I talk with all sorts of people about Wikipedia. A recurring criticism from people outside the Wikipedia community is that the effective way to produce useful writing is by getting it from professionals and experts in the relevant field. Since Wikipedia accepts content and suggestions from anyone, critics say that Wikipedia must have lower quality than a publication which only has contributors with credentials. I have heard this from several hundred people and I expect that millions more people must think this way. At this point I appreciate the difference in thought, even though I have also been through this conversation often enough that I know that any one of the many possible explanations for Wikipedia’s inner workings will impress anyone who can be impressed by organizational management.
The usual direction for conversation about quality on Wikipedia is to talk about how traditional publishing depends on argument from authority whereas Wikipedia cites the published sources which any authority would know and accept. There are lots of fun conversation paths for talking about the source of content quality but this time I want to instead talk about how Wikipedia’s “anyone can edit” philosophy creates a base of administration to encourage that quality. There are two kinds of Wikipedia volunteers – article content creators and administrative support. Many people imagine that Wikipedia editors create an encyclopedia by writing articles only. Actually, the content writers serve subject matter expert roles and the wiki infrastructure does not expect them to understand anything about Wikipedia’s technical processes. If someone is contributing good content but for whatever reason they do not understand how to edit Wikipedia, then people on the administrative side will help integrate their content into articles, format citations, set up links, and otherwise “wikify” the content by making it conform to Wikipedia’s Manual of Style. Any role which anyone could imagine existing in a traditional publishing house also exists in Wikipedia, with almost every function being volunteer managed. Categories of administrative roles in Wikipedia include welcoming and orienting new users, staffing the help desks, doing off-wiki outreach, managing human resources, doing article review, performing fact checking, doing patrol with the Wiki police, writing policy, doing user interfacing with software developers, responding to legal issues, and serving as a master of all trades for anyone who needs a last resort. I and lots of other Wikipedians have talked for hours about the various roles in each of these categories and will continue to talk endlessly more about them.
I wish to explain one of the reasons why Wikipedia permits anyone to edit, which is that Wikipedia’s community ecosystem encourages community overlap where the tools and organizational knowledge that one group has can assist writers in other unrelated fields of knowledge making decisions. As an example, I am going to explain how Wikipedia’s community developing articles on Pokémon has created an innovative way to organize Wikipedia’s information on killings by law enforcement officers in the United States. For any other media platform the comparison of information about Pokémon and a social problem which results in death would be insensitive, probably offensive, silly, and have no meaning. In traditional media groups, the staff who manage a serious topic like killings would not work closely and in the same editorial work pool as people doing the entertainment beat. In Wikipedia, there is a real tie to the administrative process for overseeing Pokémon and police shootings, and were it not for people editing articles about Pokémon, the Wikipedia’s coverage of killings and many other topics would be of lower quality.
Behind the scenes of Wikipedia there are simple rubrics for making decisions. Wikipedia trainers teach the rubrics in a general way. Editors apply these rubrics to evaluate Pokémon articles just like they apply them to everything else. Since in Wikipedia we cover all fields of study, when a rubric works for one field of knowledge we try to apply it to another. In the earlier days of Wikipedia there was more experimentation about how to maintain quality control and which ways to do things seemed most reasonable to most people. Since lots of people were interested in Pokémon, the Pokémon articles were a field for testing many editorial processes and establishing Wikipedia’s Manual of Style and cultural norms. Time passed, and the process which Pokémon fans polished is the one that social rights activists use to evaluate Wikipedia’s content on shootings. I cannot tell the story of how tens of thousands of editorial evaluations on thousands of topics led in a straightforward way from Pokémon to killings, but I can say that there was a time when Pokémon was the subject of intense debate, and as that community came to peace and consensus, the precedent set there seemed attractive to apply in many other fields of study. I have seen the old Pokémon arguments, and in my opinion, the disagreements which became compromises then matters of settled process at Pokémon are the progenitors of whatever other situations arise where an endless list of items appears in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia covers all sorts of information, but when it was established in January 2001, people began establishing and developing articles by their own choice and not because of any command from a hierarchy directing the development of the encyclopedia. The 2001-2002 history of Wikipedia is a little spotty because the oldest edits before 2002 were not all archived like everything is now, but we do have the October 2001 version of the wiki article on Pokémon and judging by the links to various other Pokémon article embedded in it, there was obviously an established community of Wikipedia editors developing Pokémon content at that time.
