In the ever-expanding digital universe we inhabit, where information zips across the globe in an instant and connectivity knows no bounds, promises of freedom, information, and equality rattle through the hardware. The internet, once a fledgling network of limited possibilities, has blossomed into an all-encompassing tapestry of knowledge so big that it would take an individual approximately 57 years nonstop to visit every single webpage.

The whole wide world is connected through the world wide web. As is the protocol for humanity, the internet is not immune to the hierarchical caste systems that plague society. Digital pecking orders are often defined by interpersonal spheres. The one I'm most familiar with? Celebrities, top. Net-native journalists, top. Influencers, mid-tier. Edgelords, mid-tier. Redditors and shitposters, bottom. Everyone has a place, except for the chronically overlooked "builders," the ones who make this all work. Who builds the backbone for digital democracy?

In the early days, when dial-up connections hummed, a brave new world was born. It was a time when the internet's potential was still shrouded in mystery. Few could have foreseen the seismic shift it would bring to the way we access and share information. In a land far, far away from things like sponcon lies a semi-utopian ideal. A place where information is decentralized and democratized. A place where all content is created equal. A place where the builders build: Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, established in 2001, emerged as a testament to the power of collaboration and the spirit of open knowledge. It became the embodiment of a radical idea – that the collective wisdom of individuals across the globe could create a vast repository of information accessible to all. At the time of writing, there are 6,664,166 articles housed on the site in around 300 languages.

Since its inception, Wikipedia has become a top 10 global website. In 2022, Wikipedia received more visitors than Facebook and more visitors than Reddit and Yahoo combined. By tearing down the barriers of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia's founders harnessed the untapped potential of the internet and paved the way for a new era of democratized knowledge, one that has since become immensely popular and increasingly useful.

Within the expansive digital corridors of Wikipedia, there exists a dedicated community of editors who dedicate themselves to curating, expanding, and refining the wealth of information available to the world. These editors, driven by a shared passion for knowledge and armed with a commitment to information, play an instrumental role in shaping the internet landscape we navigate each day. Their tireless efforts are the building blocks upon which the internet's foundations rest, with Wikipedia standing tall as a testament to their ingenuity and collective wisdom.

KALLI MATHIOS

Can you describe your motivation for becoming a Wikipedia editor and how it relates to your views on the freedom of information?

As a librarian, I work with library catalog data for books, serials, media, and archival material. The way material is classified impacts not only how people find and use information, but also reflects social understanding. Systems of classification have inherent bias, and reproduce the same structures of harm that predominate society. I study this in order to improve my own classification work, and am constantly looking for new methods and critical approaches. I came to Wikidata to initially work with ontologies that were not bound by library classification and closed library systems, hoping to experiment with new ways of sorting things out. As a former public school teacher, I was particularly interested in increasing the visibility of K-12 education on Wikidata as compared to the visibility of higher education and research data.

While Wikidata and Wikipedia contribute to open knowledge, it’s important to ask who open knowledge is for, and how it is organized. In other words, how can we improve upon more traditional knowledge systems and in what ways do we perpetuate the status quo? Working on Wikimedia projects allows me to contribute to something free, multilingual, and collaborative, instead of only consuming media or creating content for the benefit of social media platforms and advertisers.

While it still operates in this ecosystem, Wikipedia is one of the earliest visions of a utopian internet still being used in nearly the same way as when it launched in 2001; Wikidata provides an incredibly friendly interface for learning hands-on data skills with real world consequences. This has made me more aware of my agency as both an internet user and librarian, and how I can positively contribute to an internet that’s becoming oversaturated with AI generated content.

How have your experiences as a Wikipedia editor changed your perspective on the spread of information on the internet?

Editing has shown me how information moves between free, open information systems and the commercial web. That said, I don’t think having a critical eye means giving up and not engaging with our current information paradigm. Adding notable books, people, and concepts to Wikidata can help enter these topics into the mainstream and provide legitimacy to emerging ideas. It’s also given me a lot to think about in terms of speed; working in library catalogs and performing original cataloging takes great care and time, and sometimes we still aren’t able to fully capture something’s “aboutness”. Edits on Wikidata and Wikipedia can be made and reverted, changed and updated, instantly, by anyone, anywhere. Giving up some of this control has shifted my perspective that classification can be more crowdsourced and participatory.

JIM HENDERSON

How have your experiences as a Wikipedia editor changed your perspective on the spread of information on the internet?

Alas, much of public experience with the Internet is vulgar, being all about how various ignorant authors feel. Wikipedia offers something different, something I think is otherwise not so easy to find. What we provide is somewhat easier access to information much less burdened by the wishes, opinions and feelings of authors including me. Some sites such as Snopes specifically target popular lies; we have a broader mission that requires more authors and reaches more readers.

What has been your most rewarding experience as a Wikipedia editor?

