Wikipedia could be used as a channel for conducting and managing information requests. This has not been done previously. I would like for it to be done in the future. This post is three of three in a series, and this one talks about Wikipedia and information requests. In other posts I describe MuckRock as a model for comparison and describe my own personal desire for a certain kind of medical information that I think about requesting through Wikipedia.
In this post I propose making information and media requests to organizations by posting the request on the talk page of the Wikipedia article covering them. I propose this on the following premises:
- The talk page of the Wikipedia article on any given organization is the most popular and highest profile public place in which any such request can be posted
- The information request process could be routinized here based on existing processes and years of related precedents
- When the information requested advances the mission of Wikipedia, it would be welcomed by the Wikimedia community in this space
- The infrastructure of Wikimedia presents the best available option for guiding the target of the request to upload or share the information by putting it into the Wikimedia collections
- The process on Wikipedia could be modeled after similar request processes, such as that of MuckRock
- A request on Wikipedia would more strongly compel a response than a request anywhere else
What follows are more details about these premises.
Wikipedia is a lot of things. Everyone knows it is an encyclopedia. Everyone knows it is a great publication to read when anyone wants an introduction to topics which can be summarized in encyclopedic format. A lot of people know with some degree of understanding that it is a wiki, which is a radical modern publication platform distinct from other publication platforms in that any reader of the publications content is invited to make any changes to the publication’s content as they like, with the expectation that other people may in turn make their own changes subsequently. Something about Wikipedia which is not often imagined is that it might be the world’s most popular communication channel for discussing any given topic. It is my opinion that the Wikipedia project is undervalued and the Wikimedia Foundation – either intentionally or not – perpetuates that undervaluing, and right now and since its founding practically all stakeholders in the existence of Wikipedia have been content to sustain a perception of Wikipedia that it is either not significant or exceptionally significant, but in any case, not to be compared with any other communication channel. I can understand why both Wikipedia project supporters and competitors would want this; however, a result of this is that Wikipedia and related projects are not utilized by persons doing communication and not even considered as communication tools.
The Wikimedia Foundation for a long time, perhaps since about 2007, has been happy to say that Wikipedia is among the top ten most popular web properties in the world. This is not controversial and is universally accepted; data for entities including comScore, Alexa Internet, and others back this. The Wikimedia Foundation has so far declined to say more than this, and while it is impressive to say this, most people have no particular directed response when hearing this. Something that I like to think about is the extent to which Wikipedia might be the fifth most popular source of information for any given topic. What, for example, are the most popular sources of information for a given topic, a given issue, a concept, a person, an animal, a law, a work of art, a field of study, or perhaps any given organization? For various reasons, although Wikipedia is the fifth-most popular web property, it is also the world’s most consulted source of information for almost any topic. This is because the more popular web properties are not actually publishing information of the sort which competes with Wikipedia, and also because web properties are much more popular than any other single communication channel. This has a lot of implications, but consider for example Wikipedia as the most popular source of information about companies or organizations.
Wikipedia is so popular because it has the favor of all search engines and any communication channels which make an information request that in any way connect to the Internet. If someone types the name of an organization into a search engine, then it is likely that the organization’s home page is returned first and then the Wikipedia article about them is the first returned result which is not an official website for the organization. This has been the case for nearly 10 years. One might say that an organization’s own website is the most popular source of information about the organization, and organizations’ own public relations staff certainly have a professional interest in making their employers think this is so, but increasingly, people understand that organizations will tell one story about themselves, and that information elsewhere on the Internet may tell another story. There are places on the Internet which are public space outside the moderation of people, organizations, and entities which are discussed, and sometimes, conversations may happen about an entity in a place where the entity is not empowered to hold complete control over the conversation.
