good thing for Wikipedia. As The Signpost noted this summer, editing activity on Wikipedia surged to levels not previously seen in a decade. As they explained: “Recent years seem to have stabilised at a million edits every six to six and a half days, so the lockdown period with its editing levels of a million edits every five days is a significant increase.” 

Some people learned to make sourdough. Others, presumably, learned to edit Wikipedia.

1. The Wikipedia Foundation?

Chances are, you have never heard of the biggest controversy to envelop Wikipedia in 2020. The dispute, which began in January, boiled over in June, and remains as yet unresolved, centered on the obvious desire of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to change its name to the “Wikipedia Foundation” despite the clear majority of active Wikimedians who oppose the idea. 

The case in favor of doing so is simple: everyone and their grandmother knows what Wikipedia is, but almost no one outside of the movement knows what Wikimedia means. Wikipedia’s ubiquity has overshadowed other important projects funded by the WMF. By rechristening the entire endeavor “Wikipedia” and doing away with the confusing split branding of “Wikimedia”, it would unify the whole project behind the one word everyone knows.

I still remember when the WMF logo was in color

But the arguments against were simple, too, and passionate: rather than drawing attention to other projects, it would obscure their independent status and achievements. Further, the proposed change was initiated without sufficient feedback or consideration for the branding of the movement’s many organized chapters and user groups. Procedurally, it was inexplicably separated from the rest of the long-gestating Wikimedia 2030 Movement Strategy that it clearly belonged to, and rushed to the proposal stage at a time when the conferences and meetings where this would normally be debated had been called off due to the pandemic. What’s more, the proposal drew the harshest rebuke from those very groups who work most closely with the WMF—a rare intra-wiki dispute not between Wikipedia’s professionals and volunteers, but within the professional class itself.

The sequence of events was damning, too: In June, the WMF opened up a survey asking the community to weigh in on what Wikipedia should call itself. The survey was heavily weighted toward the conclusion that “Wikipedia Foundation” was the way to go, even though a Request for Comment earlier in the year ran 9 to 1 against it. Yet the WMF decided that its “informed oppose” was less than 1%, based on an invented number of “~9,000” community members whom they claimed had a chance to fill out the survey, though far fewer actually submitted responses. Soon after, an open letter organized by the affiliate groups received nearly 1,000 signatories calling on the WMF to “pause renaming activities … due to process shortcomings”. 

And so it was shelved, but only until March 2021. Whether the WMF will go ahead and become the WPF (I guess) remains to be seen, but this blog for one finds it unlikely. Interestingly enough, it also shows the limits of even these change-oriented groups’ interest in changing how they think of themselves and the movement they’ve dedicated their lives and careers to. The WMF would do well to put this aside and accept this as just one of the many contradictions that Wikipedia has managed to succeed in spite of over nearly two decades. As the old joke among longtime editors goes: “Wikipedia doesn’t work in theory, only in practice.” That’s as true here as it is anywhere.

For threatening the goodwill of its closest allies, for creating a headache where none need exist, and for being an own goal of massive proportions, the controversy around the renaming of the Wikimedia Foundation is easily the #1 Wikipedia story of 2020. 

♦     ♦     ♦

And now, if you still can’t get enough Wikipedia year-in-review content, I present to you the Wikipedia Weekly episode featuring Richard Knipel, Vera de Kok, Netha Hussain, Jan Ainali, Andrew Lih, and yours truly. Enjoy, and see you in 2021!

Image credits, top top bottom: Public domain, Sodacan, Victor Grigas, Zachary McCune, Rhododendrites, Wikimedia Foundation

Black Lives Matter

How Wikipedia Has Responded
to the George Floyd Protests

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
on June 25, 2020 at 4:42 pm

“There are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks where decades happen” is an old and likely apocryphal quote attributed to V.I. Lenin. It’s been popular throughout the tumultuous and time-warping Trump presidency, but in the second quarter of 2020 the weeks have felt like eons.

