CV NEWS FEED// An analyst at PirateWire recently wrote an article explaining how Wikipedia changed from an information source to a pillar of social activism and advocacy.
Ashley Rindsberg wrote in an August 5 article that there were two pivotal moments in the change: the first was in 2017, with the creation of the Wikimedia Movement Strategy, and in 2019, when a Wikipedia editor was fired, launching a wave of progressivism.
Rindsberg introduces several intertwined entities in the article which are pivotal in order to track the shift: Wikipedia, the website; the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), an NGO that owns the website; and the Wikimedia Endowment, a donor-advised fund established in 2016.
In 2017, a project called the Wikimedia Movement Strategy was launched to fund Wikimedia “in perpetuity” with the Wikimedia Endowment. Rindsberg explains, “where Wikipedia had been built on the principle of decentralized knowledge,” allowing anyone who wished to contribute to and edit articles, the Movement Strategy transitioned the model to one of “top-down social justice activism and advocacy.”
The Movement strategy focused on “inclusivity,” and tried to counter the fact that 80% of Wikipedia’s editors were men. Katherine Maher, who launched the Movement Strategy and at the time was the CEO and executive director of WMF, said that she opposed the “free and open” model of Wikipedia. According to Rindsberg, Maher said Wikipedia’s editing model was rooted in “white male Westernized construct” that resulted in the “exclusion of communities and language.”
The new Wikipedia model of “top-down social justice” was illustrated in a 2019 incident where an editor with the handle “Fram” was banned for a year, Rindsberg explains. He had been accused of harassing a younger contributor named Laura Hale, who at the time was an Australian PhD student who contributed to articles on women’s sports and feminism.
Fram had around 200,000 edits when he was banned, but he “was also seen as sometimes being sharp-tongued with editors whose contributions he thought violated policy,” Rindsberg adds. Hale claimed that his harassment consisted of leaving comments on her Talk page, which is where editors communicate about each other’s edits.
Fram’s ban, however, did not come about in the typical way, Rindsberg explains: “Instead of coming from the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee (Arbcom), the panel of editors empowered to make such decisions, the ban was handed down directly by Wikimedia Foundation (WMF).”
In response to Fram’s ban, 20 experienced editors resigned. Rindsberg explains, “the ban and subsequent backlash were tied to a massive culture shift at Wikipedia, precipitated by the rise of a new social-justice-minded power structure at Wikimedia Foundation,” namely, the Movement Strategy.
Rindsberg mentions that another extenuating circumstance affected Fram’s ban. Hale was in a romantic relationship with a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees named Maria Sefidari. Rindsberg adds that Sefidari worked with the executive director in “setting the literal agenda for the WMF Board of Trustees, which oversees financial aspects related to the Foundation.”
Rindsberg points to other shifts in Wikipedia’s operations that were results of centralization and focus on inclusion. In 2020, they launched the Wikiproject Black Lives Matters, which sought to address “systemic bias” and asked editors to focus on expanding pages about topics like police brutality and National Anthem protests.
In explaining the shift, Rindsberg also pointed to one of Wikimedia Endowment’s biggest supporters: Google. Google has contributed $180 million to the Tides Foundation between 2016 and 2018, and Rinsberg called it Wikipedia’s “unofficial content partner.” The Endowment is part of the Tides Foundation, which Rindsberg describes as “a leftist mega-fund” that focuses on social change and social justice.
Although the Endowment was only supposed to raise $100 million, “By last year, the Endowment had around $119 million in assets in addition to $250 million in assets owned by Wikimedia Foundation.” Rindsberg argued that by having a donor-advised fund at Tide, donors are provided with “a layer of anonymity” for those who prefer not to be identified, and also “gives known donors a buffer between their contributions and the grants that WMF would make on the other end of the pipeline.”
The Wikimedia Foundation is currently lobbying the UN so it can influence the Global Digital Compact, which sets guidelines regulating the internet. Rindsberg explains that this Compact is essentially the internet’s version of the UN’s Global Compact that established DEI regulations in businesses around the world.
Wikipedia’s “shining new outlook on controlling who gets to create, spread, own, and even define information is a fundamental philosophical shift from the decentralized vision set out by Wikipedia at its birth as not an entity,” Rindsberg concluded, “but a process for creating knowledge accessible to all — and owned by none.”
