Wikipedia as editorial microcosm

With these first three problems on the table, we can circle back around to the fact that Wikipedia is, ultimately, a written production. From this perspective, the obvious fact is that Wikipedia has no designated editors. Or rather, in Wikipedia everyone is considered an editor, so it remains an open question who will step forward to perform the kind of work more traditionally performed by a developmental or comprehensive editor rather than a content expert, writer, fact checker, web developer, or copyeditor. Of course, all of these roles are often fused and remixed in today's writing ecosystems; the point here is to highlight a particular task rather than a particular job title: that of facilitating a community of writers and working with existing content to help a piece of writing continue to develop and find its way to an appropriate form.^[10]

To clarify, the phrase "developmental editing" points to the task of assisting writers on substantive improvements in the early to middle stages of the writing process or with significant revision. Scott Norton (2009) defined developmental editing as "significant structuring or restructuring of a manuscript's discourse" (p. 1). But while Norton's definition may appear to be simply about organization, Norton's idea of restructuring discourse points to the frequent need for global refinements to a whole document in terms of content, focus, completeness, and adjustment to audience (those who teach writing and editing often group these together as rhetorical concerns). Donald H. Cunningham, Edward A. Malone, and Joyce M. Rothschild (2019) used the phrase "substantive editing," which they defined as "the process of making major changes to a document . . . in order to enhance its effectiveness, especially in terms of its usability. Substantive editing seeks to improve the organization, navigation, completeness, accuracy, and style of content" (p. 45). We could also use "comprehensive editing," in that we are considering the whole document and rhetorical situation to edit all aspects of the writing. However, we prefer the term "developmental" because it more adequately captures how certain Wikipedia articles need particular kinds of work in order to continue to develop or progress towards an appropriate form for Wikipedia that is capable of being updated as needed.

As we discuss in Part 1, these kinds of editing tasks are most needed when articles find themselves with issues that prevent the usual writing and editing process from continuing. The point is that, at some point in the writing process, appropriate and skillful work is needed to determine what content is appropriate, how it should be organized, how it should be framed, and how it integrates in Wikipedia's encyclopedia standards and style. Whether this is performed by the original major writer(s) or performed later by others, Wikipedia articles, like most writing, require attention and skill to appropriately and diplomatically tune an article to Wikipedia's conventions in a way that not only provides good content but is also open to continual updating and improvement by other editors who might want to add to or update the article.

Within the many priorities of the Wikipedia community, this task may get lost. As we discussed in the other problems, a great deal of effort has to be spent on welcoming new editors, training them on the logistics of editing, checking new edits and articles, developing and maintaining bots to facilitate this process and combat vandalism, examining potential conflicts of interest, correctly formatting and categorizing articles, handling editing disputes, addressing systemic bias, ensuring verifiability, and just getting people to actually produce content and help out—and almost all of this work is done by volunteers rather than paid employees. Naturally there will be less time, energy, and available expertise for the editing problems that require advanced writing knowledge, appropriate forms of diplomatic editing amongst a community of writers and experts, and more time and focus than is often available. However, at the core of the highest quality articles are editors who do occupy this role, in particular those working on editing towards and assessing Good Article and Feature Article status.

The hope here is that identifying this issue, describing its symptoms, providing procedures and tasks for remedying these issues, and making these resources available to the broader editing community will assist in highlighting these tasks and efforts. In the end, this kind of editing work is essential for improving this valuable public resource even as it provides an important case study in community-based, digital editing that highlights the continued relevance of comprehensive editing skills and the training in them.

These issues become most apparent on Wikipedia in stalled articles: articles that stabilize for a time in a form that is not of high quality or might even be inappropriate for Wikipedia in a way that makes future contributions difficult without significant reworking, community discussion, or other forms of bold intervention. Stalled articles are the manifestation of significant editing issues that arise within the flow of Wikipedia editing. Articles often stall for reasons that are related to the other issues we have discussed in this introduction, but usually require additional sharp, diplomatic, and bold interventions to push them in a more productive direction. This is the starting point for this project.

^[10] For a helpful discussion of the evolution of editing tasks in the workplace, especially in relation to new workflows and technologies, refer to Cunningham et al. (2019), chapters 1–3.