“Wikipedia now shapes people's understanding of who and what is important, significant and notable (i.e. who is worth paying attention to). Having a biography on Wikipedia has become a signal of authority, of individual worth and importance.”
As a first reference for millions of people, and a repository for teaching large language models such as ChatGPT, Wikipedia is a vital source of knowledge. The influence of Wikipedia extends beyond its practical and intended utility into our actual daily lives in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Wikipedia was created in 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Today it boasts more than 63 million articles, and almost 48 million users. More content is added daily, though few users are familiar with the process by which entries come to exist on the site. Ultimately, Wikipedia seeks to provide access to the “sum of all human knowledge” through crowdsourcing and consensus. Edited by volunteer contributors, anyone with a computer and internet access can fill the contributor role. There’s an exciting bottom-up politics at work here, one in which all people are able to contribute their knowledge, and where knowledge is no longer simply the purview of experts. Yet, like any encyclopaedia, Wikipedia is not a neutral site where knowledge is simply deposited for use by curious researchers. Each entry on Wikipedia is assessed by a community of contributors who consider its facticity, its verifiability, its notability, and, ultimately, whether it ought to remain in the encyclopaedia.
Indeed, as Ford argues, what counts as knowledge in Wikipedia can be said to be hegemonic insofar as it is “achieved by force through strategic editing.”
In this paper, I join a growing chorus of researchers who critique how knowledge is produced and represented in Wikipedia. I pay particular attention to the contribution processes and editorial policies that have been enacted by Wikipedia in the effort to maintain its respectability and credibility as an encyclopaedia. Drawing on my experience as a research assistant tasked with writing Wikipedia articles about influential but under-examined feminist periodicals, I offer some suggestions for how feminists, allies, and other scholars committed to social justice can engage with the platform’s “deletionism” by circumventing some of its oppressive policies. In particular, I recommend that Wikipedia writers ought to consider maintaining an article as an orphan for some time, avoiding the article wizard, and bypassing the articles for creation template, all of which will help ensure the longevity of articles related to women and other marginalised groups. I also recommend a both/and feminist approach to engaging with Wikipedia that includes using an alternative encyclopaedia like Everybodywiki.com when articles are slated for deletion.
Context
Though notability policies were developed to ensure the quality of the content of the encyclopaedia, they have made it notoriously difficult for authors who want to expand Wikipedia’s coverage. These policies dictate that subjects must have received significant coverage by reliable secondary sources, independent of the subject. Authors who, like me, want to expand the feminist content of Wikipedia, are faced with what has been described as a “consensus reality.” Wikipedia’s consensus reality consists of the shared personal biases and presumptions of its contributors all around the world, especially those with internet access and an ability to read and write in English. These biases shape a collective vision of the world that reflects the perspectives of those actively involved in creating and maintaining this reality. In the case of Wikipedia, community editors dictate which forms of knowledge matter. As my experience confirms, Wikipedia’s consensus reality distorts the avowed neutrality of the platform.
I’m not the first, certainly, to critique the workings of Wikipedia. Recently, there has been increased scrutiny of the systemic issues that Wikipedia faces. Several scholars have pointed to the notability problem as a significant issue contributing to gender-based and race-based inequalities. Wikipedia's notability problem refers to the systematic determination of subjects related to women and people of colour as non-notable as a result of uneven application of the encyclopaedia’s inclusion standards. This results in underrepresentation of marginalised groups on Wikipedia, and the erasure of their contributions to history.
To combat these injustices, universities, museums, archives, and libraries have begun to keep resident Wikipedians and host edit-a-thons which recruit volunteers to create articles about women, LGBTQI2S+ and BIPOC individuals to shrink the gaps on the platform.
Contributing to Wikipedia
While an undergraduate student of Social Work at Medicine Hat College, I worked as a research assistant for the AdArchive project, run by Medicine Hat College professor Jana Smith Elford and her collaborator at the University of Alberta, Michelle Meagher. In the Summer of 2024, I conducted my own research on second-wave feminist periodicals with the goal of posting what I found to Wikipedia.
My goal for the summer research project was to create Wikipedia articles about several second-wave feminist magazines, including Canadian publications such as Branching Out and The Asianadian.
Second-wave feminism, persisting from the 1960s through the 1980s, confronted issues beyond women’s legal rights, into reproductive rights, workplace equality, sexual liberation, and addressing norms and conventions relating to gender roles and patriarchy. Periodical studies scholars argue that feminist magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and journals play an important role in communicating second- wave feminist politics, building feminist communities, and defining the contours of feminist praxis (see Murray 2004, Piepmeier 2009, Meagher, Smith Elford). I wanted to learn more about these publications and the impact they may have had on their readers, as well as on what Meagher and Smith Elford describe as an “ecosystem of feminist publishing.” By creating Wikipedia articles, I would contribute to the AdArchive project, increasing the visibility of these important documents.
