Matthew Vetter (English Department), with co-author Zachary McDowell (University of Illinois at Chicago), recently published a book titled Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality. The book, which leverages Vetter's 10+ years of researching and teaching with Wikipedia, is a contemporary examination of epistemological policy and practice in what has become the world's largest and most widely-used knowledge archive, the "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit."
As you read this sentence, Wikipedia “develops at a rate of over 1.9 edits per second, performed by editors from all over the world” (“Wikipedia: Statistics”). In the English language version alone, which boasts over 6,355,864 articles on every topic imaginable, an average of nearly 600 new articles are created every day (“Wikipedia:Statistics”). That’s over 91 times larger than Encyclopedia Britannica (“Wikipedia: Size”).
Not only has Wikipedia grown in terms of size over the last two decades since its founding, but the encyclopedia has also matured in terms of accuracy and reliability of its content into what some have called the “Internet’s good grown-up” (Harrison), a community that “exists to battle fake news” (Forsyth), and “the last best place on the Internet” (Cooke). Multiple studies have now shown that Wikipedia is at least as accurate as other encyclopedias, and perhaps even more reliable (Brown; Giles; Hwang et al.; Kräenbring et al.; Taraborelli).
Acknowledging Wikipedia's new status as the world's foremost knowledge repository, the book explores the complex disconnect between the encyclopedia's formalized policy and the often-unspoken norms that govern its knowledge-making processes. More specifically, Vetter and McDowell invoke Steven Thorne's theoretical concept "culture-of-use" to explore and analyze how "linguistic, multimodal, cultural, interactional, and cognitive practices" emerge "in the articulation between the immediate contextual aspects...and the historically sedimented associations, purposes, and values that accrue to a digital communication tool" (56).
While the authors ultimately celebrate the community's ambitions for free and open knowledge, they balance praise with critique through an honest evaluation of Wikipedia's many problems related to diversity and inclusion. By means of this critique, the book illustrates Wikipedia's struggle to combat systemic biases and lack of representation of marginalized topics and identities as it becomes the standard bearer for equitable and accessible representation of reality in an age of digital disinformation and fake news.
is available in both print and (open access) ebook formats from Routledge.