The Catch in the Commons: Producing Knowledge on Wikipedia

“No, she isn’t notable to have her own page” is the concluding phrase a student of mine was left with after ongoing discussions on the Talkback page with (volunteer) senior Wikipedia editors about the entry of Sophie Clarke, a winner from the Survivor TV series. Compiling a robust page with abundant secondary sources and an astute argument why Clarke warrants a page following Wikipedia guidelines, as well as assistance from the WikiEdu team who are also editors, made no difference. Sophie Clarke was simply not notable.

I warn students about this possibility when introducing them to Wikipedia in my classes, hoping it’s just a warning. But every term, at least one student working on anything to do with issues related to women runs into this problem. 

As a feminist media scholar, I am acutely aware that media is gendered trifold: media is guided by who produces it, how it is produced in gendered ways, and its representational register. Yet, when I first assigned a Wikipedia project for a Gender & Culture class in 2015, a bedlam ensued. I grasped the logistics of teaching Wikipedia but not the experiential knowledge of how editors interpret Wikipedia’s ostensibly neutral notability standards—“A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject”—in such gendered ways. Several students who hit publish on their entries the night before the assignment due date woke up to messages that their entries were nominated for deletion, flagged for speedy deletion, or already deleted entirely. On the heels of some prior issues on what defines a “reliable source,” weeks of work and dedication to subjects they were passionate about were removed for not being “notable” enough. The probability for nomination and subsequent deletion for a biography about a woman arrives faster and is higher than those of men. We can hypothesize that those who do not fall into the gender binary may face even higher results as they did in my class, even though no studies have been done yet.

Treating content as a trusted source doesn’t mean wholesale acceptance, but like any work, any peer reviewed article, Wikipedia can and should be engaged with critically.

The students were disheartened. However, my initial immense guilt for not preparing us turned to gratitude. This experience was the kind of pedagogical process that teaches us about collective knowledge production within a patriarchal system, and made visible the often invisible biases that occur in academia because scholarship rarely relies on a community-based editing system.

Creating content for Wikipedia that "sticks" — that stays up on the website — is difficult and time-consuming, especially when focused on issues outside the hegemony.

Drawing from my experience coordinating official WikiEdu Wikipedia courses within Concordia's Communication Department–as well as my initial naive foray in 2015–I demonstrate why those working in social justice and journalism should engage with Wikipedia, despite the challenges involved. Wikipedia is both an urgent site of intervention and a structure that resists the very voices it needs most. Its fundamental principles—the Five Pillars—are meant as a scaffolding for neutrality and encyclopedic knowledge production, yet are its most complex and dynamic component.

1.  Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
2. Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view.
3. Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute.
4. Editors should treat each other with respect and civility.
5. Wikipedia has no firm rules.

The pillars are ultimately upheld by editors, people who volunteer their time to keep Wikipedia as Wikipedia. Creating content for Wikipedia that "sticks" — that stays up on the website — is difficult and time-consuming, especially when focused on issues outside the hegemony.

Who feels they can walk into a room and take up space and be trusted with knowledge?

Art + Feminism is an example of  a collective that formed in 2014 out of attempts to answer this question, most notably by providing workshops and resources to expand the Wikipedia landscape. A year later The Women in Red began, a WikiProject to create new biographical entries about notable women not yet featured. As Wikipedia's gender gap yawns before us, this expansion represents both a challenge, but also an opportunity. A common challenge: if an artist has produced a lot of work or changed the landscape of their milieu, but has not been written about in 'reputable' sources, they will not be notable enough by Wiki standards. Yet often Wikipedia is the first research step. It’s a kind of chicken and egg scenario that feminist artists working in the 1960s and 1970s in the USA contended with. They built their own parallel press infrastructure specifically as a pathway to getting larger coverage, strategically knowing that it is the larger coverage that will lead to artist grants and other institutional support, despite their ambivalence towards it. It is unsurprising to no one that women and non-binary people, especially racialized ones, are underrepresented in the art and cultural sphere, as well as nearly all other fields.

While Wikipedia alone cannot dismantle systemic inequities, it can certainly expand the collective knowledge commons. It is often the first website that comes up on searches, and for better or worse is used by GenAI in its search prompts.

Wikipedia as our online commons mirrors our societal discourse. Content outside the mainstream is often written about in independent publications, zines, or disseminated orally and shortsightedly deemed unreliable by Wikipedia standards. I tell my students who have a vested interest in issues, ideas, and movements outside the mainstream to write about them. Publish critical engagements with the work. It isn't by accident that of the approximately 1.9 English Wikipedia biographies only 19% cover women, or that men are overrepresented as editors. The more the work is written about, the more chances it has to be synthesized, collated, and written about elsewhere—and within our techno-cultural commons, this is what sticks.

In our local Quebec context we have abundant Indigenous perspectives that are often oral. We are a multilingual society. While Wikipedia alone cannot dismantle systemic inequities, it can certainly expand the collective knowledge commons. It is often the first website that comes up on searches, and for better or worse is used by GenAI in its search prompts. Over the years my students have translated entries (French, Turkish, Arabic), made new articles (Black masculinity in American media, VIVA! Art Action, Vilunya Diskin), or made substantial additions to existing ones (Rae-rae, Surrogacy in Canada, Pregnancy-associated femicide), refining their work based on feedback from classmates and the wider Wikipedia community.  This hands-on experience demystifies the perception of Wikipedia as unreliable, underscores the importance of public scholarship, and illuminates how journalism is integral to creating entries.

What can we do? Cover the stories that matter to the people, dig into alternate perspectives on breaking stories, and even on stories that are ‘past’ their viral stage. An article can literally shift the difference of notability of whatever you’re writing about and in turn be the difference between an entry being included or not. Without journalism and story telling, Wikipedia ceases to exist.