Applying negative outsider branding to the Wikimedia community

Historically the Wikimedia Foundation has applied negative outsider branding to the Wikimedia community. By “negative outsider branding”, I mean that the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) prefers to describe the Wikimedia community as if they were social outcasts, and that when the WMF plans outreach, or engages with the media, or positions itself to interact with the community, its staff starts with the premise that the community of people who edit and develop Wikimedia projects share some common characteristics which are unusual and less desirable than the characteristics of Wikimedia Foundation staff or the general population of people who read Wikipedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation describes the Wikimedia community as the “other”, meaning that the Wikimedia community’s members are alien and different in character, habits, culture, and identity from what a typical person is or should be.

I am about to share some examples of Wikimedia Foundation staff applying labels to the community which – whether with positive, negative, or no thoughtful intent – all share in common that they are dehumanizing labels which suggest that the Wikimedia community members are without the same motivations or needs as others which have more personhood or more complete human souls.

Here are some examples:

“Jimmy Wales: The birth of Wikipedia“, July 2005, TED conference –

the servers (which host Wikipedia) are managed by a rag-tag band of volunteers; all the editing is done by volunteers…

This is a cute thing to say, and it was said in kindness, and if this line of talk had ended here in 2005 then it would never have become a problem. “Ragtag” means jumbled, messy, perhaps in poverty, and is a happy word. The word “ragtag” was picked up from this talk and made popular to apply to the Wikipedia community for years, and it is a helpful description in some contexts. I like that the world emphasizes the grassroots nature of the Wikipedia community, and how people are welcome to contribute what they have and can expect that Wikipedia has ways of appreciating even humble contributions from anyone who would share their time in the platform.

A mixed consequence of using this word is that reputable organizations typically would not want to partner with a ragtag organization. It is sort of a mislabeling to say that the Wikipedia community is ragtag, because it is more orderly than than any library even while every day serving more documents to more people than most libraries do in a year. The Wikipedia community is also able to maintain schedules, contracts, and bureaucracy, which is also not conveyed by the word “ragtag”. There are ways in which Wikipedia has been monolithic, overpowering, and devastating, including in the way that it pushed traditional encyclopedias like Encyclopedia Britannica into obsolescence by out-competing them in scope of coverage, accuracy of content, cultural relevance, and consumer access in the marketplace for reference information. Part of calling Wikipedia “ragtag” was false humility to lull the world into thinking that Wikipedia might not matter, and was not plotting a power grab to be the hub of all reference information everywhere forever, and to convey that there was no business reason for commercial investment to compete in Wikipedia’s domain. At the time, I think there was no good option except to use “ragtag” branding on Wikipedia, but since then as Wikipedia has tried to partner with universities, major organizations, governments, and foundations, and the ragtag brand has carried over and hampered the ability of the Wikipedia community to negotiate partnerships with these organizations. Even today many organizations would never think of forming an opinion of how Wikipedia might be influencing information dissemination in their field of interest, when every organization has opinions about how Facebook, Twitter, Google search except Wikipedia, and mobile applications are influencing their field. The ragtag branding was a reason for the 10+ year delay in uptake of content partnerships wherein organizations might be comfortable sharing their content on Wikipedia in exchange for the benefits of the domineering reach Wikipedia has had in the information market since before this 2005 video was made.

In my opinion calling the Wikipedia community “ragtag” still applies for some segments of the community, but only when at the same time one conveys that the Wikipedia community manages the most popular communication channels for finding general information on almost every topic in all languages which have a significant Internet presence.

“Why Wikipedians are the Weirdest People on the Internet“, 2010, at Ignite Portland

I’m an editor of Wikipedia, a site you probably use every day. I’m here to talk about why Wikipedians like me are the weirdest people on the Internet. When I say “Wikipedians,” I mean the 0.2% of visitors to the site that actually edit it. That’s 1/5 of 1/10 of 1%. You might wonder why does it matter whether Wikipedians are really weird? Is the Internet some kind of pissing contest to find out who the strangest are? I think its a fair question but the answer is not only is Wikipedia mainstream, but for your kids, it is the only stream. For them, encyclopedias like Britannica don’t exist for all intents and purposes. When you have something that influential it is important to know how crazy the people writing it really are. There are other names for Wikipedians – “Wikipedidiot” makes it sound dumb, and “Wikipedo” is just gross. We’re weird, but not that weird, so please do not use these names, ever, unless you want to piss off Wikipedians.

