Wikipedia Is All The Web Has Left ft. Molly White

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2:15Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia used by over a billion people a month. One that, despite being maintained entirely by an army of free and at times anonymous contributors, remains one of the most reliable sources of information on the internet. Wikipedia's 62 million articles are edited by over 100 ,000 contributors. And these contributors have somehow done a better job maintaining the quality and validity of the information than any of the information provided by any of the major platforms today. Wikipedia is funded entirely through the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization funded through public donations and grants, and has a staff of over 700 people.

2:55Yeah, I'd argue most people have absolutely no idea how intricate the Web's encyclopedia is, and today I'm joined by Guerrilla Warfare, a Wikipedia editor that's made over 130 ,000 edits in the span of 18 years across two accounts. You'll likely know her better as researcher and critic Molly White, the creator of the Citation Needed newsletter, and Web3 is going great.

3:21all right molly thank you for joining me thanks for having me so i don't know how else to ask this but why should people actually care about wikipedia today well uh i mean i think wikipedia is one of the highest quality resources there is on the web today um i think everyone uses it sometimes without even realizing it given that wikipedia data powers so much of you know AI chat GPT responses or home assistants that are answering your questions or Siri. And so I think keeping the quality of information on Wikipedia high or even improving it even further is one of the most important things that we need to be focusing on.

4:06But one of the big critiques of it, and I know, and this is very much a podcast for people who might be techie, but people also who are just being exposed to tech outside of the consumer realm. How is it reliable? Because that's the big question. How is this something you can trust? Well, I think like a lot of things, you need to take it with a grain of salt and understand that there is variation on Wikipedia between some very high quality articles that have been reviewed by hundreds of people versus some that are fairly new and being created still. So I think it's important to realize that there is the possibility that whatever you're reading is not reliable and there is some onus on the reader to verify that what they're reading is correct.

4:52But I think that generally speaking, the quality control on Wikipedia is actually pretty good. There are a lot of editors who are constantly maintaining the platform, making sure that the material on there is well-sourced. It's coming from high-quality, reputable publications. and that it is meeting the criteria that Wikipedia puts in place. And I think the result of that is that the content on Wikipedia tends to be very high quality. And how does the actual moderation work? So what goes into a Wikipedia page? Well, it's a little bit ad hoc. There's not really a process in which every page has to go through a set of criteria or anything like that.

5:40generally speaking, anyone can edit Wikipedia and contribute to the best of their ability. And when someone does something that is not in line with Wikipedia's requirements, then the idea is that hopefully someone will come along and notice that, revert the change, or improve it so that it does meet the criteria. And I realize that sounds very slapdash, and it is to some extent, but because of the sort of processes that have developed over the years, it actually works pretty well where most pages do you get, you know, a fairly strong set of people who are, you know, taking a look at the changes that are coming in, making sure that they are appropriate for the encyclopedia and, you know, allowing them to remain or, you know, discussing them and reverting them if necessary.

6:34Talk to me a little bit about that process though. What happens? Well, if someone goes and makes an edit to a page, generally speaking, there are a fair number of people who are patrolling recent changes to the encyclopedia, not necessarily even watching that page specifically, but just looking at new edits that are coming in and checking them for reliability. Is there a source included? Does the edit pass the smell check? There's also some automated processes involved that will try to filter out edits that are abusive or match certain patterns. And then there's a lot of editors who have various pages that they're interested in or they have expertise in on what's called their watch list.

7:24And so they take a look at changes to those pages every once in a while and see if everything looks all right or if there needs to be improvements or edits to what's been added to bring them back into line with the quality that we expect. So is there an organization? I know there's the Wikimedia Foundation, we know that, but is there a moderator chat? Is there a place where people congregate? Or is this just entirely, I don't want to say decentralized, but disorganized? Well, it's certainly disorganized. There are actually kind of a bunch of places where people congregate and some people use some of them and some people don't.

8:06But there are various places on the encyclopedia that are project specific pages where people discuss issues that are coming up or flag things that need more attention. um you know not everyone has like the ability for example to block an editor who's being disruptive so editors who can't do that themselves will report it for people who can um and then there's you know more real-time places like we still use irc believe it or not um but there's also and for listeners by the way irc is what a 30 year old shareware product yeah it's basically one of the first online chat protocols. I was a Polaris IRC guy, but for listeners as well, Discord is very much, I believe Discord is actually somehow built on IRC.

8:58That's a different episode though. I'm not sure if it actually is or if it just interoperates well with it, but there's also Wikipedia Discord now for people who don't want to go figure out how IRC works. So, you know, there's a bunch of different places where people can chat and talk about working on the project, different formats. And there's no compensation of any kind? Correct. Not unless you are an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation who is writing the actual MediaWiki software or performing one of those tasks, but that's a very small organization in comparison to the number of people who edit the encyclopedia, the vast majority of whom do so for free.

