Decolonization of knowledge in Wikipedia: Plenty of questions and much less answers
In recent years, the Wikimedia community has increasingly been paying attention to the question of giving voice to underrepresented communities. The diversity themes include such problems as gender imbalance or representation of the LGBT community — but also much more issues. Arguably, one of the most significant yet undiscussed questions relates to the problem of “colonized knowledge”, which refers to the insufficient representation of communities from the Global South (Africa, Latin America, and most countries of Asia) in the content of Wikipedia and its sister projects.
The problem lies not only in the smaller number of articles devoted to African or Asian topics as compared to the number of articles about Western Europe. A deeper problem is that the current methods of information evaluation and source analysis have largely been developed by Europeans and North Americans. Thus, they often fail to represent the mentality and interests of communities from the Global South.
Wikimedia has not yet achieved any major successes in solving these problems — even though first steps towards promoting greater use of images and video indicate some progress. At the same time, the number of profound questions posed before the Wikimedia community by far outreaches the number of existing answers.
The Essence of the Problem: Many Questions
It’s difficult to deny that the contemporary science lacks geographical diversity. English is a sole dominant language of science in the world, while the vast majority of scholarly methods and scientific epistemology have been coined by researchers from the Global North, primarily Europe and the United States. Consequently, the science is inherently biased in favor of Western powers today, while failing to represent the factors specific to the Global South. For example, most traditional communities of Africa rely on writing to a much lesser extent than inhabitants of Western Europe — yet written sources lay in the foundation of the contemporary science.
Wikipedia and other wiki-projects clearly represent this problem. From the perspective of the Wikimedia movement, the major dilemma relates to the approach to describing cultures of the Global South, which have produced much less written sources. From this point of view, a particular problem lies in the fact that some small Global South communities simply have not produced any written sources.
Which sources should we use when writing about these communities? Should we follow the ideas of verifiability and reliability of sources, which are core content policies in Wikipedia, and thus employ primarily written sources? But in this case, the sources will be mostly Western-originated — for example, missionaries’ works or theoretical writings created by researchers who never visited places they describe. Therefore, we will fail to follow the idea of diversity and will leave behind the point of view of the local population (or will at least precept it through the lenses of researchers from the Global North).
Alternatively, we can abide by the principle of diversity and representation — and more widely employ the oral culture of the local population from small Global South communities. However, this approach leads to the fundamental question: How can Wikipedians verify such sources? Say, can we call a video which recorded a local ritual equally reliable to the notes written by a professional anthropologist? Perhaps no. But, in the world with highly developed technology, cheap smartphones with a camera might reach a village in the Amazon rainforest earlier than a group of professional anthropologists. It’s only one example out of many cases which relate to Wikipedia’s (and contemporary science’s) inability to give voice to underrepresented communities of the Global South.
Potential Solutions: Some Answers, Plenty of New Questions
Currently, the Wikimedia movement (and, arguably, the world community in general) have not achieved sufficient solutions to the questions discussed above. A partial resolution to this problem might lie in the shift from text as a key way of disseminating information to the model, which equally values written text, images, video, and audio. However, Wikipedia and sister projects have not coined an efficacious approach of verifying non-written sources to the same extent as written ones. So, this task remains an important one for the Wikimedia community.
Obviously, the roots of these problems don’t lie in the Wikimedia movement; instead, they reach to the many centuries of unequal development of the world. That’s why we face another group of questions, which are perhaps even more philosophical than previous ones. Can Wikipedia be an engine of progress — or should it remain a mere mirror of the outside world? If a small tribe from Sub-Saharan Africa is not represented in sources (and probably doesn’t wish to be represented — because of religious beliefs, for example), perhaps Wikipedia shouldn’t write about it. Or should it?
If Wikipedia shouldn’t develop quicker than reliable sources do — can perhaps other wiki-projects take the role of an engine of progress? Maybe Wikisource should become a repository of texts and especially media files, which are not represented in any other sources. In this case, how do we verify them and check their reliability, how do we identify hoaxes and fakes? The number of questions still surpasses the number of definite answers.
For the Wikimedia movement, 2018 should mark an important step in the search for answers to these questions. If Wikipedia manages to increase the representation of Global South communities, it will be an important progress for the broader goal of giving voice to all underrepresented communities.
Most ideas from this article constitute the author’s perception of the discussions conducted during the Wikimedia Diversity Conference in November 2017.
Author — Anton Protsiuk
