Wikipedia:Thoughts on Wikipedia Editing and Digital Labor
"Thoughts on Wikipedia Editing and Digital Labor" by Dorothy Howard April, 2014.
Most Wikipedia editors self-describe themselves as volunteers and that’s a fact. Editors generally believe in Wikipedia’s mission of a free and democratized web along its other impacts such as providing free and open information about medicine, media, current events, government, and so much more to skimmers and scholars.
But recently I’ve been thinking about what it means for someone to be considered a volunteer when the work they do voluntarily turns into a fulltime jobs and generates all sorts of other bonuses to the ‘movement’ if you like to call it that, and to the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation let alone to other SEO engines like Google. Wikipedia doesn’t usually care to talk about is how its data is used by search engines like Google and Yahoo but I think it should. While I am a firmly committed editor myself, I still feel worried when I think about how my contributions to Wikipedia are indirectly fueling these money-making machines. Someone is making money off my edits, and that is the people using the data that I voluntarily contribute under the guise of ' giving ' to the open access movement.
Another question I have related to labor and Wikipedia: What if, in all our good-hearted encouragement to build an editor pool, we have created a small class of obsessive editors that forsakes other types of paid work to make Wikipedia editing their main priority? I raise this question because I feel strongly about digital labor and labor ethics and think Wikipedia should consider what it means to have such a large base of volunteers just as another non-profit might consider whether to take on unpaid inters.
Many editors have taken their work on Wikipedia to the extreme side of an obsession. In 2012, Justin Knapp became the first Wikipedia editor reaching over a million edits. An interview at The Daily Dot reports:
…so what does he do for a living? ‘I do all kinds of odd jobs for money, but my most recent forty hours a week was pizza delivery,’ he told me in an email. He added parenthetically: “which I lost two weeks ago due to a downturn in sales :/…The hardest working editor on the sixth most popular website in the world is an under-employed former pizza delivery man…
— Daily Dot, Justin Knapp, Daily Dot
Justin is still the top editor on Wikipedia but is now joined by two other editors who have reached the million edits mark as well as several hundred other editors that have reached six-digits for edits. For these devoted editors, Wikipedia is more than a hobby it is a lifestyle and perhaps also full-time volunteer position. While Wikipedia is not responsible for its editors getting carried away into editing and making this volunteer work a full-time job, I believe that it must address its indebtedness to these editors. Without them Wikipedia would have millions less articles and be a much less reliable source, let alone a much less promising enterprise for financial donations.
Hope Labor
But why do editors get carried away? Kathleen Kuehn, and Thomas F Corrigan have written about online social production using the term “hope labor” to describe how, in the tough job market, people engage in uncompensated work like unpaid internships, excessive blogging, and other types of media contribution as a way to attract the attention of future employers. While Wikipedia is a less public form of attention-grabbing, editing still has the psychological effect of making you feel that you are putting in work that will be rewarded. But the problem with “hope-labor” in unpaid internships and online media contributions is that the payoff often doesn’t come. Justin Knapp, despite his media attention, was still a pizza delivery boy in the end. That’s not to say that Wikipedia doesn’t provide a springboard for some- members of Chapters, Wikipedian in residence, and others engaged in the movement get credentials, non-profit management experience, and more, but for many editors who never get engaged in the organized effort, this is not the case.
Stereotypes of the Obsessive Editor
Wikipedia’s encouragement of the obsessive editor stereotype is all done in good fun, joking at the fact that some people are born editors- with concentration and perfectionist qualities to be a regular editor. But I also wonder how this stereotype plays into the labor aspects of Wikipedia’s army of unpaid volunteers.
The stereotype of the ‘obsessive’ Wikipedia editor is endorsed from within and without the Wikipedia community. As a Wikipedia editor myself, I would say that I proudly wear the ‘obsessive’ badge as an editor, and many of the other editors I know as friends and community members have self-characterized as such. Perhaps one thing that encourages obsessive editing among volunteers is that Wikipedia is always there for editing. Everytime you open the internet you can edit, and many do, just as often as they may check Facebook or Twitter. Speaking from personal experience, I don’t have much of a time-table for editing but sometimes will find myself working on an article into the wee hours of the night. Literally putting in several hours a day and what might add up to at least a part time volunteer job.
Extending from this ‘obsessive editor’ stereotype, I also think this conversation should address something that the Wikipedia community talks about way less than those who do not edit Wikipedia– that is the perception that many editors are Neurotypical and have Aspergers and/or Autism.
 | This user has signed the Neurotypical / Autism spectrum interaction pact. |
There are many essays on Wikipedia written by and for editors with Aspergers and/or autism. In one, the essay opens with the line, “If a group of researchers had been tasked to create a working/hobby environment specifically designed to attract high-functioning autistics, it's hard to see how they could have come up with anything better than Wikipedia!...it's very probable that here in Wikipedia we have a much higher percentage of autism-spectrum people than you'll find in the Real World. Wikipedia is like a honey-trap for people on the autism spectrum…” My question is here, what it means to provide a space and activity for editors with Aspergers or autism to volunteer, but then for this hobby to be transformed into an almost full-time volunteer occupation. Would it be unrealistic to consider this transaction a form of exploitation? I bring this question up not because I want to accuse the Wikimedia Foundation of labor exploitation but because I think there are some questions about the ethics of digital volunteering/Crowdsourcing that pertain to the particular types of editor-base that we often attract as a movement.
What is There to Be Done?
As Wikipedia moves forward, I hope to advocate for Wikipedia taking a keener interest in its labor practices as pertaining to digital volunteering. Most volunteers or unpaid interns sign a volunteer contract- is there room for such a model when it comes to crowd-sourced knowledge projects?