Wikipedia Culture, Journalistic Culture, and Academic Culture

Have you ever seen a Wikipedia page warn you that it cites too many primary sources? Or wondered why the most active Wikipedia editors tend to be understimulated older or younger people but rarely practitioners, researchers, or journalists?¹ It turns out these two factors are connected, because Wikipedia has a unique culture which is hard for academics or journalists to engage with.

The people who created Wikipedia’s culture were making it up as they went along. I can’t tell the story of how it happened, but they came up with a set of standards of behaviour which are not the same as in any profession. One of these is the idea of no original research. Wikipedians love long policy documents which cross-reference other documents, but the WP:NOR policy (“no original research”) contains clauses like:

• “Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources, and to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic’s notability and avoid novel interpretations of primary sources. All analyses and interpretive or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary or tertiary source and must not be an original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors.”
• “Never use self-published sources—including but not limited to books, zines, websites, blogs, and social network posts—as sources of material about a living person, unless written or published by the subject of the article. ‘Self-published blogs’ in this context refers to personal and group blogs.”
• Even though hosting a Wikipedia page is basically free, Wikipedia has a provision for deleting articles on the basis of notability. Notability is a term of art to Wikipedia and I won’t try to explain it.

The rule about secondary sources means that, for example, if the only source for an ancient person is a few lines in Strabo’s Geography, and Wikipedia currently cites a book or article which misrepresents those lines, you can not strike out the book or article and quote Strabo. Strabo is a primary source. You need to find another book or article which talks about Strabo to cite, and then argue why the first book or article is not a valid expert opinion. “But isn’t deciding whether that book or article is a valid opinion a matter of judgment?” you might ask. After all, most misconceptions about the ancient world come from people with a PhD who are writing outside their area of expertise or without pre-publication peer review. Deciding what counts as a valid opinion is a judgment call, but to Wikipedia, it is not for editors to decide”does this book or article accurately represent the only possible source?” This is true even if it only takes basic arithmetic or reading comprehension to verify that the secondary source is incorrect.

The rule against self-published sources means that if someone got in the news for his leadership in an organization, then left it under a cloud of scandal, you can cite the favourable news story but not the scandal unless the scandal was reported in the news. Even citing court records can be difficult because they are a primary source. Serial fraudsters love to create a series of social media pages about themselves and citing them in their own Wikipedia articles, because Wikipedia articles are not allowed to cite their critics. People who make their living by failing upwards can also exploit Wikipedia in this way: cite the press release about them being put in charge of a project, but not the hints why they moved on to another project under another manager just before the first project was restructured. Google and Bing rank Wikipedia pages highly, which is good if there is a ‘poison pen’ campaign against someone on social media and private websites, but bad if someone is sleazy in private and business life but knows how to look good on Wikipedia.

And the rule about notability is very subjective, and weights Wikipedia articles about people to people who appeared in journalism during their lifetimes. A certain kind of Wikipedian loves flagging articles on some kinds of people as “not notable” whether that is female scientists or Nazi war criminals. A racist crank once argued for white supremacy because of the number of entries for people from different parts of the world in a biographical dictionary. Of course this reflects that until this century, scholarly books in English were overwhelmingly weighted towards men, places, and events from western Europe and its colonies, not that those people, places, or events are objectively the most important. Henry V of England was not more important than the Yongle Emperor, but books and encyclopedias in English have more to say about kings of England than emperors of China.

Culture Clash

If you are trained as a journalist or an academic, these Wikipedia rules should make you feel uncomfortable. Old-school journalists love talking to people, even if they could get the same information quicker and more accurately by reading. They often report information which they got by asking someone and never checked. They quote from their notes rather than listen to a recording. Anyone who has been close to a few stories know that journalists get things wrong all the time because they never have enough time or background knowledge.² Academics know that there is no alternative to using professional judgment and reading and evaluating the arguments and evidence for yourself. We know that empty references³ are common and that a lot of scholarship has the forms of scholarship without a chance of moving closer to the truth (cargo-cult science). We know that many of our tertiary publications such as textbooks are out of date or shoddily written even if they come from a large and well-known press. While science is verified trust, anyone who does research has the responsibility to show how we know some things and decide which scientific research is convincing.