The person who gave this talk was on the Wikimedia Foundation’s Growth Team, which was a department of paid staff whose responsibility was to design and manage products and projects to increase the number of Wikipedia editors. I took this talk because the text I quoted above is the introduction to the talk, and because it gives a lot of information clearly together, and because I feel that it is representative of the general perception of people at the Wikimedia Foundation of the editor community. I could have quoted other statements from other WMF staffers at other times; I just took this one as a typical example of a perspective. It would be a great injustice to this person or any other WMF staffer to hold them personally responsible for what they say and do. The Wikimedia Foundation’s use of disparaging language to describe the Wikipedia community is an institutional custom and to say that any one or any group of people practice the custom more than others would be an unfair assignment of blame. Blaming any individual for a misstep would draws attention away from the systemic problem that the nature of the Wikimedia Foundation’s operations (and more generally, probably any organization managing crowdsourcing) is to disparage volunteers to increase the respectability of the institution’s public face and to ease the workload of its staff. I am about to critique the passage I just quoted, but it is my opinion that this sort of opinion is the systemic norm for what the Wikimedia Foundation has staff say about the Wikimedia community. I could have given other examples, but this one above is typical enough to stand as representative of the general trend.

I will give some comments about what is said here and respond. First, this person identifies as a Wikipedian and as “weird.” I am a Wikipedian, and I do not identify myself as weird, and I have met a lot of other Wikipedians, and my expectation is that few of them would identify themselves as weird. Individuals in the Wikipedia community, in my view, are typical people except that they participate in Wikipedia. The kind of people who would contribute to Wikipedia are the kind of people who are passionate either about sharing information or the right of others to share information. Something weird about Wikipedians collectively is that it is a diverse community brought together by a neutral publishing platform, and comparing Wikipedians is like comparing people who are interested in the sort of information which might be published in books or communicated in a video documentary. It is weird that people might join to support a communication channel, but individually, in my experience, there is no particular striking weirdness that cuts across even 10% of Wikipedians. Higher than average education might be one kind of weirdness; high literacy; good writing skills; an academic background and understanding of research principles; and perhaps a helpful attitude and willingness to volunteer are other kinds of Wikipedian weirdness, but in my opinion, those things are not imagined when someone uses the word “weird”. “Weird” is a term for describing outsiders and misfits.

The person goes onto to say that Wikipedians revel in their strangeness, which suggests that Wikipedians seek to be outsiders, and that they are “crazy” for doing what they do. I fail to recognize why anyone would say this about the members of the Wikipedia community. In my opinion, Wikipedians are exceptionally helpful individuals who seek to make uplifting social connections with others. The Wikipedia community has a lot of heart and tolerance in minimizing class, social status, and differences in others. Wikipedians are not in a crazy frenzy to participate in the website, but rather they make a thoughtful assessment to contribute because they believe in the community mission to share all information with all people online for free. I do not mean to read so much into this person’s casual use of the word “crazy” in this instance, because the speaker here did not mean that Wikipedians were in a craze, but overall, using these kinds of outsider labels to the Wikipedia community contributes to a disparaged public image for Wikipedia contributors which I think does not match the characteristics of typical Wikipedians.

About calling Wikipedians “Wikipedos” – he is talking about pedophilia. The implication here is that Wikipedians are sexual deviants, and this line of talk goes into an outdated narrative that participants in online communities are perverts, sexually frustrated, likely to transgress sexual boundaries, and generally not having normal sexual behavior whatever that means. First I want to say that in my opinion, Wikipedians are like any other community, so differences of most sorts are not more likely to appear in the Wikipedia community with more frequency than comparable communities. In my experience Wikipedia like other online communities is more accepting of diversity, so with regard to sexuality, I think that the Wikipedia community has a greater than average representation of gender and sexual minorities than the general population, as Wikipedia will take kind-hearted competent people from any background even if somehow they are excluded in general society.