As a starting point, my research supervisors shared with me the work of their former student who had also created Wikipedia articles for second-wave feminist periodicals (under the pseudonym penguinxs). I was surprised to discover that around a third of her articles were declared non-notable and tagged by the community editors for deletion, falling victim to Wikipedia’s notability policies. Explanations from community editors focused on a lack of academic secondary sources. However, both the previous student and I faced a serious challenge to meet the demands of the platform.
Because of the nature of feminist information networks - particularly in the 1970s - there were few secondary sources or “notable” references about these organisations and publications, even though we know that they informed and mobilised thousands of people to the cause. This is not our problem alone. Efforts to create articles about marginalised individuals can reveal systemic inequalities in the demand that entries meet the bar of “notability.” The notability guidelines, in other words, create a hostile environment for any subject that does not conform to hegemonic, Eurocentric, and patriarchal ways of knowing. Therefore, what presented was not a neutral system as promised by Wikipedia, but instead risked becoming a system of misclassification and exclusion.
Another threat that both the previous AdArchive student and I faced was the threat of deletion of our entries. Community members can, as discussed above, make strong recommendations that an entry be revised to meet standards of notability. There are three main ways this can happen. First, by nominating an article for deletion - which anyone can do. Second, the speedy deletion policy which allows for rapid removal of articles that meet specific criteria such as previous deletions, copyright violations, or vandalism. Third, the proposed deletion process, which will automatically delete an article if it is not formally contested within seven days.
Data shows that subjects related to women are nominated for deletion at a significantly higher rate than subjects related to men.
Furthermore, upon nomination for deletion, research reveals “herding effects” which see subsequent votes disproportionately conforming to previous decisions. These trends have led to higher rates of subjects related to women being deleted; these subjects are, as Wagner argues, held to a “higher bar.”
Deleting an article on Wikipedia (like the entry for the journal titled Connexions, that penguinsxs created) communicates that the deleted subject is not something that people want to know or are presumed to care about. The deletion of this subject removes it from consensus reality. Some entities are objectively unworthy of their own articles (e.g. A pointless dream that a public figure had), while others are undoubtedly worthy of their own articles (e.g. The moon landing). The problem is that anything in between is totally up to subjective interpretation by community editors who are working with vague guidelines. The existence of guidelines suggests that there is an air of objectivity where there is little.
D. Taraborelli and G. L. Ciampaglia described Wikipedia's maintenance and policy enforcement systems as examples of “decentralised governance of peer production systems.” Because maintenance workers are self-selected and self-governing, suboptimal solutions occur which perpetuate exclusionary forces on the platform.
These are just some of the factors which contribute to a “sociology of ignorance” through unvetted contributors' declarations of articles as “nonknowledge” which add to the erasure of women’s work from the internet - and history.
A possible solution to the flawed Wikipedia inclusion system is to rid the system of its deletionist logic - which is a philosophy that supports “selective coverage and removal of articles seen as poorly defended.” Wikipedia might be encouraged to embrace full inclusivity and erase the potential for biased exclusionism. Certainly, this would come with its own problems with too many redundant or benign articles, but I am not convinced that such would discredit the encyclopaedic nature of Wikipedia. Its credibility is already debated and its utility is already demonstrated. In the meantime, there is still the problem of how to write entries about women-related subjects that can pass the test of Wikipedia’s consensus reality.
From Practice
Armed with an understanding of what it takes to write an entry, and motivated by the experiences of penguinxs, I was determined to find a way to write feminist periodicals into Wikipedia. I had some successes. For instance, I began my endeavour by translating and expanding the French article for Branching Out for English Wikipedia. From there, I created my own original articles for The Asianadian, DYKE: A Quarterly, Women: A Journal of Liberation, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.
Though I had success writing original articles, there were also significant challenges. I wrote an entry on Women's international resource exchange (WIRE) by expanding upon penguinsxs’ 184-word article and adding details about its notability as well as adding references. During its run, WIRE provided resources and reprinted works about, by, and for women in developing countries - particularly Central and South America. There is clear evidence that WIRE contributed to the women’s movement, publishing writings by notable women and giving a voice to women south of the U.S. border. They provided affordable access to vital and previously unpublished documents to advocacy groups, trade unions, human rights organisations, and more. Regardless, my WIRE entry was tagged for deletion due to a lack of notability, with community editors citing the previous proposal for deletion due to a lack of sources. Because WIRE had already been deemed non-notable, my article was deleted overnight.
Despite my early successes with publishing original articles, it wasn’t long before one of them was proposed for deletion. My entry on Women & Performance, a scholarly journal about gender and performance, currently published by Routledge, was declared not notable, even though there were a number of secondary sources.
When making my objection to the proposed deletion, I simply said there were reliable sources and that all other claims were resolved. Providing a standard abbreviation for the journal met the final criteria for notability. With that addition, and a final assertion that my references were reliable - the article was allowed to remain on Wikipedia. The frustrating part is that almost all of the periodicals I have seen are undoubtedly notable. The only ones whose notability might be contentious are those that did not survive for more than a few issues, and even then, many of them are widely attributed to being influential publications for the women’s movement.
