Wikipedia's Blind Spots: Jimmy Wales on Content Gaps and the Outsider Dilemma
In a new interview, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales offers insights into Wikipedia's corporate content gaps and how volunteer editors should respond to complaints from the people they write about.
Photo of Jimmy Wales by Zachary McCune / Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s been a long time since Jimmy Wales was actually in charge of Wikipedia, but no one’s opinion about the site carries more weight than his. Nearly 20 years removed from active leadership of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wales’s fame and founder status make him the unofficial spokesperson for the Wikimedia movement. These days, Jimmy Wales’s primary role is simply being Jimmy Wales.
Earlier this month, New York magazine called on him to reprise this role for an interview not tied to any news peg, mostly just asking Wales why Wikipedia is “still so goood”. New York is correct to recognize Wikipedia as one of the last bastions upholding “the utopian dreams of the 1990s web.”
Indeed, visiting Wikipedia feels like re-entering a time when the Internet was meant to bring us together; it is one of the few online platforms that does not use algorithms to separate people from information and from each other. Perhaps that’s one reason why Wikipedia remains so popular today.
Here at Beutler Ink, we took particular interest in two key topics discussed: the overlooked content gap on Wikipedia affecting large but non-famous companies and organizations, and how Wikipedia editors should handle situations where individuals are upset about how they are written about.
Companies and Content Gaps
In the interview, Wales shares an anecdote about how, when preparing to speak at a trade conference for makers of “flexible packaging” (e.g. tin cans), he discovered Wikipedia had little to say about this “unbelievably boring” industry or its key players. Wales notes, “People write about what they know and what they’re interested in; if they’re not interested in something, we’re not going to have much about it.”
We can attest to this. Wikipedia’s mission to compile the world’s knowledge includes companies and organizations, but volunteers rarely choose to spend their free time writing corporate histories. This is where Beutler Ink can help out both. When companies see that Wikipedia isn’t telling their story right, we’ll organize their information to meet Wikipedia’s content guidelines and work through community processes to seek placement. While certainly challenging, this can very much be a win-win.
But editor disinterest isn’t the only issue limiting Wikipedia’s business coverage. In the interview, Wales and his interlocutor discuss why some celebrity biographies seem to cut off around 2013. Wales attributes this to the cresting peak of Wikipedia participation (see chart below left), when more editors were available to write such stories. While unmentioned in the article, a similar effect seems to be the case with corporate profiles as well.
But the timeline doesn’t quite line up. Wikipedia’s peak participation was in 2007, followed by a modest decline before stabilizing around—actually—2013. While there could be a delayed effect, a better explanation is the decline in circulation (see chart below right), budgets, staff, and news stories available to write articles from. Unfortunately, these have not at all stabilized.
Active Editors at the English Wikipedia (2002-2023)
Chart: https://stats.wikimedia.org/, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Credit where due: Wales himself has recognized the importance of news and once launched a publication called WikiTribune, though it was not a success. Meanwhile, the Wikimedia movement technically has WikiNews, which has never caught on. And while the Wikimedia Foundation’s grant-making has grown significantly, it has never invested significantly in news gathering.
This could be worth reconsidering: if sources provide the building blocks of Wikipedia articles, long-term sustainability for the encyclopedia could also mean sponsoring non-profit journalism to provide the sources Wikipedia needs to thrive.
Thinking Like a N00b
The second topic of interest comes at the end of the interview, when Wales is asked why people shouldn’t edit their own Wikipedia entry. It’s a topic Wales has long been on the record about, having si-advised people and companies to avoid making direct edits and instead submit edit requests for community review.
As Wales observes, editing about yourself can be “emotionally difficult” and risks attracting negative attention. But he is also more empathetic than many Wikipedia editors encountering self-interested editing activity, even going so far as to offer a mental narrative for how editors should approach it:
“Well, that’s not really how to be a good Wikipedian, but it’s not your job to be a good Wikipedian. You’re just somebody who had a bad false claim in your Wikipedia entry and you’re upset.”
This is exceptionally wise, and demonstrates a level of thoughtfulness that Wikipedia editors concerned with conflict of interest editing should take to heart. From the Wikipedia editor’s point of view, for an outside entity to come in and edit their own Wikipedia article is a nuisance at best and can even be harmful to the encyclopedia. But that is not how the outsider thinks about it: they know Wikipedia is important, they have heard Wikipedia describe itself as a platform anyone can edit, so if something is wrong, they feel compelled to fix it.
Wikipedia’s processes for addressing these situations aren’t perfect. They can and should improve. At Beutler Ink, we think about these challenges often and, when we can, have contributed to improving Wikipedia’s systems. Wikipedia will never be perfect, which is why we’ll keep helping our clients understand Wikipedia, and vice versa.
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