The Wikipedian has written twice previously about how the encyclopedia anyone can edit has covered the coronavirus pandemic. Today I’m interested in how it has handled the George Floyd / Black Lives Matter protests, which—over the course of the past month—have grown into an international movement whose impact is being documented in the press, in the streets, and on Wikipedia in real-time.

It’s a lot for even a crowdsourced encyclopedia to keep up with, and simply trying to decide what to write about was no small task. The closest thing to an overarching theme is the rapidly changing attitudes toward racial and policing disparities in what might be called the second Civil Rights movement. This post can only speak to a narrow part of that, and specifically will focus on how George Floyd and the protests in his name have been covered on Wikipedia; how articles about the numerous police killings in America are organized; how questions about diversity around the Wikimedia project are (and aren’t) being addressed; and how any of the above could change in the future.

Decades more may happen in the weeks to come. For now, here’s some of what’s transpired:

Wikipedia Says His Name

As of this publication, approaching 1,500 Wikipedia articles mention the name George Floyd, an explosion of new content that reflects public outcry over his killing and government responses. Sadly, when you try to think of other people who became this famous immediately upon their deaths, the most prominent examples are other Black men who have met fates similar to Floyd’s at the hands of police (and at least partly within view of a smartphone camera).

The other proximate comparison, for general newsworthiness, is of course COVID-19; when this blog last wrote about the topic in mid-April approximately 6,000 articles used this novel phrase, and today there are more than 24,000. The focus article in that case, now called COVID-19 pandemic, has received more traffic overall and more edits than the focus article in this situation, but it is certainly comparable.

In this case that article is about the incident and its aftermath: Killing of George Floyd. The article has been edited more than 4,200 times by more than 700 different editors since it was created almost one month ago, and it has been viewed more than 4 million times, not counting 58 additional articles in other language editions. 

The biographical article about George Floyd himself has over 900 edits by more than 200 separate accounts and more than 3 million views, plus 24 additional articles in various languages. From a Wikipedia perspective, it is somewhat unusual that there is even a standalone page for him, as there is not typically a separate biographical article for victims of police violence. Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and Breonna Taylor do not have biographies separate from articles about how they died. There is one for Trayvon Martin, though, whose death was similarly racially-charged, albeit not at the hands of the police.

Then there is George Floyd protests, with more than 4,700 edits from 800+ editors, more than 1.8 million views, and 42 articles in other languages.

George Floyd mural outside Cups Foods in Minneapolis. Photo credit: Lorie Shaull

Around 80 other articles actually have Floyd’s name in the title, thanks to the repeated construction of George Floyd protests in [location] across the great many places where they have occurred, both in the U.S. and around the world. Some of this owes to the secondary discussion around the many statues and monuments—of Confederates and others—torn down or formally removed from public view in recent weeks. There are too many to link, but the articles List of George Floyd protests in the United States, List of George Floyd protests outside the United States, and List of monuments and memorials removed during the George Floyd protests seek to account for them all.

Floyd’s name is now tied to the reputations of many other people, places, and things:

This list only scratches the surface—here’s a link to the search if you want to keep exploring. But one clear takeaway is Wikipedia’s response has as little precedent as George Floyd’s death has far too much.


When is a Death a Killing, a Shooting, or a Murder?

Although Killing of George Floyd is by far the most visited of these articles, it has received less traffic than a very similar article that no longer exists. Strictly speaking, they are the same article: for the first week of its existence, when the world first learned about what happened in Minneapolis on May 26, the article was titled Death of George Floyd. The name change followed a debate spanning more than 24,000 words—longer than Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—and there is a very good chance the page will be renamed again, eventually. As first reported by Stephen Harrison in Slate earlier this month, there is a contingent of editors that wants to move it to Murder of George Floyd. That discussion was closed after a mere newspaper article’s worth of discussion, about 1,300 words.

Factors considered in the successful renaming effort included: which word was most accurate; which was most neutral; instances of “death of” and “killing of” in news reports; applicability of the site policy referred to in shorthand as WP:BLPCRIME; and, most interestingly, the precedent of similar articles about police killings of citizens. Death of Eric Garner was mentioned in about a dozen comments opposed to the change, but also by a few in support. One said: “I’m legitimately interested to know what a move for this article would mean for the Death of Eric Garner article, then, since the two cases are extremely similar.”