I have the most fun as an editor in meeting my colleagues. I love being with smarter people who have more important things to worry about than whether their smartness is justly recognized. These times of course are fortunately few and short; otherwise they would cloy. They just ought to be twice the length and thrice the frequency that they are.

I also take pleasure in making something work right that was failing, such as an ambiguous sentence or a link to a less than relevant article. After 41 years repairing things for a living, my internal reward system works that way. And teaching. I get a great rush of pride in seeing that a new editor understands how to do something because I taught them. Especially when they use their new powers to find and fix a problem I failed to notice.

How do you see Wikipedia evolving in the future?

As it happens I wrote some bits of Predictions of The End of Wikipedia, and perhaps made it a bit too optimistic about the survival and future usefulness of Wikipedia. Paper encyclopedias of an improved type, edited by qualified scholars, came to be produced late in the 18th century. They changed, grew, and were highly useful until the early 21st century when Wikipedia, written by thousands of amateurs under a new kind of disciplinary system, eclipsed them.

I don't think this new kind of encyclopedia will have a run of two hundred years of great relevance to the life of the mind. Better query software along the lines of Siri, Alexa and Bixby, strengthened by Large Language Models and other developments, will eventually produce a better way to connect all people to the sum of human knowledge. But I'm an elderly man and feel confident that Wikipedia's usefulness will far outlive me.

ANN MATSUUCHI

Can you describe your motivation for becoming a Wikipedia editor and how it relates to your views on the freedom of information?

Building open educational resources is what many librarians and teachers consider as part of our mission. To those of us who want to promote a better understanding of and usage of Wikipedia, it has been an ongoing process of convincing our peers and our students that Wikipedia has value and that we all can play a role in shaping how it - and the internet that relies on it - develops. To me, Wikipedia remains one of the few non-commercial major players online, and that the world needs it to be a public media channel for sharing information in multiple languages.

How have your experiences as a Wikipedia editor changed your perspective on the spread of information on the internet?

I’ve been fortunate to have been able to travel to Wikipedia conferences and meetups in different locations around the world, and it has been inspiring to meet such a diverse group of people all working on different projects with goals of building a true information commons, not governed by paywalls and corporate structures. At the same time, it has also surprised me how when looking at the edit histories of Wikipedia entries that the same usernames appear again and again.

Oftentimes, it is gratifying to meet some of these active, committed, editors in real life at conferences, but it suggests why there might be content gaps too - there is a need for a much broader community of occasional editors who contribute and patrol the Wikipedia space. Power operates online in familiar and predictable ways, and this needs to be acknowledged and actively worked on.

For instance, there are disputes about what stays up on Wikipedia, and some editors aggressively delete what they believe does not belong there. There are also troubling reports of how LGBTQ+ editors face hostilities when contributing to entries, either on subjects related to LGBTQ+ issues or simply as out editors. As in other online spaces, trolling and bullying can be visible in the Wikipedia space.

Can you share your perspective on how the community of Wikipedia editors contributes to a more informed internet?

In an online ecosystem that is increasingly dissimilar to the one in the past that was reliant on traditional media organizations, having a non-commercial and reliable portal to verify our information sources is of utmost importance. Everyone needs to understand how these changes are happening and realize how disinformation and media manipulation is rampant. I have been teaching about the internet and Wikipedia’s role in it, with a friend at my college, Professor Ximena Gallardo C. for several years. We began by teaching courses on the work of science fiction writer Octavia Butler and used Wikipedia as a platform for student research and writing.

We showed students how Wikipedia need not be immediately dismissed, and that their work was of the caliber that it could help other students and readers of Butler’s work all over the world. We found that students could be motivated to write for more than a good grade, and that they wanted their work to be read and freely accessible to the world. We wrote about teaching with Wikipedia in a chapter of a book about pedagogical approaches to Octavia Butler: “‘My Books Will Be Read by Millions of People!’: The LaGuardia Community College Octavia E. Butler Project on Wikipedia.”

JAISON OLIVER

Can you describe your motivation for becoming a Wikipedia editor and how it relates to your views on the freedom of information?

I saw the work being done by AfroCROWD to bring people of African descent into the Wikimedia community and train them to edit Wikipedia. I was inspired to organize an edit-a-thon, and they helped introduce me to the world beyond being a passive reader. I love that whenever I walk into a room I can ask when people last visited Wikipedia, and it's always within the past week. The site is an invaluable resource and our world is made better every day because of the information people obtain through it.

How have your experiences as a Wikipedia editor changed your perspective on the spread of information on the internet?

Just like everyone else, I was told not to trust Wikipedia as a student. But as I've grown, I've become more aware of how issues of representation, bias, and subjectivity were glossed over when using traditional encyclopedias. Helping to grow the community of Wikipedia editors also means helping to develop more thoughtful consumers of information, who are able to gauge reliability and critique sources that may otherwise go unchallenged.

