THE IMPORTANCE OF IMPROVING POLITICAL SCIENCE AND POLITICS TOPICS ON WIKIPEDIA

Why should political scientists care about ensuring the quality of political science and politics content on Wikipedia? In short, because it is the most widely used source of encyclopedic knowledge in the world. As the 13th most visited website in the world (eighth in the United States), it lags behind only a few notable search engines, online retailers, and social media platforms.Footnote ² Furthermore, popular search engines often use Wikipedia articles as a “first-hit” source of information.Footnote ³ Similar to how we use it for information about other disciplinary topics, other people are using it to learn about our field as an entry point to scholarly work. Thus, it is important that Wikipedia’s knowledge is accurate, complete, and unbiased for the broad goal of ensuring accessible and high-quality encyclopedic information on politics and political science.

Because of its open-access nature, Wikipedia has the potential to address important local and global inequalities in access to knowledge by providing substantive summaries of scholarship that otherwise are gated. Whereas many can access Wikipedia on the internet, both hardcopy and electronically gated published sources typically are too expensive for most individuals unless they have access to a well-funded higher-education library. Such inaccessibility is especially acute for Global South populations, even at higher-education institutions, but rapid expansion in internet access is rendering Wikipedia accessible to many more of these populations. As described by Martha Wilfahrt and Kristin Michelitch (Reference Wilfahrt and Michelitch2022) in this symposium, Wikipedia also has the power to make a special impact here—Global South populations often are limited to state broadcasters as sources of political information, which seldom archive historical information and can be biased in favor of incumbent regimes.

Contrary to initial skepticism, scholarly assessments of Wikipedia articles across diverse disciplines (see the meta-analysis in Mesgari et al. Reference Mesgari, Okoli, Mehdi, Nielsen and Lanamäki2015), including political science (Brown Reference Brown2011), tend to find existing articles to be accurate (i.e., do not contain misinformation). However, where they need improvement typically is in regard to their completeness (i.e., do not contain all information that scholars deem necessary), including their unbiasedness (i.e., do not present all perspectives and/or maintain a neutral point of view).

These findings, of course, are a consequence of how articles are edited through crowdsourcing. Many people do not realize that editorial supervision exists to ensure policy compliance. Although anyone can edit an entry, edits are monitored by more experienced editors and administrators for adherence to Wikipedia guidelines such as neutral writing and proper citations using reliable published sources. Certain articles (e.g., medical information, living persons, and controversial topics) are heavily and systematically monitored. Editor groups (called WikiProjects)Footnote ⁴ maintain lists of missing or low-quality pages, with bots often aiding in those endeavors.Footnote ⁵

It is critical, however, that for crowdsourcing to work, a “crowd”—not only one individual—is needed to contribute, especially on more controversial entries in the realm of politics and political science. For example, two studies examining articles on US politics have shown that, compared to the Encyclopedia Britannica (created by experts), Wikipedia displays equivalent bias when articles have undergone revision but can be more biased when editorship has been minimal (Greenstein and Zhu Reference Greenstein and Zhu2012; Reference Greenstein and Zhu2018). Savvy readers also can make their own assessment; as Anasuya Sengupta and Brooke Ackerly (Reference Sengupta and Ackerly2022) note in this symposium, the complete editorial history of each page is available (under the “talk” tab) for anyone to determine whether an article has been written primarily by one editor or if claims have been contested.

A running list exists for missing political science articles.Footnote ⁶ We argue that what is missing (both on and off this list) reflects well-known systematic biases related to the “politics of knowledge” in political science, and we highlight four biases tackled by symposium contributors through student initiatives.

SYSTEMATIC KNOWLEDGE GAPS AND BIASES

Systematic biases in Wikipedia content and cited sources have been a central concern of the Wikimedia FoundationFootnote ⁷ and a subject of much external coverage of Wikipedia.Footnote ⁸ Political science and politics topics are no exception. There are two main sources of these biases. First, although crowdsourcing promises to democratize the editorship of Wikipedia, as a community of volunteers, its editors are not representative. Therefore, although crowdsourcing critically widens the decision-making power over which entries are included relative to a group of experts, Wikipedia editors are disproportionately from historically privileged groups: the Global North, young, white, and male.Footnote ⁹ Thus, content tends to be tailored toward the interests, abilities, and perspectives of those who are relatively privileged (Sengupta and Ackerly Reference Sengupta and Ackerly2022). Whereas Greenstein and Zhu (Reference Greenstein and Zhu2018) noted that increasing the crowd of editors reduces bias, increasing the diversity of these editors is certain to make an impact.

