The harsh truth about your Wikipedia page
Does your or your company’s bio on Wikipedia get things wrong? Did you not want one in the first place? Or, to your disappointment, does it keep getting deleted? There are some harsh truths to being represented (or wanting to be) on the world’s most visible information platform:
Not everyone who deserves a bio gets to have one.
You don’t get a say in what yours says.
A Wikipedia page will never capture you in your full, human complexity.
Before I get to the hopeful part of this, where I offer a bit more generosity, some solutions, and lots of thoughts, let’s break down these truths a bit.
First, not everyone who deserves a bio has one because of something called the gender gap—a structural inequality in the site’s very fabric. Wikipedia relies on volunteers to generate its content. Folks who have the most flexibility to provide this free labor tend to be Western men, ages 24-30. The most active coordination among these volunteers generates some amazing work, but the highest quality information on Wikipedia tends to fall into a few main categories: military history, sports, video gaming, and pop culture. So biographies? Not so much. Biographies of women? Even less. Only 18% of all the biographies on the site, in fact, are about women, let alone BIPOC women. But the gap is not just a problem of not trying. Wikipedia relies upon news coverage that already exists. Because there are existing inequities in who gets featured in our culture’s wider news, Wikipedia can’t help but replicate (or at least reflect) the problem.
The number one question I get when I say I know a bit about Wikipedia is, Can you help me with my page? Typically, the person has tried to correct or write their page themselves and have gotten a firm slap on the wrist from Wikipedia volunteers citing conflict of interest. I don’t have a page myself, but I could imagine there’s no feeling of helplessness quite like the specific one of having a public narrative about you just doesn’t feel right and not being able to do anything about it.
A Wikipedia bio can only do so much. Watch someone try to include that you love to play guitar in your family band on the weekends. If that charming anecdote isn’t stated in a fact-checked source like the New York Times, it’ll be deleted from Wikipedia. These encyclopedic standards dictate that your page can’t feature quotes or elements of your voice. It can’t display your professionally-taken headshot (which is copyrighted), no matter how gorgeous. And you can’t describe yourself in your own terms. There is no celebration. The narrative of your life will be, in my opinion, inevitably cold.
None of this sits all that well with me. As much as I believe that writing Wikipedia pages for folks who are not yet represented is a powerful act—these pages give credibility and acknowledge someone’s rightful place in history in a way that matters to our culture—I’m disheartened that the person can’t participate in documenting their own life. I find myself asking the same question each time I set out to write a new page: Who am I to tell your story?
Is writing a Wikipedia biography an unethical archival practice?
When I conducted oral history projects in college under the guidance of Dr. Martha Gonzalez, we often discussed how to document someone else’s story ethically and according to feminist archival practice. It was important that I, the archivist, asked myself some questions throughout the process. How did my identity as a privileged, English-speaking, white, female college student affect what I could know about the person I interviewed? How did it affect the choices I made when organizing the narrative of their life? How can I involve the person who really owns this story in every step of telling of it? When I recorded oral history within the Los Angeles artivista community, I wondered how I could challenge the power dynamic between me (the “archivist”) and them (my “subjects”). I acknowledged the origins of Western anthropology—a discipline born from colonialism and efforts to “capture” stories of the “other” to aid violent expansion. What did it mean for me, an outsider to come in to document, and how could I avoid dominating the narrative? How could I ensure my “subject” still had agency over the telling? Only then could we arrive at a final product that was both collaboratively and ethically produced.
Later, as I entered the nonprofit job sphere, I helped lead storytelling workshops that put the entire narrative power into the hands of the person with the story. Workshop participants gathered over three days to make a 2-3 minute video featuring a snapshot of their life. Many came in with one story in mind that they planned to tell. But quickly after meeting this group of kind strangers, many folks were taken by the spirit of a different story entirely—one that felt much more pressing, almost physically necessary to tell. Similar to the practice of testimonio, I and the participants witnessed this transforming experience for each other. Some folks shared things they never had told anyone before, encouraged by the rare opportunity to hold the floor so uninterrupted and without judgement. When the time came to share our final, polished stories on the third day, the honesty and genuineness of each one brought me to tears.
So when I began writing Wikipedia pages in accordance with policies to present subjects in an objective light, I felt a bit conflicted. Objectivity (or at least verifiability) is the basis of Wikipedia. And for good reason. It would be a problem if a page about a well-known Hollywood abuser did not include information about his misconduct, for example, simply because he didn’t want it to. Public record holds figures of history accountable.
Still though, I cringed at the assumption that as long as a ‘Wikipedian’ (the name for volunteers who edit the site) followed the guidelines, the end product would be objective. Was that true? Didn’t each volunteer bring their own bias about what information was important to include or not, and how to do so? Plus, I thought, objectivity isn’t where the life of the story lives.
Despite Wikipedian efforts to be objective, ultimately there are quite a few subjective choices you just have to make when writing the story of a life. Everyone brings a unique perspective about what should or should not included and what language to use to describe it all, and with it, their own implicit biases. Until recently, Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Jennifer Doudna’s page framed her accomplishments in terms of her male thesis advisor, the male supervisor of her postdoc, and her husband. The facts about her research and career trajectory were accurate, but her story was told as if she was a secondary character in her own life. That did change, but only when another volunteer noticed and reframed the narrative.
So how should we balance Wikipedia’s definition of objectivity with the praxis put forth by feminist archivists? What’s possible?
The Wikipedia I wish for:
What if each biography were written in tandem with the subject?
One of the first biographies I wrote was for Kelly Moran, a composer and multi-instrumentalist who uses electronic music techniques in combination with the prepared piano. I summarized the secondary sources about her that I could find, cited my references, and published an initial draft. Next, I decided to track down Moran’s contact info to run my edits by her. Had I gotten anything wrong? Did she have an image of herself I could add? She responded gratefully and graciously with a few copy edits, including a request that I distinguish “black metal” from “metal”—the former of which she said she did not affiliate herself with. That was simple enough, and she had a secondary source to back it up. I hadn’t given her control of the narrative (that would have violated Wikipedia’s conflict of interest policy), but I felt that the exchange had been respectful of her and her story given our constraints.
What if we deleted unwanted biographies?
So many biography pages (especially the kind that I’m interested in writing) have such tiny viewership that if someone requested theirs be deleted, the loss for public knowledge wouldn’t be all that great. When a prominent biologist I wrote one for a couple years ago asked me to delete hers, I did. I did the same for a climate activist whose biography I had written last year. As one volunteer among tens of thousands, I can’t guarantee that someone else won’t write those pages. But at least for now, someone has respected the wishes of these women. If the pages ever do get created, it won’t be by me. But I’ll make sure they represent the narrative of their life and accomplishments fairly.
What if volunteers acknowledged their position in writing each page?
Before writing the biography for activist Nemonte Nenquimo, I considered whether I was the right one to do so. I would inevitably be writing it from a Western, English-speaking lens given the sources I had access to—potentially not painting a full enough picture of her life and work. But, I decided, given the piece she published in the Guardian, a Western audience like the one that consumes English Wikipedia is exactly who should be reading about her. And they do, about 25 people a day in fact. Plus, it has now been translated into 10 other languages. This one page can be expanded by other editors and into other languages, and reach further than a single-authored news article or blog could.
The beauty of Wikipedia is that these pages are all living documents. There’s distress in that, yes. But also opportunity. And if I can ever help, please reach out.
