Should prison inmates be permitted to edit Wikipedia?
I assisted a prison inmate in placing a request for Wikipedia edits (see this week's In the media). I want to explain what I did, what context this action has in Wikipedia culture, who made the edits, and my own motivation for being involved.
In the context of Wikipedia, nothing extraordinary happened with this, and the matter does not merit special attention. If this matter gets extra attention, then that is because someone chose to make it special among their other options. If anyone outside of Wikipedia wishes to look into Wikipedia culture, then the surprise in this incident might be that Wikipedia seeks to avoid discriminating against any person who follows Wikimedia community rules. I would not have thought to write about it except that a few people have contacted me about this, and I thought that it would be helpful to deconstruct the story to its basics if that would help anyone understand Wikipedia better and participate in constructive conversation.
When I processed the request, I did so casually without much thought and without expecting attention to the action. Any case can be made into a case study, and any case study can be generalized to its essential points. If there is an issue to discuss here, then I wish that it could be discussed outside the context of this particular inmate making the request, and outside the context of my responding to it. In summary, I performed the routine action of posting an editing request on Wikipedia on behalf of a person who asked that any Wikipedia volunteer assist them with this.
The request was in a volunteer queue that could have been answered by anyone, and mostly by chance that I was looking, I pulled the ticket for this request and managed it with some minutes of thought and labor. It is unusual or perhaps unprecedented on Wikipedia for an incarcerated person to request edits in Wikipedia, but I treated this request in the same way that I would treat any of the hundreds of other requests that come to Wikipedia in this task queue every week. In the narrative of Wikipedia, I hope that I did not do anything remarkable or surprising here except perhaps be standing for Wikipedia duty. Another person taking this ticket might have negotiated it to the same end, or any person with a conviction in their background and access to a computer might have posted their own request. In either of those cases, would we be asking the same question: should prison inmates be permitted to edit Wikipedia?