I am going to say something for the future because no one in the future will imagine how quickly social change happened, but at the advent of the Internet around 1995, no one prominent in society or business thought that it mattered. Until 2005 or later in the United States there was a pervasive media perception that only antisocial people would use computers and do things like have an email address. From about 1995-2005 having basic skills to use a computer was still not standard among educated people, and admittedly, anything related to computers was much harder to use then as compared to now. Despite these media perceptions, computers with Internet access were within reach and the lives of most young people in the United States from about 1998 on, so there was a disconnect of 10 years or more when many media and business interests did not notice the Internet while any teenager from the late 90s onward was fully competent in using Internet applications and visiting websites. Throughout this era, the media and social leaders claimed that every kind of deviancy would exhibit itself more often in Internet users, and old media channels reported that Internet users in general were weird antisocial deviant geek nerd perverts. I am sure that part of what the person says in this video is the product of what he believed because of the culture of the time, but by the time Wikipedia had achieved international prominence in about 2005 the individuals in its community were not weird in any particular way. The root of the problem was that older people did not want to learn new skills and use the Internet, and they regretted having their jobs made obsolete by younger people with new skill sets. An older generation opposed change because it caused loss for them, and the younger generation embraced change for its empowerment to them. The older generation controlled the media, so of course they insulted the root of the changing times, and that created a public perception that Internet users were weird, and that led to the Wikimedia Foundation staff embracing a branding legacy of saying that Wikipedians might be termed wiki-pedophiles. I do not blame the person I quoted above or any of the other Wikimedia Foundation staff who use these insults routinely, because they only act in the context of the cultures in which they live. Despite not blaming these individuals, I do blame the collective institutional branding choice for applying insults routinely to the Wikipedia community. It would be useful to avoid propagating ridiculous negative stereotypes which are applied as labels by others. Again, the problem is not this video, but that Wikimedia Foundation staff tend to say things like this often, continually, and over time.

At the end of 2014, after 4 years of designing outreach strategies for the Wikimedia community, this same WMF employee complained about the Wikimedia community rules saying that he had come into conflict with a “fussy neckbeard”. The situation was that he had uploaded a copyrighted image to Wikimedia Commons (the art on a package of candy) and was upset that his image was deleted. Again, I am not singling this person out, but rather it is typical that Wikimedia Foundation staff want special exemptions to the community rules of Wikipedia. From a Wikimedia community perspective, what would be commonly said in this case is that “competence is required” – brusque for sure, but Wikimedia projects cannot distribute copyrighted content, and the community takes a hard line about compliance with the law. It surprises me that anyone would even argue this point, or if they did argue it, then I would expect them to propose some nuance to the traditional interpretation rather than start by propagating the WMF stereotype that the Wikimedia community is best described as “neckbeards” – “slovenly nerdy people who have no sense of hygiene or grooming.” Almost no Wikipedians could conceivably fit that description. The ones who do fit that description do not deserve to be shamed, and especially do not deserve to have the Wikimedia Foundation pay a rich privileged man in an urban center to insult their physical unattractiveness while saying it is a barrier to their participation in an online community. I say again – I absolutely do not place any blame on this individual for saying these things. He is part of an organization that encourages this kind of behavior, and is the product of a professional network which encourages its members to disparage the Wikimedia community.

All said – I do not have personal experience which makes me believe that Wikipedians would be identified as weird, crazed, or sexually deviant with any more frequency than would individuals in any other population. I might say that these traits are less common among Wikipedians, because to fit into Wikipedia well enough to be in the community cycle of positive feedback and out of the community cycle of negative feedback, one has to be competent enough to continually pass a lot of review from other people.

“Wikimania“, 5 April 2015, in 60 Minutes

In general I would say we’re a lot of geeks. A lot of tech geeks. A lot of people who are really passionate about information. – Jimbo Wales

Women are less likely to kinda geek out at their computer for 10, 20, 40 hours. I mean, there’s a reason that the stereotype of the hacker is a guy in a filthy T-shirt eating Doritos, right? Like, that’s hard. A woman is less likely to get social permission to be in a dirty T-shirt eating Doritos. – Sue Gardner

(Wikipedians are) fussy people. They are a little OCD. They’re careful and they’re cautious and they’re serious. And it matters to them that things are right. They’re persnickety people. – Sue Gardner

…there are thousands of articles about computers and software programs. And we don’t think anything about that, ’cause we’re a bunch of computer geeks. – Jimbo Wales

When Morley Safer says, “Once a year a band of hardcore Wikipedia contributors come together from the four corners of the earth in what you might call the dance of the geeks” – is he saying this because his own assessment is that the community is geeks, or is he saying that because Wikimedia Foundation staff are encouraging the public to talk about the Wikipedia community as if they were geeks? Where are external media outlets getting the idea that the Wikimedia community members are geeks?

It is completely inappropriate of Gardner to present the typical Wikipedian as a person with social permission to be covered in the filth of junk food. Members of the Wikipedia community are typical humans and if they are labeled at all, it is unfair to label them in a dehumanizing way. She should not say anything if she cannot find nice things to say. Note that she uses the word “fussy” again, and she describes the neckbeard stereotype again, just like the other person I quoted. This is a trend and part of the WMF organizational culture.