Second, Wikipedia’s editors, regardless of their identity, must cite published sources that fellow editors assess as reliable.Footnote ¹⁰ When controversy exists, encyclopedic neutrality norms call for editors to represent each point of view with the weight and credulity afforded to it by the best sources of information on the topic.Footnote ¹¹ It is problematic that available published knowledge in political science, of course, is widely documented to overrepresent privileged groups (e.g., based on class, race/ethnicity, and gender).Footnote ¹² Political scientists also have documented that published works by overrepresented groups are more likely to be promoted as important (e.g., cited, listed for syllabi, or retweeted) (Bisbee, Larson, and Munger Reference Bisbee, Larson and Munger2020).Footnote ¹³

Furthermore, Wikipedia policies on reliable sources for citation can compound this skew. In an endeavor to promote the accuracy and reliability of the information, Wikipedia restricts information sources to published work. Although in many ways this is reasonable, one consequence of this policy is that editors may not contribute their own unpublished knowledge (e.g., original data analysis and interview material) due to conflicts of interest. Given the disproportionate hurdles for underrepresented groups to develop a career in knowledge production and creating published work (e.g., academia and journalism), a lag thus exists in their ability to contribute knowledge.Footnote ¹⁴

STUDENT INITIATIVES TO ADDRESS SYSTEMATIC KNOWLEDGE GAPS AND BIASES

Some political scientists edit Wikipedia as part of an individual mission to close knowledge gaps for a global audience. However, a different and potentially more impactful way that political scientists could improve Wikipedia is through student initiatives in higher education. In the 10 years of its existence, for example, students in courses with Wiki-Edu collaborations are responsible for making more content for Wikipedia than the last print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Footnote ¹⁵

In many ways, students are ideal contributors. With support from librarians and subject-expert instructors, they can access the gated knowledge resources of a university. As Wilfahrt and Michelitch (Reference Wilfahrt and Michelitch2022) argue, students are “semi-experts” able to understand and synthesize academic writing into language that is accessible to laypeople. More complicated topics that require additional training might be best served by graduate students, as demonstrated by Baltz (Reference Baltz2022). Finally, students tend to be a more diverse population in gender and ethnic backgrounds than the standard editorship of Wikipedia, which has the potential to diversify the content through different lenses. For example, whereas 86% of the editorship of Wikipedia is male, 59% of students undertaking WikiEdu collaborations are female, with an additional 2% identifying as nonbinary.Footnote ¹⁶

Contributors to this symposium discuss the following four illustrative examples of how student initiatives can address systematic knowledge gaps across political science and politics entries on Wikipedia.

CONCLUSION AND MOVING FORWARD

The mission of most universities includes not only research and teaching but also wider knowledge dissemination in society. Whereas incentives and resources for political scientist professors are more apparent for the research and teaching goals, pathways for knowledge dissemination beyond academic audiences are less clear. Improving Wikipedia is one such path.

This symposium invites political scientists to consider contributing to Wikipedia, with attention given to addressing systematic gaps and biases in its content. It is important to ensure accurate, complete, and unbiased information regarding our discipline on Wikipedia due to its sheer reach and reasonable level of baseline quality (21 years into what many thought would be an untenable project). In fact, given that Wikipedia is the most accessible knowledge resource to most of humanity, it promises to be the widest audience we can impact.

More specifically, we suggest that political scientists support student initiatives as Wikipedia editors. Symposium contributors describe diverse initiatives that not only improve Wikipedia but also achieve an important range of pedagogical goals for students. Moreover, these student initiatives have the potential for a wider impact among students. First, skills gained through firsthand participation in the generation of public knowledge for Wikipedia yield larger lessons for the production and consumption of knowledge writ large. Second, when instructors provide a foundational entry into Wikipedia editorship, students may feel empowered to continue to edit Wikipedia, in either extracurricular clubs or as an independent project—which increasingly is a graduation requirement at many higher-education institutions (Kuh Reference Kuh2008). Without an introduction to editorship from instructors, however, editing Wikipedia may seem to be an unimaginable task for most students.

At a minimum, we aim to convince readers to become—and facilitate their students to become—better consumers of Wikipedia. Although we agree that Wikipedia is not appropriate as a citation for a term paper, it is almost every student’s initial springboard into researching a topic. Rather than preaching “abstinence” from Wikipedia, we instead should teach ourselves and our students to be savvy digital literates, to adjudicate between high- and low-quality articles, and to identify systematic biases.