You could argue that the Wikipedia approach is better for Wikipedia’s mission, and that academic culture and journalistic culture have many foolish and counterproductive customs. No news agency or academic journal faces the risk of publishing anything that anyone with an IP address sends it without any employee or volunteer looking at it first. But many Wikipedia rules are totally contrary to how journalists and academics learn to do things.

Good Wikipedia editors ignore these rules whenever they would cause more harm than good. This can work until they get into an argument with someone fluent in Wikipedia’s rules. In my experience, German Wikipedia is better at citing primary sources and key research literature than English Wikipedia, and I suspect they have editors who ignore the written policies when those policies would cause harm.

If you have enough time and resources, you can play this game by (for example) having a friendly journalist publish an interview in which you say that you are divorced because the interview is an excellent secondary source according to Wikipedia but your website is a self-published primary source so questionable according to Wikipedia. When Steven Pinker arranged for Matthew White to publish Atrocitology as a book, he turned an Unreliable Self-Published Source into a Reliable Secondary Source even though the research was basically the same. If I wanted to cite one of my blog posts on Wikipedia, I could turn it into a magazine article and cite that. It does not matter to Wikipedia whether the journalist or the magazine performed any independent verification, just that they are not self-published sources. Anyone can memorize the Wikipedia rules, build allies among the mods, and learn to argue like a barracks lawyer. But all of this takes time, and experts, academics, and journalists rarely have a lot of time to spend on unpaid writing and arguing. And if you are deeply invested in how journalists decide what is true, or how scientists decide what is true, learning how Wikipedia decides what is true is hard and unsettling. This is why very few academics or journalists edit English Wikipedia, except the occasional article on a topic with black-and-white answers which is not tied into the culture war or community identity. Its much easier to get classicists to edit the Wikipedia page on Thasos than on ancient Macedonian ethnicity because editing the second page leads to arguments with angry nationalists. The most active Wikipedia editors tend to be people with lots of time on their hands to do research, memorize rules, and argue with strangers on the Internet.

I don’t know anyone who has written the story how Wikipedia developed norms which are so different from academic or journalistic norms. Can any of my gentle readers suggest something?

Edit: Jessamyn West recommends research by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_M._Reagle_Jr. who sees Wikipedia through a feminist lens

Back before he got a full-time job in archaeology, Martin R. encountered these issues in https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/wikipedians-check-this-out/ and https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/im-a-wikipedia-inclusionist/ You can see the back and forth in the comments where Wikipedians point out situations where their rules make sense, and Rundkvist replies “ok, but for the type of Wikipedia page I work on, these rules are silly! And why enforce rules when they cause harm?” Molly White is a good example of someone who is enthusiastic about Wikipedia and only later became a journalist. Spencer McDaniel describes a pretty typical career of being very active on Wikipedia as a high-school student, then moderately active on Quora as an undergraduate, then focused on her own sites and publications since beginning a Master’s ‘s program. Language Hat has some examples of people with endless energy but limited skill in a language taking over its Wikipedia. Matthew White was a Wikipedia critic from 2004 to 2006. Deletionism can be a helpful keyword, since it can mean both arguments about whether a page should exist, and debates about what is a valid source and which perspectives are worthy of acknowledgement. Should a Wikipedia page for a business name the executives, but not workers who died in an industrial accidents caused by those captains of industry?

(drafted 5 April 2024, updated 11 July 2024)

1. It was reddit user DinoInNameOnly who noticed in 2019 that there are Wikipedia users who edit every four minutes and Amazon buyers who review eight books per day and a thousand Wikipedians out of millions of unique visitors make two thirds of Wikipedia edits and proclaimed that “Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People.” Its hard to post so often when you are establishing your career or raising small children. https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ ↩︎
2. Wikipedia: Reliable Sources mentions many of these issues, but can’t push them too far because the whole site depends on some online sources being reliable by default ↩︎
3. “Empty references are references that do not contain any original evidence for the phenomenon under investigation, but strictly refer to other studies to substantiate their claim. … Empty references can go through several iterations with each subsequent author citing empty references that in turn cite other empty references.” – Anne-Will Harzing, “Are Our Referencing Errors Undermining Our Scholarship and Credibility? The Case of Expatriate Failure Rates,” Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 2002), pp. 127-148 ↩︎