Wikipedia as editorial microcosom

Wikipedia emerged both with much fanfare and fretting.^[4] It was revolutionary to think that we could compile knowledge in such an open format while still maintaining quality and accuracy. As such, within its first 10 years, most of the controversy around Wikipedia focused on this problem of accuracy and authority. The extensive back-and-forth across media outlets is extensively documented on Wikipedia itself, so we won't rehash it here. However, it is essential to remember that this problem of authority occupied a great deal of early efforts to formulate procedures and guide contributions to the encyclopedia.

During this time, procedures were set in place for ensuring Wikipedia article quality, which are summarized on Wikipedia's editorial oversight and control page, such that by around 2010, concern about Wikipedia's authority diminished somewhat. User registering, blocking and protection systems, and software facilitation made it far easier to identify and counter unproductive editing or vandalism (Lageard & Paternotte, 2021). In addition to bots that could spot and roll back vandalism, a significant core of devoted Wikipedians could use software to quickly and more extensively perform quality control, particularly for first-time edits, new pages, and points of controversy.

Even more important was the development of extensive standards for verifiability and notability, and fact-checking, along with a culture focused on ensuring these standards are maintained (more on this in Problem #2). Such attention was particularly intense around issues where authority was especially needed, such as articles on science, health, biographies, current events, and fringe topics. Specific standards were developed for each of these, as well as increased scrutiny for edits on these topics. These standards were developed early on—as early as 2003—and were essential for addressing the questions of article quality and remain essential guidelines for arguing for and ensuring the quality of articles.

In our experience editing with students, authority and quality of citations are one of the primary concerns of editors, as Wikipedians always want to ensure that contributors are providing correct and verifiable information from high quality sources.^[5] Offers to improve articles often lead to questions about one's sources. A great deal of the infrastructure in place on Wikipedia is understandably focused on this problem of adding and checking sources, including the citation needed tag and citation bots.

In thinking about how this problem occupies so much of the attention about and work on Wikipedia, we would like to note in passing that Wikipedia serves as an interesting microcosm for the general concern about authority and misinformation in journalism, communication ethics, and writing instruction.^[6] The problem of authoritative sources and citation is an essential part of the writing and editing process, but only one element in ensuring quality of content. What we discuss here prompts us to consider how this focus on misinformation in the writing world cannot be emphasized to the exclusion of other writing and editing tasks for contributors. It is worth remembering that there is far more to good writing than whether something is factually correct. This is true of all writing, but deserves extra emphasis given Wikipedia's cultural and procedural hyperfocus on correctness.

^[4] For an overview of reporting on Wikipedia from its inception to 2020, refer to Benjakob and Harrison (2020).

^[5] Refer to, for example, this response to a student's plans to edit. A more balanced, yet wary, approach was taken in another discussion with a student on the Ghost Hunting talk page.

^[6] For thoughts on Wikipedia and ethical issues, refer to Santana and Wood (2009).