The Wikimedia Foundation paid staff get benefits from dehumanizing the Wikipedia community. The volunteer community does all the labor on which basis the Wikimedia Foundation staff get funding. From its founding in 2001 until about 2008, there was no significant funding to the Wikimedia Foundation, and yet by that time already Wikipedia was probably the most popular single general information source for most topics in all languages which an Internet presence. Wikipedia came to prominence because of volunteer contributions, and not because of funded staff support.

I appreciate funded staff support, and it is necessary, but it can be had without continual insults to the volunteers, and in a way that allows both paid staff and volunteers to support each other without continual conflict. Some of the reasons why it is efficacious for paid staff to insult the volunteer community include the following:

1. Dehumanizing the volunteers de-legitimizes their demands for how funding should be invested. Admittedly it is difficult to please a crowd and much easier to do work in the absence of user testing, community consultation, and meeting demands of diverse stakeholders.
2. It is impossible to please everyone and it is stressful to any paid staff to receive information that their work is not meeting community needs. Because of Wikipedia’s diversity, all projects will include outcomes in which large numbers of people have needs which are not met. This is an unnatural characteristic of human work in the digital age, that when humans make products which are supposed to scale to be used by millions of people, still emotionally humans expect feedback on the scale of tribes and small communities responding to what an artisan make create for the small social circle around them which would have existed in the age before Internet. It is shocking and deeply upsetting for anyone employed by the Wikimedia Foundation to have the experience that a mass of hundreds of thousands of people are dependent on their routine daily actions and have expectations and needs which ought to be met. Wikipedia, uniquely among practically all websites, has a user base which has a stake in the funding of the project and a say in the outcomes purchased with that funding. Right now the Wikimedia Foundation has no good way to minister to the emotional and spiritual needs of its product creators, and thus supports its staff by downplaying the legitimacy of feedback from the Wikimedia community just so that the staff does not have to bear scaled-up criticism.
3. There is a social legacy of disconnect between the production of anything which is mass produced and the welfare of the consumers use those products. My organization Consumer Reports was partially founded on a 1933 book called 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs. This book says that the America public are test subjects for all companies with national branded products, and says that mass marketing has fundamentally changed the nature of the relationships between people who produce things and people who use them. The book says that industrialization dehumanizes consumers in the eyes of producers. The Wikimedia Foundation similarly dehumanizes people who use its products, not because they are bad, but because they are routinely making a product like anyone else. What is different about the Wikimedia Foundation is the new and radical close relationship it has with its volunteer labor army, and the interdependence the foundation has as the steward of a huge amount of funding which is intended to benefit the consumers. There is a moral hazard here in which the WMF is spending money belonging to the Wikimedia community, but individuals in the WMF are bearing the emotional consequences of doing this, and also the Wikimedia community has close watch on absolutely every action taken by the WMF when there is little social precedent for having something so well-funded be so closely watched by a huge number of intimate stakeholders.
4. Outright conflicts of interest exist. Staff working for the Wikimedia Foundation are underpaid because they get the privilege of working for a high-profile nonprofit organization. Probably this means they get 30% less pay than they would doing the same job for a commercial entity. As individuals, this is stressful, plus they bear the burden of being on very high-profile projects and not having staff or funding which is sufficient to complete those projects in a way that meets minimal community expectations. There is pressure on the staff to complete projects. A lot of the staff is younger and less experienced, so completing any Wikimedia project would give them high career status for life. The combination of staff being inexperienced, underpaid, under pressure to finish, under scrutiny of the community, and in need of something to put on their resume results in wacky software development projects being released in a forceful frenzy with intense expectations that the volunteer community of Wikipedia editors should praise them. When Wikimedia products are developed and released, the people who developed those products are the ones who receive the feedback, respond to it, are supposed to fix problems, are the ones who released the products, and who have to move on with their careers reporting the outcomes. Releasing a Wikimedia product is an absurdly high burden to put on any person. Because of the stress of this process, to maintain sanity one of the easiest things that a product developer can do is begin to think that when their product fails to meet the expectations of large numbers of people, then emotionally they must feel that it was not their responsibility to meet that demand. It is true that individuals should not feel emotionally responsible for all problems in the world, but some kind of mediation system should be created to disperse the responsibility.

If I could have a wish for reform, it would be for better mediation between the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia community. Too many emotions arise without mediation and I feel these communities are unable to communicate effectively without having someone neutral recognize the needs of both sides of stakeholders and communicate them to the other. Currently, one problem with doing this is the Wikimedia Foundation’s staff tendency to identify themselves as part of the Wikimedia community. This also needs to stop, as members of a corporation making products for the public have too much conflict in judging the extent to which the public benefits from the products they are marketing.