As late as December 2006 there was a deletion discussion of a sort which I had never seen when I became more involved in wiki around 2008. The discussion to delete was for Pokémon #293, Whismur. At the time there was not as much community buy-in and understanding of the Wikipedia concept of notability. The premise behind deletion in Wikipedia is that there are standards of “notability”. Topics which meet those standards are “notable” and can have Wikipedia articles. Topics not meeting those standards are “non-notable” and cannot have Wikipedia articles. While there were arguments in this discussion that this Pokémon was not meeting notability criteria, many participants seem to be talking about deletion rationales other than notability, which was a community norm that I felt was well established by 2008. The counterarguments insisted that if there is a list of topics to discuss and reliable information establishes that list, then it would be preferable to collate all items in that list than to present an incomplete list. Since there are hundreds of Pokémon, their argument went, Wikipedia should have articles for all of them to make a complete set. Having articles only for some of them means that there will be gaps in the list. Many Pokémon fans wanted a complete list – “gotta catch ’em all” – or at least a way to share information which would be useful to everyone. Because there were so many Pokémon and because the deletion discussions were recurring and too heated eventually instead of re-hashing discussions and having the same conversations make the same points repeatedly for each of hundreds of Pokémon, editors began to want to reach a consensus and have a consistent way of doing things.
In August 2004 editors established what is now called WikiProject Pokémon, which is a forum for collaboration in developing Wikipedia articles on this topic. The establishment of that forum led to a range of organizational discussion still archived to the beginning on its talk page. In March 2005 an editor User:Radiant! Poképrosal, which was a proposal which would manage all Pokémon articles in a certain way. This proposal failed and would be out of line with contemporary thought in Wikipedia. Following that failure, another editor user:Hiding articulated a Pokémon Test. The Pokémon test was a comparison test identifying one of the lowest importance Pokémon characters, and starting conversations by comparison saying that topics which meet fewer of the standards as that character should not merit an article, while topics which meet higher standards than that article can have articles. Although the Pokémon test was no great innovation and other people had said such things before, discussion about the Pokémon Test was popular at the time and served as a way to draw people into the conversation and helped them to understand the controversy. That Pokémon test did contribute to the body of thought which led to the December 2007 establishment of the “Other stuff exists” argument which people do use daily today. All of these discussions happened in the context of an earlier 2003 guideline on Stand-alone lists which is still a popular guide but which editors have since developed and clarified by all these discussions.
The end result of all the Pokémon controversy and policy making did not have any dramatic finale that I can find. I was not a part of these conversations because they settled before 2008 and Ionly came to know about all this because when I started editing I would see people cite historical Pokémon discussions as shorthand for communicating an entire thread of discourse. In the end, what happened was that there would be list articles on Wikipedia. When a topic is not notable, still if there are some sources to cite and if the list itself is notable, then anyone can add items to a notable list if they can present evidence which meets reliable sourcing criteria but the evidence does not have to meet the higher standard of independent notability. Whismur these days is an item in “List of generation III Pokémon“. A search for the name of any Pokémon will go to either a stand alone article or an item in a list.
The significance of all this is that now we have good information on Pokémon, and also we have a rubric for deciding how to treat items in any long list. If the items meet notability criteria then they are independently notable and can have their own article. If there are reliable sources which establish that an item belongs on a list, but not enough sources to establish notability, then still we can put that item in a list article even if we bar it from having its own article.
The earliest record we have for “firearm” is when a User:John Steele edited the the September 2001 article. Now it is hard to even look back on users like this, because the current wiki software detects no edits associated with this account yet notes that the user registered the account in September 2001. There is early data which the software developers still have not reconciled because early wiki anthropology is not an investment priority. User:Ed Poor, the user I mentioned in this post who still edits, established href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_control&oldid=29621″>the “Gun control” article in March 2002. The timestamp on the creation of these articles establishes early interest in information on firearms but is not otherwise insightful. It was in October 2011 that a user:LUOF (aka User:ThaPolice) established the “list of killings” article. Upon routine review, that article went to deletion discussion within about a day. I enjoy reading these old discussions for entertainment value and to consider how people did things differently in the past, and what kind of cultural claims people might might. One user said to delete the article because it fails the “Man bites dog” standard; the argument went that because police in the United States kill so many people, Wikipedia would be taking an editorial bias by reporting these incidents. User:LUOF/ThaPolice makes strong arguments about how they will develop this article. They cite a series of similar articles about shootings of police officers themselves and they also describe how to document each shooting. In my opinion, the arguments coming in here seem much like the arguments for retaining items for individual Pokémon on lists.