9:40um technically you there are some people who edit wikipedia articles for pay as a part of like pr strategies and stuff but that's a whole can of worms and it's uh somewhat controversial well that's actually a good question so i run a pr firm and i know that there are people will come along on both sides and say can you get me a wikipedia page and then others will say for this incredibly large sum of money i can do this for you and the it feels like those people are fighting a losing battle. It's one of the rare cases where capitalism can't really win. And how is it that Wikipedia is so resistant to that kind of stuff?

10:19Right. So there's a lot of resistance from the Wikimedia community towards people who are editing for promotional purposes. Because the whole point of the project is it's supposed to be an encyclopedia, not an advertising space, not a resume, not a place to promote your business or your product. But of course, people want information on Wikipedia about them. And so there are some people who are able to sort of tread that line where they understand Wikimedia policies very well. They understand what is allowed as far as writing about a company without being promotional. They understand what that organization or company or person would need to accomplish in order to achieve those notability requirements.

11:07And then they can write about them. And they do so very transparently. They disclose that they are doing so for compensation, that they've been hired by that person or organization. And they go through the process. And it's very carefully orchestrated. But there are also a bunch of people who do so sort of on the sly. and they don't really disclose that they're doing it for pay. Those are often the people who will sort of cold call you. Like if you've gotten emails, they're like, hey, I can make you a Wikipedia page. A lot of those are sort of scammy, not so reputable organizations. And generally speaking, they actually have a pretty hard time doing what they claim that they can do because they don't tend to understand the policies well.

11:54They try to shoehorn articles into Wikipedia about subjects that are not notable or that are too promotional. And so they tend to get taken down, much to the dismay of the people who pay them quite a lot of money. So if you're listening to this and you've heard from one of those people, I would not recommend hiring them. Just become more important, which I guess is kind of the question. How does Wikipedia actually judge notoriety? What is important? Yeah, so generally speaking, the notability requirements is, it basically goes on how much coverage a subject has received in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.

12:35So if a big newspaper or several newspapers write about you in detail, chances are you might be notable enough for a Wikipedia article. On the flip side, if you're just publishing press releases that's not independent of you, that probably doesn't qualify. If there's just one brief mention of you in a reliable source someplace, that's probably not sufficient. So that's sort of the general guideline. There are other sort of more specific requirements for some sorts of like specific types of topics, you know, like sports players and things like that. But generally speaking, even if someone meets one of those guidelines, they've already met that general guideline where, you know, it's just about the amount of coverage in reliable sources.

13:21And that can be press, that can be academia, it can be books, you know, anything that sort of qualifies as a reliable source.

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16:10Now, recently, CNET, one of the largest tech sites, actually found itself downgraded in reliability. Were you aware of that situation? Did you see that happen? I saw the conversations about it. I wasn't a participant in them, but I sort of watched it happen. So for the listeners, CNET has hundreds of millions of views a month. It's one of the most notable websites, frankly, and has been for decades. So what happened there? Why was this significant website considered less reliable by Wikipedia? Yeah, so Wikipedia has these discussions pretty frequently about different sources and whether or not those sources are generally reliable or sometimes reliable or usually not reliable.

16:59And in order to sort of prevent people from having to have that same conversation every single time they want to cite a source that's heavily cited, you know, like CNET or, you know, the New York Times or something like that, we have this list of very commonly discussed sources where we just discuss, you know, we outline the general reliability of that source. And what you're referring to is a recent discussion where some editors decided we really needed to revisit the general reliability of CNET, which was previously considered fairly reliable for sourcing on Wikipedia. And the reason for that is that there had been a pretty noticeable change in the quality of the material that they were publishing, where it no longer had the level of accuracy that it once did.

17:48The articles that were being published didn't seem to be being edited well or fact-checked well. And so we decided that if you're planning to use CNET as a source, you should really consider this and consider that it's probably not even as reliable as it once was and maybe use something else. Because they've started using AI-generated content and stuff like that that has noticeably affected the quality of the articles that they publish. And what are the ramifications of that downgrading? What does that mean practically? It means that if you're writing a new article on Wikipedia and you want to use CNET as a source, you are somewhat discouraged from doing so now.

18:35It means that where CNET has been used as a source already, editors are going to be looking to improve that sourcing, generally by swapping it out with something that's more reliable. although as notability changes in these publications sometimes older content that was written or published prior to a change at the organization will be considered reliable whereas newer content that's being created now and might be using AI or other tools is not considered reliable anymore so for example we have a couple of sources where we'll say that anything they published before 2015 is fine but anything after that you should take with a grain of salt.

