The Internet Should Be More Like Wikipedia

As Wikipedia approaches 20, there’s been a small proliferation of articles celebrating the site as “a bastion of the Good Internet” and “the last best place on the internet.”

Wikipedia may not be actively throwing up roadblocks to participation, but it’s “also OK with not everyone being an editor — the way a Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey would like all seven billion people in the world to be users of their platforms

Those core values of deliberation, stewardship, and common ownership and common good seem old-fashioned, but that retro-ness is worth reconsidering and re-centering as we think about what values we want from the platforms we invest our data, time and attention in.”

Robust editorial oversight.

Wikipedia has a built-in editorial lodestar that social media platforms lack. Whereas sites like Facebook have recently invested more heavily in moderation (with limited results), their sense of neutrality remains “passive” — compared to Wikipedia’s “active” sense of neutrality

No reliance on personalization or amplification algorithms.

Peer production over ad- and engagement maximization.

Wikipedia operates on a central database, but its peer production model and edit transparency bears some similarities to decentralized networks. And this option feels decidedly less radical a step for the major social platforms than, say, exit to community.

Still, it’s incorrect and counterproductive to characterize Wikipedia as a bastion of algorithm-free people power. In a 2019 op-ed, Katherine Maher cautioned against empty Web 1.0 nostalgia and underscored the important role that artificial intelligence plays in spotting potential vandalism and directing editors to pages that might need evaluation.