Wikipedia hasn’t lost sight of its mission 18 years after launch

It’s tough to think about today’s technology enterprises without veering into the negative: the misinformation, the privacy invasions, the greed, the gentrification.

But there is an enormous technology enterprise that not only set itself a humanistic mission but is actually fulfilling that mission. It turned 18 years old this week.

I’m talking about Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is such an established resource in our lives that it’s easy to forget it wasn’t always there. But the world’s free encyclopedia — which now contains more than 48 million articles in some 300 languages — was born on Jan. 15, 2001, with a vision to have “everyone share freely in the world of all knowledge,” as Samantha Lien of the Wikimedia Foundation told me.

What’s remarkable is how well it’s succeeded.

When I think about the way Wikipedia has worked over these past 18 years, it barely sounds believable to me.

Hundreds of thousands of volunteers all over the world, tethered by nothing but their internet connections and a zealous determination to share information, create millions of articles together. They hash out their own rules, they edit and fact-check each other’s work, and they keep up with the world’s fire hose of facts — usually faster than any other media source.

They do it without compensation. They do it without bloodshed. And they do it every hour and every day.

“There’s a saying in our community that ‘It’s a good thing Wikipedia works in practice because in theory it’s a disaster,’” Lien said.

Lien is right. In theory, all of this sounds, at best, disastrously utopian. At worst, it sounds like a Tech 1.0 scam.

Wikipedia’s extreme form of democracy sounds even stranger in 2019 than it must have sounded in 2001. This year, so many of the world’s democracies are grappling with internal hatred and political paralysis. Yet Wikipedia is zipping right along. One of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ early decisions — to run Wikipedia as a nonprofit, rather than to cash out — has paid dividends in terms of the institution’s independence, integrity and its ability to evolve in a changing world.

It’s working with schools, libraries, museums and archives all over the world to help them share their own collections and resources. Its foundation fights for privacy and tries to keep the internet free of political strangleholds. It relies only on individual donors (the average donation is about $15) for its future.

“Increasingly, we’re being asked to serve knowledge beyond our own sites,” Lien said. “For example, a lot of A.I. (artificial intelligence) is trained on Wikipedia. If you ask a home voice assistant a general-knowledge question, there’s a pretty good chance it will respond with something from Wikipedia. So one of our big strategic questions right now is how we can ensure access to all of our free knowledge as the infrastructure around us changes.”

Wikipedia is far from perfect.

Several years ago, a series of surveys found that Wikipedia’s gender balance is as retrograde as that of any other technology institution. In 2014, Lien told me, fewer than 20 percent of Wikipedia editors were women, and fewer than 15 percent of its biographies in the English language were about women. (I would love to see the research on race and ethnicity, which I’m sure is no better.)

There are a variety of reasons for these imbalances, many of which stem from problems outside of Wikipedia. Basically, it boils down to the fact that rich white guys have long been the ones who were given the resources and the societal authority to determine what other people should learn, and, using all kinds of increasingly desperate tactics, they’re still clutching to that privilege today.

But the great thing about Wikipedia is that those who have been historically excluded from information production can easily organize to change things on their own.

The rise of the “edit-a-thon” — organized events to contribute to the online presence of notable women, people of color, LGBTQ people and others — over the past few years came directly out of this challenge.

“When I realized Wikipedia was a resource for me, I started noticing how many artists with huge bodies of work just weren’t on there,” said Dorothy R. Santos, a 40-year-old writer in San Mateo, who has hosted edit-a-thons to create Wikipedia pages for under-documented artists and activists. “Having some kind of agency in terms of crafting knowledge and passing it along feels good.”

Lien told me that one of the Wikimedia Foundation’s key objectives for the future is to “support the world of lived knowledge” — also known as increasing the diversity of its editors, pages and subjects.

If it were any other technology institution saying that, I’d roll my eyes. But Wikipedia has beaten the odds since its beginning, and there’s no reason for me to believe it’s going to stop doing so now.