Wikimedia: people-powered

Summary

In an era of automated content, human-centred organisations such as Wikimedia have never been more important. CEO of Wikimedia UK Lucy Crompton-Reid discusses the role Wikimedia plays in modern knowledge sharing and the employees and volunteers behind the scenes who work to maintain a free and open knowledge platform for all. As a community with human-centred knowledge at its core, Wikimedia is an essential bastion for equitable, reliable knowledge access. With disinformation on the rise, Wikimedia’s volunteer-driven model underscores the power of collective truth-seeking. 

Reading time

Six minutes

In an age where knowledge is everything, Wikimedia’s behind-the-scenes communities are keeping the lights on and ensuring the truth is told.

On the morning of 5 July 2024, the UK woke up to a new political landscape, with 335 fresh faces in Parliament – including a record number of women – reshaping the House of Commons. Perhaps, in the warm sunshine of that day, some turned to Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, to learn more about these new representatives. I suspect not many would have paused to enquire how that information came to be there. Only a few could have guessed that a dedicated group of volunteers had spent the night painstakingly updating Wikipedia, fuelled by pizza and a conviction that women MPs deserve to have their achievements documented as much as their male counterparts.

Human resource

When I was approached about the role of chief executive of Wikimedia UK in 2015, I only had the vaguest understanding of how Wikipedia worked. While I knew that the site was edited by volunteers, I had no idea how the community functioned. It turns out that one of the best things about working for Wikimedia UK is the extraordinary people that I meet, both in person and online. ‘Wikimedians’, as volunteer contributors to Wikipedia and the other open knowledge projects are affectionately known, come from all walks of life and all demographic backgrounds. They are united by a belief that knowledge should be shared and that free access to information is innately a good thing because it underpins a functioning democracy.

Wikipedia invites us to “imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge”. While that may seem like a lofty aim, Wikipedia’s coverage and reach are impressive by any standard. Wikipedia is viewed more than 15 billion times each month and includes more than 63 million articles across 300+ languages. It is edited 342 times per minute and, every month, more than a quarter of a million volunteers contribute to its content from around the world.

However creating access to the sum of all knowledge is still a work in progress. Wikipedia’s community strives for accuracy and a neutral point of view, but this is inhibited by systemic bias, exacerbated by the shared social and cultural characteristics of many editors. And, as a secondary source aggregator, Wikipedia is a mirror of our unequal society, reinforcing and sometimes amplifying androcentrism and other inequities.

The pursuit of equity

Choosing to commit one’s time to trying to address these challenges is, in my view, an act of courage. While it might feel disheartening to hear that, on the English Wikipedia, the proportion of biographies that are about women has only increased from 15.53% in October 2014 to 19.96% a decade later, each one of these percentage points represents tens of thousands of Wikipedia articles, all researched and written by volunteers, and all complying with Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines.

One such volunteer working to address the gender gap is Lucy Moore, a British academic and winner of Wikimedia UK’s 2022 Wikimedian of the Year Award, who spent much of her spare time between 2021 and 2024 creating a Wikipedia page for at least one woman from every country of the world. Moore’s list includes scientists, artists, writers and activists, as well as neglected historical figures such as Julia Chinn, an enslaved woman and plantation manager who was the common-law wife of a US vice president.

Another project working to address Wikipedia’s gender gap from the ground up is Protests and Suffragettes, a Glasgow-based social enterprise led by artists and activists. As part of their mission to recover and re-voice the histories of women activists in Scotland, the group has hosted a series of workshops on how to edit Wikipedia. The organisers view their contributions as an important form of knowledge activism, enabling them to improve the representation of Scottish suffrage on the open web.

There are many examples of displaced or minoritised communities working to improve Wikimedia with the goal of increasing their representation online. In 2022–23, Wikimedia UK worked with the Mixed Museum to increase Wikipedia’s coverage of Britain’s multiracial history, drawing on the virtual museum’s scholarly research to ensure better public access to this important but often neglected aspect of our national history. As described by the Mixed Museum’s Director, Dr Chamion Caballero, Wikipedia is a crucial tool for public engagement, but prior to working with Wikimedia UK its pages related to Britain’s racial mixing were “shockingly patchy, dire or even non-existent”.

Fighting for truth

Where information on Wikipedia is missing or incomplete, it is usually because it has been overlooked due to unconscious bias or a lack of references. In some cases, however, Wikimedia can be a target of deliberate falsehoods. This can be a particular challenge during conflict situations or health emergencies, which exacerbate inequalities and amplify asymmetries in the information environment, and provide fertile ground for the growth of misinformation and disinformation.

The events of 7 October 2023 and the subsequent conflict have, of course, received millions of page views. On the English Wikipedia alone, the main article on the Israel–Hamas war was read more than 30,000 times a day in October 2024. In writing about such events, Wikipedia’s emphasis on proportionality, neutrality and verifiability becomes even more vital, but the history of these articles (publicly accessible to anyone) demonstrates that knowledge is not a fixed mark but something that is negotiated in real-time, while real lives are being lost.

During 2024, the largest election year in history, it has been especially important to guard against misinformation and disinformation posted on Wikipedia, as well as to protect our volunteer editors around the world. In the months prior to the recent US presidential election, an anti-disinformation task force monitored potential disinformation, which we know is most pervasive when public opinion is deeply divided.

Committed community

During periods of fast-developing and sensitive events, it is often the most experienced and established editors who work tirelessly to ensure that Wikipedia’s coverage remains neutral and based on reliable, verified sources. Some of these editors have been contributing to Wikipedia for more than 20 years and have made literally millions of edits in what can be a thankless and undervalued task. So what motivates them to continue?

For some contributors, it’s about changing the face of online information and increasing coverage of people from their own backgrounds or communities. For others, simply knowing that they are adding to the sum of all knowledge is motivation enough. But what encourages someone to start editing Wikipedia and what keeps them contributing might be quite different. I have been struck by the importance of in-person gatherings to create and reinforce a sense of community in a movement whose activities are mainly online. The annual ‘Wikimania’ conference, which took place in Poland this year and was attended by nearly 1,000 volunteers and staff from around the world, is a testament to the value of human connection and interaction for Wikimedians.

This human-centred approach makes Wikimedia increasingly vital in an era of machine-generated content, with all its inaccuracies and hallucinations. Indeed, Wikimedia’s reliance on volunteers for the creation, curation and moderation of its content, and its faith in the power and integrity of collective decision-making, have been fundamental to its success and reach. No other information source exists in so many languages, for free, always. While the erosion of trust and trustworthiness within the information environment is a key challenge for all of us, I believe strongly that Wikimedia’s unique community remains essential to the creation of a more informed, democratic and equitable society.

Lucy Crompton-Reid is the Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK, the national chapter of the global Wikimedia movement. The charity brings together practical and policy expertise about Wikimedia to demystify and drive engagement in open knowledge through advocacy, education, outreach and partnerships.

Sébastien Plassard is an illustrator whose classically inspired work tackles modern concepts using imagery and linework reminiscent of mid-century drawings and prints.

This feature first appeared in RSA Journal Issue 4 2024.