Review of Wikipedia @ 20
- MIT Press, 376 pp, softcover, ISBN 978-0-262-53817-6, October 2020
- Co-edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner
- Text available online at https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
— Jimmy Wales, Slashdot July 7, 2004
Jimmy Wales set Wikipedians an impossible task, of course, but as Wikipedia approaches its twentieth birthday in January we can, with the benefit of hindsight, assess how far we've come in achieving that goal. We can assess where we stand now – our successes and challenges – which leads us to planning for the future.
That's the goal of Wikipedia @ 20, an academic collection of 22 chapters, written by 34 authors and co-authors representing many aspects of the history, present, and future of the world's best online encyclopedia.
At 376 pages, it's a densely packed tome – you're not going to be able to read it all before Christmas – but perhaps it's not long enough to fully cover its immense topic. As a publication of MIT Press, it's academically oriented, but it's also a community collaboration much like its topic, and draws its authors from both the academic and Wikipedia communities. These overlapping communities give the book a rare combination of points-of-view. We can assess how well Wikipedia has worked in both theory and practice. Long-time Wikipedians will find many old friends and acquaintances, including the former Chairperson of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees, Phoebe Ayers; Yochai Benkler, Heather Ford, Jake Orlowitz, and Benjamin Mako Hill. Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director Katherine Maher writes the capstone chapter that reviews the past and present but focuses on the WMF's plans for the future.
Most authors give a brief history of Wikipedia from their specialty's point of view, so this book will be an invaluable source for the movement's history for the foreseeable future. Most authors also address their personal histories on Wiki as if their first encounter was a life-changing event.
Defining the scope of Wikipedia in less than a paragraph is difficult, but perhaps we can say "anything that might be part of human knowledge". Defining the scope of the book is also difficult, but let's say "anything that might appear in Wikipedia". Some fairly unusual topics appear, as you'd expect on any writing about Wikipedia. For example, there's a full chapter on using Wikipedia offline.
Bias is perhaps the most common topic mentioned, appearing in at least 13 chapters. Misinformation, disinformation, or fake news appear in at least eight chapters.