Uniting and reigniting critical Wikimedia research
Article / Journal
Author(s) / editor(s):
Francesca Sidoti
,
Heather Ford
,
Steve Jankowski
Year: 2025
Abstract:
Over the past fifteen years, Wikimedia's technical relationships and social meanings have shifted from supporting the creation of an encyclopedia that seeks to store humanity's knowledge to a pivotal component of global technical infrastructure. Such a change demands a reassessment of what critical Wikimedia researchers examine, the methods that inform their analyses, and the theories that emerge from their work. In connection with “A Manifesto for Wikimedia Research: Critically Studying Media as Infrastructure”, this commentary calls for researchers to critically examine Wikimedia's role as global knowledge infrastructure. The manifesto emphasizes the need to analyze power dynamics, policy-practice tensions, linguistic and cultural plurality, and the impact of algorithms. It also advocates for historicizing Wikimedia's epistemology, recognizing the dispossession of the commons, and understanding its data as partial and evolving. Ultimately, it urges interdisciplinary collaboration to investigate and reshape the knowledge commons critically. We conclude by emphasizing that this call-to-action demands working together to interrogate and reconstitute the knowledge commons.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517251357292
Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein