Wikipedia celebrates its 25th anniversary this month as the internet’s most reliable knowledge source. Yet behind the celebrations, a troubling pattern has developed: the volunteer community that built this encyclopedia has lately rejected a key innovation designed to serve readers. The same institution founded on the principle of easy and open community collaboration could now be proving unmovable—trapped between the need to adapt and an institutional resistance to change.
Wikipedia’s Digital Sclerosis
Political economist Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for studying the ways communities successfully manage shared resources—the “commons.” Wikipedia’s two founders (Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger) established the internet’s open-source encyclopedia 25 years ago on principles of the commons: its volunteer editors create and enforce policies, resolve disputes, and shape the encyclopedia’s direction.
But building around the commons contains a trade-off, Ostrom’s work found. Communities that make collective decisions tend to develop strong institutional identities. And those identities sometimes spawn reflexively conservative impulses.
Giving users agency over Wikipedia’s rules, as I’ve discovered in some of my own studies of Wikipedia, can lead an institution away ultimately from the needs of those the institution serves.
Wikipedia’s editors have built the largest collaborative knowledge project in human history. But the governance these editors exercise increasingly resists new generations of innovation.
Paradoxically, Wikipedia’s revolutionarily collaborative structure once put it at the vanguard of innovation on the open internet. But now that same structure may be failing newer generations of readers.
Does Wikipedia’s Format Belong to Readers or Editors?
There’s a generational disconnect today at the heart of Wikipedia’s current struggles. The encyclopedia’s format remains wedded to the information-dense, text-heavy style of Encyclopaedia Britannica—the very model Wikipedia was designed to replace.
A Britannica replacement made sense in 2001. One-quarter of a century ago, the average internet user was older and accustomed to reading long-form content.
... continue reading