Can you share your perspective on how the community of Wikipedia editors contributes to a more informed internet?

Wikipedia encourages us to take ownership of our collective knowledge and the public record. At times, it can be frustrating dealing with the editor community, but I appreciate seeing people working through those tensions publicly, especially during a time when accurate histories are being undermined. Those of us in the United States are also being pushed to move beyond our English-speaking, USian bubble to fully enjoy a global community with over 300 languages, helping to broaden our horizons and increase our understanding of the world as a whole.

RYAN MCGRADY

What do you contribute? Are there any defining contributions?

When I started editing actively, I did a lot of maintenance work: searching for spelling errors, undoing "vandalism," tidying article presentation, copyediting, and so on. It took a couple years before I was contributing more substantively to articles, and since then have found that I write about whatever interests me at the moment.

I'm drawn to some odd topics, which is perhaps why I was originally drawn to Annie's Depths of Wikipedia account. The last article I created was BRAAAM, the sound that's in basically every action movie trailer since Inception. Some of the others I'm happy with: fictional order of mammals with diversely functional noses, devices used by people living in areas of conflict to create pirate radio stations, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, one of the earliest sorta-kinda encyclopedias, destroying ivory as an elephant conservation strategy, the time a third of everyone in RI lost access to their bank accounts, the most trafficked animal in the world, the first woman engineer at NASA... I've done a lot of New York City-specific topics like a guerilla gardening group that threw "seed grenades" in empty lots on the LES, site of a chocolate flood, the bug lady of AMNH, an event space that almost burned down to an eel in a fire hose and later made "all your dreams come true", a social movement archive, a former squat that's now an arts center... And lately there's been a lot of birds. I was one of the people who got really into birding during the early pandemic, and wound up writing an article about birding in New York City, the Central Park Mandarin duck, Flaco the escaped eagle-owl, a bird rehabilitation hospital, and a woman who led bird walks in Central Park for decades. Oh, and a lot of bird photos. Sorry, that's probably too much.

(Editors note: It was not too much)

Can you describe your motivation for becoming a Wikipedia editor?

I'm motivated by two things: the knowledge that Wikipedia matters, and my interest in the subjects I write about.

Wikipedia is important. We use it every day to learn about the world around us, to form opinions, to do homework, to settle a bet, to prepare for an election, and to inform crucial decisions about ourselves and our loved ones. Doctors use it to inform their interactions with patients, judges use it for summaries of past decisions, and politicians and their aides use it for summaries of issues and policies.

Though difficult to quantify, Wikipedia's effects are everywhere. You can catch a glimpse of its hidden influence when an error pops up in multiple sources, just to find out it can be traced back to Wikipedia. I want people's default source of information to be as good as possible. It's for that reason that I wind up spending a good amount of my time focused on "serious" topics related to politics, social movements, laws, etc.

Obviously the list above doesn't include many of those. I spend time on the others because I'm interested in the topic and want to share it with others. I'm not under the impression that my article on the first human cannonball is going to change the world, but I get a lot of satisfaction from a sense of doing an obscure, interesting subject justice in our shared historical record.

How have your experiences as a Wikipedia editor changed your perspective on the spread of information on the internet?

The main thing that has changed is just since I started uploading a lot of photos. I started noticing pictures I've taken popping up all over the web, in magazines, in books, etc. While a Wikipedia article has many authors, so none are individually credited when another publication uses the text, a photo just has one author, who gets credited when it's used. I started a vanity Google alert for my Wikipedia username, and learned just how many publications rely on Wikipedia (and its sister site that hosts its media, Wikimedia Commons) to illustrate their articles.

Most of them are small publications that likely rely on free images because they don't have the budget to purchase a license. For someone who's not a professional photographer, I just want my photos to be useful, and to that extent it turns out uploading them for use on Wikipedia gives them a life far beyond one website. There are a handful of bird species, buildings, and people for which my photos are now one of the top results in Google Images simply because they've been used so much. Beyond that, although it's not quite changing my perspective, watching Wikipedia since 2007 I've certainly seen its place in the world change.

First it was a quirky little project celebrated by a few tech journalists and Silicon Valley techno-utopians, then it was an immensely popular scourge of the academy, and then savior of accurate information and inoculation against fake news. It was a plucky encyclopedic experiment, then a so-so digital encyclopedia, and now a core part of the world's information infrastructure.

I think that certainly the positive press it got after 2016 made it more acceptable for people to use and even cite Wikipedia, rather than ridiculing it in public while depending on it in private. I have mixed feelings about that -- we may have slid too far the other way -- but it's definitely good for the broader Wikimedia movement. There's a much wider understanding now of how important it is, which is both intimidating and inspiring as a volunteer.