Many people have never noticed this despite reading Wikipedia articles many times, but supplementary to every Wikipedia article, there is a discussion or talk page for that article. Anyone can view an article’s talk page by clicking the “talk” tab at the top of any Wikipedia article. The talk page is a place for discussing the development of that one Wikipedia article. It is emphatically not a public forum for discussing the subject of the article, and any such discussion is deleted to keep the community focused on the goal of developing the encyclopedia. Right now and historically, the talk page has been a place for Wikipedia contributors to talk with other Wikipedia contributors about developing articles. There have been historic attempts to have some discussions on talk pages with some organizations, in which sometimes Wikipedians ask in a haphazard way that organizations do something on Wikipedia. Typically the request is for organizations to kindly leave Wikipedia and quit trying to use the Wikipedia article about themselves as a place to post biased promotional content about themselves. Elsewhere on Wikipedia, typically not the talk pages about organizations, sometimes Wikipedians talk with organizations about some other kind of Wikipedia partnership. Examples of this include Wikipedia talk forums about arts, for example, where Wikipedians talk a bit with museums and ask them museum to grant them access to their digital collections so that Wikipedians can integrate those collections into Wikipedia. There has been some success in doing this but is a largely ungratifying exchange. The benefits to organizations doing this are limited, uncertain, and of dubious value, and the Wikipedians who manage these exchanges work very hard without getting the kind of support from institutions that they are expecting. None of this is relevant to the kind of information request which I have in mine, but such as they are, these are the kinds of information requests which happen on Wikipedia now. This kind of exchange has happened in a significant way probably not more than 2-300 times since 2001. It is something which does not happen spontaneously or in a routine way, and takes love and dedication to make it work.
Suppose that for whatever reason, there existed some organization somewhere that held some kind of media or information which it owed to the public. This already is an odd supposition, because many people do not imagine that organizations often “owe” the public anything. Governments could be a model for this, but in thinking about this, exclude governments because governments already have communication channels for the public to make requests for their information. Instead imagine that somehow a non-profit or commercial organization somehow has information or media which belongs to the public, or which it is obligated or under pressure to give to the public on request, and there is currently no particular communication channel by means of which members of the public can make a request to this entity to receive this public information. This would mean that the default action is that if anyone requested this information, then probably it would be their own private communication to the entity to request the information, and then that entity could reply back also privately. Before the advent of Internet it was possible for average people to think of no other way of communicating requests for information.
Since the advent of Internet there have been other options for making such requests. One option would be that an individual could make public requests, perhaps from their own website made for the purpose of making the request. Another option could be the MuckRock model, which I described in this post, and which MuckRock uses to make public requests for information from the US government. But the reason why MuckRock works is that there is such a thing as the Freedom of Information Act which compels the government to respond to information requests, and their model could not work the same way to get a response from entities which are not bound by law to respond to requests for information. When an entity is not bound by law to respond to a request, they are likely only to respond to it in a way that is favorable to them. Suppose that a person wants information, perhaps from a commercial organization, and both the commercial organization and the requester agree that the information being requested is owed to the public. Consider possible outcomes that may result depending on whether the request is done privately or whether it is made in a known, public, timestamped form.
Private individual request
- The organization may give media in response to the request if they feel that it serves their interests to favor the requesting individual
- If they fail to respond then no one except the individual requester would ever know
- If they decline the request then no one except the individual requester would ever know
Public timestamped request
- The organization may give media in response to the request if they feel that it serves their interests to favor the requesting community
- If they fail to respond then it will be forever known to anyone who ever thinks to request the same information that an outstanding timestamped request is pending
- If they decline the request it will be forever known to anyone who ever thinks to request the same information that the information requested was denied
I am not suggesting that Wikipedia be used to make any request for information which is not owed to the public, and in fact, organizations rarely owe or feel compelled to share any information with the public. But it sometimes happens, and if it does happen and someone wanted to use Wikipedia to make the request, then I think that is an idea worth exploring.
Some advantages of using Wikipedia to make the request are the visibility that Wikipedia can give the request, its trusted timestamp infrastructure already in place for all communications, the fact that Wikimedia projects themselves can host a broad range of information including casual conversations; media files of all types including images, audio, video, and entire archival documents; Wikimedia projects present a range of tools for media processing, categorization, and sorting; and best of all, if there is anything worth sharing through the encyclopedia, then Wikipedia is a natural place for presenting the information shared.