THE ARCHITECTURE OF
COLLECTIVE WRITING

Wikipedia is an interesting playground for collective uses of the more “pragmatic” archives that are developed today. It is massive, with over 40 million articles spread over 295 wikipedias. The English one, that is dominating with its more-than-5 million articles has been our main focus, although we also venture into the French, Dutch, Norwegian or which ever our participants feel more comfortable working with.

One of the crucial differences between Wikipedia and other encyclopedias is that its articles can be written by many different people and not only by a selected set of experts, making it possible to represent a multitude of truths and not just one side of the story.

But since 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation’s surveys on Wikipedia’s users gave alarming results. Despite its openness, only 9 to 16 percent of Wikipedia’s contributors identify as women. The “encyclopedia that anyone can edit”, wikipedia’s motto, is thus in fact mainly edited by the same group of people, which average is a 31 years old white straight single male, with a degree in higher education. This replicates a long history of writing.

Still today most of the history books published are written by, and about, white men. This general imballance in representation is creating a loop. If there are less sources on women-related topics, it is harder to write articles about them, and they are in turn less represented on one of our world’s most visible and popular knowlege platform.

When published sources do exist, these can also be biased by a patriarcal society, which repeats representations where it is highlighted that women are first and foremost “wifes of”, “sisters of”, “daughters of” other, more important men. For the past 15 years history has been re-written on Wikipedia at an increasingly high speed. With over 40 million articles created in such a short time, we need to have a look at who is performing the editing, and how decisions are being made.