ON SEPTEMBER 25TH, I attended a panel where the Wikipedia community grappled with political imprisonment. Osama Khalid, a young Saudi doctor and a Wikipedia administrator, was arrested and imprisoned by the Saudi government along with a fellow editor in July 2020. Both were charged with terrorism for “swaying public opinion” and “violating public morals”; Khalid now faces a sentence of 32 years. Wikipedians had initially remained silent by request of Khalid’s family. Nonprofits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced campaigns to defend him earlier this year, so now editors were speaking up. Even then, they seemed (understandably) unsure of what to say and do to protect our collective encyclopedia.
I wondered why this might be.
Wikipedia, at its start, was shaped by the ideals of cyberlibertarians like John Perry Barlow who, in his imperial “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” condemned the “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel.” Wikipedians, early on, interpreted those ideals as requiring an uncritical stance towards the biased sources produced under capitalist hegemony (especially on topics where sources are not produced). The early community did not yet have organized projects to expand its uneven coverage of, for example, the Global South. But I believe the mass participation by a generation of editors has reshaped Wikipedia into something more human, more proletarian. There is still a core of experts that try to steer the wiki projects, but they cannot stand against the consensus of the editors. Too much of the infrastructure of the wikis are in the hands of volunteers for that kind of elite capture to work.
Many features of the wiki projects have radical potential. While its “neutral point of view” pillar and policy of only covering “notable” subjects may give a liberal or libertarian apolitical veneer to the project, articles on current events, historical genocides, and religious conflict cannot avoid political discourse. A rigorously maintained list of reputable sources for every individual wiki prevents “fringe” pseudoscientific beliefs from polluting articles on medical care. All of this is done via a radical consensus-based — not democratic — model: instead of voting on different versions of the same content, editors must engage with each other through productive disagreement to reach a consensus on each page. A cohort of editors monitors new pages and edits for vandalism or large-language model slop. Editors gather not by nationality but by language, which gives wiki projects different international characters that are shaped by but not entirely dependent on nations. For example, editors split from the official Spanish Wikipedia in 2002 to oppose the introduction of advertisements: their protest succeeded and helped move all wikipedias from the .com domain to .org.
Still, even though editors publicly proclaimed at the Khalid event that “knowledge should not be a commodity” and that their work answered to “no Gods, no masters,” I did not meet any socialists at that event.
Wikipedia is one of the few bastions of the “participatory culture” Internet that we have left. It is also a living demonstration of what communal control over a means of production can produce. The intellectual, administrative, and political labor that makes up Wikipedia shapes global public understanding from moment to moment. As tech companies hoover up data across the public Internet to recycle into slop, they also know that the “knowledge” they have produced is coming, in large part, from one source. I learned that ChatGPT is offering free checks for large-language model text to high-level Wikipedia users—that is, even as tech companies try to stripmine the US economy, they know their efforts still depend upon Wikipedia. Just as capital cannot escape labor, the tech oligarch’s profits would not exist without the commons that editors produce.
When Marx wrote about the enclosure of the commons in 17th and 19th century England, he tried to describe the origins of “primitive accumulation.” What is often left out of that story is that the pastoral commons that landed gentry enclosed were active. They were often not pristine nature but rather shaped by hundreds, if not thousands, of years of agricultural stewardship into a productive, sustaining landscape. The Wikimedia movement considers itself to be producing digital commons, and that mindset shapes its relationship to capital.
The Wikimedia Foundation is the main representation of capital in the Wikipedia movement. The Foundation has established a large endowment and often tries to use it to shape Wikipedia projects and occasionally control community decisions. I have, for example, heard that the Foundation might have censored writing submitted to a community publication that mentioned the disruption of last year’s WikiConference North America by a man with a gun.
The Foundation has not, however, been completely successful. Because their labor, even if unwaged, is a source of capitalist profit, editors hold their own strange power over capital. When Wiki Workers United decided to affiliate with Communication Workers of America earlier this year, they did so with the support of a petition of over 1,400 editors who promised to go on a solidarity strike and withdraw editorial labor from Wikipedia if the union requested it. The wiki editors produced their own reporting of the labor struggle to keep their community informed and expand its solidarity for staff. The Wikimedia Foundation and its union-busting law firm were defeated: US staff voted for their union in a National Labor Relations Board election in early September.
At the end of the event for Khalid, I listened to a Wikimedia staff member describe the need to protect free speech (often an American political shibboleth). Moments before, I had realized that I myself could no longer access my own Wikipedia account. My editing account had been registered to an email domain hosted by Autistici/Inventati, an Italian hacker collective shut down by the US administration for its support of leftist groups.
Wikipedia editors have had to learn to move against capital to preserve their project. As political repression in the United States worsens, we need to work with other communities who are active, organized, and in opposition. Wikipedia, and its army of editors, could become one.
Wikipedia editors can still sign a petition in solidarity with Wiki Workers United.
