Stephen Harrison on Wikipedia’s role and its lessons for news media

Stephen Harrison is one of the most prominent tech journalists on the Wikipedia beat. He’s reported on the platform since 2018 for Slate with a thesis that Wikipedia deserves more coverage as the place that shapes how millions of people view the world.

When Harrison set out to tell Wikipedia’s story in book form, he chose to write a fictional novel rather than a non-fiction account. His book “The Editors”, published in August, uses Wikipedia’s fictional version as a scene for a cybertech thriller. “It’s an interesting setting because people use it every day, but it’s still somewhat mysterious how it works behind the scenes”, Harrison told The Fix. 

Back in real life, Wikipedia plays a unique role in the digital landscape. It also offers interesting lessons for news publishers. That’s what we discussed with Harrison in a recent interview, edited here for length and clarity.

What role do you think Wikipedia plays in the internet information ecosystem?

It is infrastructure. It is a knowledge base that powers other Internet resources. It powers Google knowledge graphs and has started to power AI.

It’s not a for-profit enterprise, but is used by for-profit tech companies like Google and OpenAI. It’s almost like a utility that people rely on and that we want to make sure is continuing to provide a trustworthy resource to the broader Internet.

What do journalists misunderstand about Wikipedia? 

Sometimes journalists misunderstand that something can happen very quickly on Wikipedia. It’s gotten better now, but there used to be a lot of news stories about Wikipedia vandalism, about mistakes that actually were fixed within seconds.

Wikipedia is a little bit undercover because many contributors choose to remain anonymous. They aren’t like Instagram or TikTok stars. While anybody can edit, there’s a relatively high barrier to entry in learning policies, using reliable sources, and adding information the right way. These policies and seeming bureaucracy can be challenging for journalists to describe.

Wikipedia has been praised for being effective at combating misinformation, especially its English-language edition. What’s your view? How effective is Wikipedia at fighting misinformation?

What’s interesting about Wikipedia is that editors can delete information. When someone says something wrong on X, I can try and get a community note on there, but I can’t really delete that person’s post. That’s the difference with Wikipedia, where information can be deleted and re-added. For information to stick on Wikipedia, there must be consensus about it.

Wikipedia is successful because it starts with a different principle than a lot of political media. It asks, “What is a reliable source for this information?” Then it curates and describes that information on a page. It’s not aiming to help one political cause, but to curate information from reliable sources. It’s mostly describing what’s in reliable sources rather than writing original content.

It can go wrong in non-English editions with fewer contributors or ideological capture by one group. It can also reflect biases in mainstream media sources. It’s an ecosystem where issues in one part affect the other.

Is there anything news organisations can learn from Wikipedia?

News publishers could get a sense of objectivity and neutrality from Wikipedia. Some good Wikipedia articles teach the controversy, while journalists sometimes try to serve their political base instead. A neutral point of view, though a journalistic principle, is sometimes embodied more by Wikipedians than journalists themselves.

This isn’t necessarily the journalists’ fault, but rather the news market that rewards clickbait and attention-seeking content. However, journalists should remember that neutrality is a professional goal, something Wikipedia editors practice daily.

Wikipedia doesn’t rely on clickbait because it has a different funding model, it relies on donations. Is there anything the media can learn just from Wikipedia’s business model?

I do think much of the media’s problems are driven by the business model. A [more widespread] NPR nonprofit model or other nonprofit models might remove some pressure. This could allow more publishers to pursue the objective of accurately describing facts, rather than just chasing clicks.

You mentioned community notes on Twitter, which are somewhat close to Wikipedia in spirit. Is there anything other platforms and news organisations can learn from Wikipedia’s collaborative approach to fact-checking?

I think so. Reddit has a similar approach with upvotes and downvotes, and comments. I wonder if there could be a way to add edits to Reddit posts that can be reflected somewhere, even if not on the main post.

Some corporations are finding that creating internal wikis is useful for distributed knowledge, decentralisation, and continuous updating. We live in a complex world, and a Wikipedia-type model helps because it allows people to edit on the fly and adjust. There’s a lot to be learned from this model.

Source of the cover photo: Oberon Copeland via Unsplash

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