19:20So I think that's partly the case with CNET now as well. So why do you think that Wikipedia is so much better at quality control than, I don't know, Google? Well, I think there's a very different set of incentives at play. Google is a profit-driven corporation. They have other motivations besides providing the person who is using their search engine with the most relevant results. That is ostensibly what they do, but they also have motivations around generating ad revenue and clicks for different groups that are using their service or advertising with them. Wikipedia doesn't have those sometimes conflicting incentives.

20:07The goal of Wikipedia is to deliver the highest quality information that we can, And we're not, you know, there's no advertisements, we're not trying to surface some specific set of content for people based on who is paying, you know, or not paying. It's really just that one incentive. And I think that simplifies things because we can all sort of get behind that one goal. and we aren't trying to juggle multiple things that are sometimes very much in conflict with one another as I think we've seen with Google where that goal of providing the highest quality information to the search user has been very much challenged by the other incentives at play.

20:50So you've edited Wikipedia for about 18 years. I think the simplest question is, why do you still do it? Why did you start? Why do you continue? you? Well, I started because I was a curious kid who discovered that I could, and that was exciting for me. And I have, I don't know, I think there are just some people out there who have like a very specific type of brain where Wikipedia just like sort of tickles it just right, you know, and like doing that kind of editing and, you know, curation just appeals to me. I find it really enjoyable. But I also think that, you know, the project is a really wonderful creation, you know, and I think it provides really important service to the people who have access to it, which is almost anyone.

21:40I mean, it's anyone with an internet connection, and there are even ways to get access to Wikipedia without an internet connection. And so I think that, you know, Maintaining a quality source of high reliability material is incredibly important and arguably getting only more important as other sources of that same type of content are becoming degraded in the way that you just described with Google, for example. So I'm very passionate about it. I think providing high quality information to everyone is one of the most important things that sort of humanity needs to achieve. And so I find that very strongly motivating.

22:18And is there any pressure at all from the Wikimedia Foundation? Do they push people around at all? Not going either way, I'm just wondering what influence they have on the platform. Yeah, it's kind of an unusual relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the editing community. It's sometimes a little bit adversarial, which is sometimes a little confusing to people who are new to the project. But I would say no, the Wikimedia Foundation generally takes a pretty hands-off approach towards the projects that it kind of supports. The Wikimedia Foundation almost never comes in and says, hey, you need to delete that or you need to do something very specific with the content.

23:02There are some very edge cases with legal requests and things like that where they can sometimes do that. but they are very, very conservative on when they will do that. And for the most part, they take that very hands-off approach. The Wikimedia Foundation is mostly concerned with paying the bills, keeping the site online, developing the software that actually powers the encyclopedia and the editing infrastructure and all that, and then trying to contribute and grow the editing community and that type of thing. But they are pretty hands-off when it comes to editing, which I think is actually quite good.

23:40It allows the community to organically develop its own policies and protocols and things like that without the Wikimedia Foundation putting its thumb on the scale. So a more practical question. As an editor, what do you do? Is it just editing? The reason I ask this is you provided me with your Wikipedia editor page, and there's things like unblock, reblock, blog, thanks. What do you do as an editor? What are these numbers about? Because it feels like there's kind of a niche social network hidden inside it. Yeah, there's a lot that happens behind the scenes besides just opening up a page and writing something new.

24:24I do do some of that. I do write pages from scratch once in a while, or I'll go in and edit something if a page is missing something or needs something. But there's also a whole bunch of other sort of administrative work, I guess, that goes on behind the scenes where I will sometimes patrol articles. That's sort of what I described earlier, where people will watch the recent changes to the project and try to just filter out anything that looks abusive or disruptive or honestly just less than productive. Sometimes I try to go around and welcome new editors who are just joining the project. Sometimes they need help, and so I'll try to show them the ropes a little bit.

25:06And then there's the blocking and deletion and things like that, where people who are known as administrators on the project can block an editor who is regularly being disruptive or delete a page if it doesn't meet the requirements that we have defined in our policies and things like that. And so I do some of that as well. So how does one become an administrator? So there's a whole process called requests for adminship where you either put yourself up, you nominate yourself as a candidate or someone else who thinks that you would be a good administrator will do so. And then there's a long process where you answer some questions and then the Wikimedia community votes pretty much on whether or not you have the experience, the mindset, basically the right attitude towards contributing.

25:59and then there's a vote pretty much. And if you pass the threshold, then you are nominated or you become an administrator at that point. So it's something that happens fairly regularly. I did it in 2010, I think. But various people go through it pretty often.

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