In fact, once the change was approved—faster than in most cases, on account of the tremendous public interest—a proposal was made to rename the Garner article to Killing of Eric Garner, now citing the Floyd article as precedent. 

Meanwhile, a different choice was being made about how to reposition seven other articles, beginning with Death of Breonna Taylor. But this was not connected to the Floyd or Garner cases at all; these articles were about fatal police shootings specifically, and in fact the proposal went up on May 23—three days before Floyd was killed. The discussion to change all of these from “Death of” to “Shooting of” and bringing consistency to the category of articles called People shot dead by law enforcement officers in the United States took fewer than 600 words to reach consensus.

Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, DC. Photo credit: author

The desire for consistency is understandable, but the more you look up similar police killings, the lack of coordination across Wikipedia articles becomes quickly evident. Among the better known cases in recent U.S. history, each is considered differently: Shooting of Michael Brown, Death of Freddie Gray, Shooting of Trayvon Martin, and the newest entry, Killing of Rayshard Brooks. While at first it seems like the use of a gun dictates the difference between “Shooting” and “Killing”—and “Death” where there is some ambiguity—the Brooks article complicates matters. As it happens, there is an ongoing debate about whether to rename that article, and it seems like it very well might happen. So far the discussion has lasted more than 11,000 words, about the length of a profile in The New Yorker. 

Confusing as the above may be, Wikipedia’s categories are even more of a mess. Here is a list of some largely overlapping categories that I found by clicking around for just a few minutes:

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these are consolidated at some point; in the meantime, I recommend instead looking to the Black Lives Matter template, which lists more than 70 such cases. Among them, you will find a few using the “Murder of” prefix that some would like to apply to the Floyd article. For instance: Murder of Renisha McBride, Murder of Laquan McDonald, and Murder of Jordan Davis. In all of these cases, the change followed successful prosecutions of the officers responsible. A Murder of George Floyd article will clearly have to wait, and—as of this writing, and with no arrests made—a similar article about Breonna Taylor will have to wait even longer.


Who Tells Your Story on Wikipedia?

Wikipedia can be quite adept at documenting current events, whether hurricane, pandemic, or social movement. But there is a level of understanding beyond mere documentation, and the coverage of the George Floyd protests raises questions about how well Wikipedia addresses and contextualizes topics relating to Black people, their culture, history, and wider impact.

The rest of this post will examine this from two perspectives. First, Wikipedia’s demographics: how much do we know about the backgrounds of those editing, and how much does it matter? Second, Wikipedia’s content: what are some ways to look at how Wikipedia handles topics relating to people of African descent? Putting them together: what, if anything, should the Wikipedia community do about any of it?

It would be wrong to say Wikipedia is not aware of diversity or systemic bias in its midst. In fact, one of Wikipedia’s most famously persistent shortcomings is its low percentage of non-male editors: just 10%, even after years of organizing and repeated public acknowledgment of the problem. It’s also one of the most studied questions: a search of Google Scholar yields over 100 results for the narrow phrase “gender bias in wikipedia”. The number of results for the phrase “racial bias in wikipedia”? Zero. 

This problem extends to surveys conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) itself. Most recently, a 2018 report on the diversity and “health” of Wikimedia’s communities asked contributors about gender, age, education, and geography—but nothing at all about race or ethnicity. Pages written by editors to raise issues with other editors, such as Who writes Wikipedia? and Systemic bias, have little to say about demographics or the potential for racial bias. Another page about the demographics of Wikipedia editors makes no reference to race at all—likely because the surveys do not.

Curious about this omission, I asked the WMF communications team about it: in a brief email exchange, they confirmed that questions about race and ethnicity have never been included in its periodic surveys of contributors, including the 2019 report which will be released in July. As for why these questions haven’t been included, they told me it was “largely due to methodological challenges: given that race/ethnicity is defined differently across countries, it can be difficult to find language and a methodology that can be applied consistently around the world.” But they added that they do plan to ask these questions for the 2020 report, which will be available in the first half of 2021.