Not only is authoring articles in a way that doesn’t get them deleted a challenge, but once the article is up, there is still a deal of work to be done. The problem is finding sources that constitute significant coverage by Wikipedia’s highly interpretive standards.
The above examples demonstrate the subversion of women’s contributions to civil rights movements and history in general. By way of active erasure, editors who write about women-related subjects on Wikipedia are subjected to added layers of burden when they decide to contribute to these topics. Tripodi details a “taxing level of emotional labo[u]r,” as a result of frequent harassment, increased scrutiny, and the aforementioned herding effects, which see to it that unwanted articles are removed by force - regardless of their merits.
While Wikipedia’s inclusion policies may strive for neutrality by means of a thoughtfully reasoned logic, a closer examination produces a very different reality. Enacting a feminist ethic of care reveals a disproportionate resistance to women-related subjects on the platform, exposing a landscape of oppressive forces that have continued to undermine the visibility and existence of marginalised individuals.
Circumventions
It is clear from the mounting body of evidence - and my own experience - that oppressive policies result in oppressive forces on the platform. I argue that to contribute to Wikipedia - which hopes to contribute to the sum of all human knowledge - Wikipedia editors must be prepared to navigate and circumvent oppressive policies in a subversive environment.
Deletion logs display trends that deletions tend to happen in the early life of a new article. This was reflected in my work; articles were under considerably more scrutiny in the first few weeks. To accommodate for this, I learned to intentionally keep articles as orphans - which are articles that do not link to other articles, which limits their ability to be found by other users for some time before linking them to relevant pages. This prevented deletionists from easily accessing the article and proposing them for deletion. That way, I could bulk up my references in my own time and get tips and assistance from more experienced contributors.
Another deliberate action I took in order to help keep my articles alive was by ignoring the article wizard, which identifies my creations as creations by an inexperienced Wikipedia user. This invites scrutiny by more experienced users by means of Wikipedia’s automated systems. My decision to avoid the wizard means that I had less help from fellow Wikipedians in creating my articles, but it also kept my articles “safer” from any potential deletionists during the early stages of the article’s life.
The third deliberate action I took was to ignore suggestions to template articles as “articles for creation (AFC).” When I had my first articles published, a fellow Wikipedia user suggested that I template my articles as such - so as to improve them. This suggestion was an act of goodwill because they were primarily concerned with some formatting issues that were present in my articles because of my inexperience. Of course, I could not template my articles in this way. Doing so would have put my articles completely at the mercy of users who moderate AFC tagged articles of whom I know nothing about.
Luckily, the Wikipedia user helped me fix a number of my formatting errors. Later, a small number of Wikipedians went around and made additional formatting corrections to my articles - improving them significantly and bypassing any potential benefits I would have gotten by submitting my articles for creation.
These are the main ways that I learned to circumvent some of the less desirable consequences of Wikipedia’s policies. Then, I would slowly introduce links to other articles - making them orphans no more - and more controversial texts such as information on DYKE, A Quarterly’s separatist radical lesbian feminist politics. I learned to introduce feminist subjects gradually and carefully into the Wiki space to avoid ruffling the feathers of those who do not appreciate feminist or women-related subjects on Wikipedia.
A Call for a Feminist “Both/And” Model for Engaging with Wikipedia
It is no easy task to eliminate the systemic issues in Wikipedia. Reform is possible, but the current editorial policies mean that what counts as knowledge will continue to exclude knowledge from alternative frameworks. This means that feminist standards are not likely to take a significant hold on the platform without structural change. I suggest two primary solutions here: first, allies must engage in the battle to decenter content on Wikipedia and represent what is actively being erased (women BIPOC LGBTQI2S+ voices and artefacts) by the strategies I suggest above. Second, a decentralised encyclopaedia needs to be developed and widely adopted by feminist thinkers as the standard, alternative Wiki to find footing and establish an egalitarian encyclopaedia. Everybodywiki.com is a good example and could potentially find itself the global feminist- aligned encyclopaedia with enough work. This is a monumental task but a twofold approach to combating hierarchies of knowledge would serve to better even the battlefield.
Armed with the knowledge that there are ways to flourish in Wikipedia’s subversive environment, I offer a clear call to action. We must combat the consensus reality that undermines and erases women’s voices from history. I argue that this is work for allies. We are prepared to take on the burden and labour of contributing to Wikipedia. Also, this charge provides allies with a clear-cut mission on how to actively participate in the feminist movement in a way that has direct, deliverable, real-world consequences. As described by Richard Cooke for Wired.com, “Wikipedia is built on the personal interests and idiosyncrasies of its contributors. You could even say it is built on love.” It is a love for justice, equality, and our fellow people that drives this work, and it is love that will prevail.
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