Consider “List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States, May 2017“. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and at the same time the wiki community has to maintain quality control. We need a simple rubric which we can quickly explain to anyone so that they will understand what items they can edit into this list and what sort of content we will not accept. Just like with Pokémon we follow the same process – anyone can put an item on the list if they can also provide a citation to a reliable source. A “reliable source” in this case is usually third-party journalism. The most common sources are the police beat reporting of the local newspaper. If we have a published source to verify that a killing happened, then Wikipedia relies on the professionalism of that source. We do not discriminate in trusting who adds the fact and citation to Wikipedia in the way that it is reasonable and right to discriminate in trusting an unknown person who merely asserts a claim without citing evidence. We also draw a line in Wikipedia about original research and reporting. We defined Wikipedia as an encyclopedia in the sense that we claim encyclopedias to be summaries of what is already published, and not themselves original publishers of new information. If someone urgently needs some information represented in Wikipedia, then we might suggest to them to first convince a professional journalist or researcher to put that information through the usual vetting process which Wikipedia avoids.
User:LUOF took the unusual step of using their user profile page to describe a research methodology for populating these articles. They suggested a series of search terms which anyone could put into a search engine to identify recent journalism or reports about police shootings. When anyone found a shooting then they could summarize the shooting in one line in a Wikipedia list article, cite the source, and thereby create data and make sure that the shooting is not forgotten.
I want to give even more context on this for future readers. At present there is no structured data and no way for even the best funded researchers to get the basic information necessary to have introductory conversations on topics for which data is necessary for understanding. Last month in March 2017 Radiolab, a podcast, ran a story about police shootings. One of the interesting issues that they raised was that there is no way for anyone to get data about how often police shoot anyone or kill anyone. I expect that in the future all police departments and everything else will be totally connected to data reporting systems, so definitely, the city governments, state governments, national government, and probably international organizations, researchers, and the general public will have access to any kind of data which typical people would expect should be public. Right now there are no reporting systems, so this on-wiki amateur police shooting project is an early effort to use crowdsourcing to create open data about a difficult issue. Probably Wikipedia is the highest quality source of information for finding information about individual police shooting events, because there is no way that anyone could get data easily from multiple cities without having a human read newspaper articles from all cities, summarize them, and format them into a list.
Besides the Radiolab story I was thinking about this because in Wiki NYC we are doing a range of projects related to police shootings. One of our members, User:Jeremyb, has been connecting the local Wikipedia community with organizations in NYC who either protest police brutality, or want better relationships between citizens and police, or maybe are radical and want no police. Whatever the case, the infrastructure of Wikipedia has an impact on what non-wiki organizations do and learn, and the members of those kinds of organizations influence Wikipedia in innumerable and indescribable ways. Wiki NYC also has a collaboration with LaGuardia Community College, which is considering doing a round of student research projects with a focus on editing Wikipedia articles about police brutality in NYC based on records and summary reports from the NYC mayor’s office archives. As I wrote this blog post I also prepared to tell this story at a club I am in where we practice public speaking. Telling this story in a way that expresses how I feel has been challenging.
I do not know what will happen with any of this in the near future but I am often in awe of how seemingly insignificant conversations and activities lead to small changes and the establishment of habits, and then those habits change people’s worldviews, then those worldviews lead people to actualize their wishes, then those wishes become a reality. Sometimes people criticize Wikipedia or they criticize me for associating with Wikipedia, because they say it cannot be a serious publication with so much focus on pop culture. However, the editors who do pop culture are doing good because pop culture is something to celebrate, and also, everyone who contributes any labor also helps to establish the administrative base which we all share and from which we benefit. I am sure that the younger children who edited Pokémon Wikipedia articles in 2005 were much better prepared for research and university than their peers when they grew to college age. I love that Wikipedia does so much to help people to understand research techniques and make critical thinking a life skill for everyone. In general, I trust teenagers who edit Wikipedia to be more scholarly than I do typical graduate students, because the Wikipedia editors have had more practical experience, training, and peer feedback.