While we’re on the subject, what about WMF employees? In October 2019 the Foundation released a “diversity and inclusion” report, which did ask about race and ethnicity. It showed that two-thirds of employees were white, 13% were Asian, 8% were Hispanic, and just 7% were Black. (Another 5% were of mixed race, without further specification.) The numbers are worse when you look at employees in technical roles: 78% are white, 3% are Black, but a little better when you look at executives: 58% white, 14% Black (and 14% each for Asian and Hispanic). Overall, the report states, the numbers are better “compared to last year’s diversity report, but we still have significant room to improve.” (These figures cover only U.S. full-time employees, not contractors or international staff, but it’s much more than a representative sample.) Nonetheless, it is entirely plausible that the Wikimedia Foundation is more diverse than the community of editors it supports. Next year we might find out.

Race / ethnicity of Wikimedia Foundation U.S. employees. Source: WMF

The best information resource, surprisingly or unsurprisingly, turns out to be an article in the main encyclopedia called Racial bias on Wikipedia. It’s not a perfect article, but it is more informative than what little can be found behind the scenes.

Even as information is scarce, collaborative efforts are growing: WikiProject Black Lives Matter was created only in the first week of the Floyd protests, though it has identified just over 400 articles within scope—many fewer than I would have expected. Meanwhile, longer-running efforts like WikiProject African diaspora (with more than 10,000 articles under scope) and the Wikimedians of the Caribbean User Group are other places to collaborate specifically on Black subjects. WikiProject Countering systemic bias is another place to get involved, albeit one that is less active so far as I can tell. I suspect that it is because the topic is rather broad, and specificity matters. That is especially true for Wikipedia editors, who tend to edit on the subjects they know best.


Open Knowledge as Anti-Racism Tool

Recognizing the limits of my own knowledge on this subject, I reached out to Sherry Antoine, the executive director of AfroCROWD. The initiative was established in New York City in 2015 and sponsors or participates in at least one “edit-a-thon” or similar Wikipedia-focused event every month. In particular, I was curious how she understands the current state of Wikipedia’s demographics and content from a Black perspective.

Among my first questions for her was: has there been a formal investigation of Wikipedia’s content regarding Black topics? My point of comparison is WikiProject:Women in Red, a group which has measured the number of biographies of women relative to men across Wikipedia. (It’s not much better than the percentage of non-male editors.) According to Antoine, there has not been one that she is aware of. Antoine is supportive of the idea, although she has a good idea what one would find: “There is little disputing there is an under-measure of information about people of African descent,” she says.

The lack of a well-known benchmark—the kind of factoid that can make for a good news hook—has not stopped AfroCROWD from doing something about it. The organization has worked closely with New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and others to identify missing biographies across professions including STEM, medicine, and the arts, as Antoine puts it, “trying to find and fill in the gaps that we may not even know about.”

Here are four gaps I hadn’t thought much about until researching this topic:

