How the new UK tech law hurts Wikipedia
It has been an incredibly difficult three weeks in the world, and the internet shows it. In the last couple of newsletters, I’ve noted just how hard it is to find reliable information on the social web right now, where everything seems to revolve around attention, revenue and shock value, and verified facts are few and far between. So this week, I’m turning my attention to a totally different part of the internet: Wikipedia.
It’s been on my mind lately because of the proposed new online safety law in the U.K. that will set strict age requirements for young people online and require websites to scan and somehow remove all content that could be harmful to kids before it appears online. In a recent blogpost for the Wikimedia Foundation — the non-profit that supports Wikipedia — Vice President for Global Advocacy Rebecca MacKinnon wrote that by requiring sites to scan literally everything before it gets posted, the bill could upend the virtual encyclopedia’s bottom-up approach to content creation. As she put it, the law could destroy Wikipedia’s system “for maintaining encyclopedic integrity.”
You may be wondering precisely what “encyclopedic integrity” means at Wikipedia, where the article on the Marvel Comics character Spider-Man cites almost twice as many sources as the article for the Republic of Chad, a country of an estimated 18.5 million people. I get it. Wikipedia, by its own admission, has had problems with an overrepresentation of the interests of nerdy white male American 20-somethings who have too much time on their hands. But these people also really care about what they post online, and they have created an effective cooperative system for collecting, verifying and building knowledge. The system is totally dependent on the good will of thousands of contributors, and it is wholly decentralized — there are Wikipedia communities across the globe who share some basic principles, but decide together how they’ll handle contributions that could violate the law, offend readers or anything in between. In sharp contrast to corporate social media spaces, where attention is the driver of all things, this is a totally different way to “scale up” — more like scaling out — and it has led to a dramatically different kind of information resource.
I recently spoke with two Wikipedia volunteers in Wales, who are seriously worried about the effects that the U.K. bill might have on Wikipedia’s Welsh-language site, which is the only Wikipedia community that exists almost entirely within the jurisdiction of the U.K. Robin Owain and Jason Evans explained to me just how essential Wikipedia has become for Welsh speakers — with 90 million views in the last 12 months, Welsh Wikipedia is the largest and most popular Welsh-language website on the internet. Young people are a big part of this, and the secondary school system in Wales works actively with the community to engage high school students in building up material on the site.