Wikipedia:Thoughts on Wikipedia Editing and Digital Labor

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"Thoughts on Wikipedia Editing and Digital Labor" by Dorothy Howard
April, 2014.

Most Wikipedia editors self-describe themselves as volunteers. Editors generally are not just content producers, but truly believe in Wikipedia’s mission of a free and democratized web along its other social-humanist applications such as providing free and open information about medicine, media, current events, government, and so much more to skimmers and scholars. This is what makes Wikipedia a 'culture,' or as its been called, a 'movement' - words that try to get at the fact that it is more than just a non-profit organization, it is a lifestyle.

But recently I’ve been thinking about what it means for someone to be considered a volunteer when the work they do voluntarily turns into a full-time job and generates all sorts of other bonuses to the ‘movement’ if you like to call it that, like donations to non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, and fiscal benefits to other SEO engines like Google using Wikipedia's open data.

Another question I have related to labor and Wikipedia: What if, in all our good-hearted encouragement to build an editor pool, we have created a small class of obsessive editors that forsakes other types of paid work to make Wikipedia editing their main priority? I raise this question because I feel strongly about digital labor and labor ethics and think Wikipedia should consider what it means to have such a large base of volunteers just as another non-profit might consider whether to take on unpaid interns.

Many editors have taken their work on Wikipedia to the extreme side of an obsession. In 2012, Justin Knapp became the first Wikipedia editor reaching over a million edits. An interview at The Daily Dot reports^[1] :

…so what does he do for a living? ‘I do all kinds of odd jobs for money, but my most recent forty hours a week was pizza delivery,’ he told me in an email. He added parenthetically: “which I lost two weeks ago due to a downturn in sales :/…The hardest working editor on the sixth most popular website in the world is an under-employed former pizza delivery man.

Justin is still the top editor on Wikipedia but is now joined by two other editors who have reached the million edits mark as well as several hundred other editors that have reached six-digits for edits. For these devoted editors, Wikipedia is more than a hobby it is a lifestyle and perhaps also full-time volunteer position.

While Wikipedia is not responsible for its editors getting carried away into editing and making this volunteer work a full-time job, I believe that it must address its indebtedness to these editors. Without them Wikipedia would have millions less articles and be a much less reliable source, let alone a much less promising enterprise for financial donations.