  • Activity on non-protest topics: Obviously, there is a ton of activity around the ongoing protests. But what about other Black topics? I decided to examine three articles: African-American history, Timeline of African-American history, and List of African-American firsts. I found that the first one had experienced a considerable traffic spike in late May and early June, but not the others, and none had a corresponding uptick in editing. Based on this, I assume that most of the activity is focused on current events, not the long-term coverage of Black topics, at least in the United States. Speaking generally, Antoine acknowledged the tendency for breaking news to drive editing activity. “I think and I hope that the attention that has been brought to it will continue when the news stops talking about it,” she said.
  • Wikimedia Commons: As Antoine pointed out to me, if you search Wikipedia’s image and media repository, Wikimedia Commons, for phrases such as “black women”, the results are dismal. If you follow the link (NSFW), yes, there is a photo of the female members of the Congressional Black Caucus. But the returned images actually contain more photos of white women, including some in various states of undress. Change it up slightly to “black woman” and the results are no better: it brings up an Egyptian figurine and women of other races, and another nude white woman, not to mention other sexualized content, before it returns any black women. Likewise, searching for a photo of a Black woman using a computer yields some relevant illustrations, also a few white women using computers, and more NSFW content. Matters improve if you find topic pages such as Black people, although it is mainly celebrity headshots, and the category African-Americans includes people like Johnny Depp and Penn Badgley, whose African ancestry is negligible to non-existent, respectively. Commons is notorious for being uncensored to the point of embarrassment, and a free-for-all to boot, but this is a bit much.
  • Capitalization: Should Wikipedia capitalize the word “Black” when discussing people of African descent? Capitalization has long been the practice of African-American newspapers such as The Chicago Defender, and in recent weeks has been adopted by the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and other mainstream publications. The Columbia Journalism Review, having opined otherwise as recently as 2015, now recommends capitalizing the word “Black” in such contexts. But Wikipedia has no formal rules on this subject. In fact, the Manual of Style’s guideline on Capital letters#People and their languages is just one sentence long, and focused on another topic. The first time I can find that the matter came up was way back in 2005, when it was reasoned that “black” and “white” are not proper nouns, and the lack of interest in capitalizing “white” would create an imbalance. The last time before the present moment it came up again that I can find was in 2018, when it was quickly shot down. A new Request for Comment was posted on June 21, and so far it has not attracted much attention, suggesting that Wikipedia will retain the status quo—with the question of what to do about “white” complicating matters as it often does. (For the purposes of this post, I have struggled with how to write it, and while The Wikipedian generally follows Wikipedia conventions, I have settled on capitalizing it for now.) In any case, Antoine is more concerned that anxieties about writing mechanics not disincline someone from contributing: “If that’s the focus, then we’re missing the point. Just write it. Get it in there. Later on we can have an argument about semantics.”
  • Blackout Tuesday: Wikipedia chose not to participate in Blackout Tuesday, a protest action held on June 2 where various businesses went silent, either all day long, or for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. In 2012, Wikipedia did join a blackout to protest two pieces of U.S. legislation known as SOPA and PIPA. That was very controversial in the Wikipedia community, and The Wikipedian covered it at the time. This time the opposition was much more uniform, the effort being seen as outside Wikipedia’s domain, and arguably unhelpful. As one editor put it: “We are an encyclopedia designed to provide knowledge to all for free. Going dark takes away that knowledge.”

Knowledge was very much on the mind of Spelman College professor Alexandria Lockett, as the (virtual) keynote speaker at AfroCROWD’s Juneteenth edit-a-thon, which I attended last week. Lockett described Wikipedia as a “liberatory” force: the fact that anyone can edit Wikipedia is revolutionary—a point often noted since Wikipedia’s founding, but even more salient in the struggle for racial equality. And yet Lockett said her students sometimes will feel they do not have the authority to make changes themselves, even with well-prepared content. “You do not have freedom,” Lockett said, “if you do not feel you have the right to make knowledge.”

Taken very literally, it’s a chicken-and-egg problem: if Black content is missing from Wikipedia, would-be Black editors might feel less comfortable contributing. But if there are not enough Black contributors, there likely won’t be enough Black content. The same would hold true for any marginalized group. This is a stylized presentation of the issue, to be sure, and in fact there are editors of color and efforts to encourage more of them, not least via AfroCROWD. But it does broadly describe the challenge involved in making Wikipedia a better resource on subjects that the straight white men who founded Wikipedia simply might not ever think to write about.

And just as white Americans and Europeans have been driven by conscience to join the George Floyd protests, so too might Wikipedia editors—whatever their ancestry—amplify efforts to increase representation of Black voices on the platform. As Antoine puts it, learning about people you might not encounter frequently “stretches your ability to understand what you might normally fear—the unknown.” She adds, “It allows you to make up your mind, rather letting your immediate society make it up for you.”

Any and all efforts to close information and representation gaps will ultimately strengthen the platform. The knock on Wikipedia, from some corners of the internet and academia, is that its “anyone can edit” ethos means that it ultimately lacks subject-matter authority, no matter how strong the citations. But by increasing topic and community representation, and highlighting this diversity, Wikipedia draws incrementally closer to being the type of epistemic change that many want to see.