The search for Wikipedia’s edges

Wikipedia has become an authoritative source for facts about the world. It promises to be working towards reflecting “the sum of all human knowledge” in 288 languages. Every day, however, thousands of contributions to Wikipedia are rejected. A large proportion of those whose contributions are rejected remain silent on Wikipedia’s platform. In this chapter, I describe my attempt to give voice to some of those silenced. In 2011, I met and interviewed a small group of Wikipedians in Nairobi in order to investigate the apparent success of the Kenyan Wikipedia community. There were many surprises as people spoke about their hopes and disappointments regarding the community and the platform into which they had recently been inducted. This experienced highlighted what I believe to be a vastly understudied area. Instead of more ethnographic work that considers only those who are highly active and visible on Wikipedia, there is a need to also study the lacunae, the people who remain on the edges of Wikipedia because of a feeling of disappointment, rejection or invisibility. I highlight the gaps in ethnographic research on Wikipedia to date and suggest the principle of multiplicity within ethnography as a way of articulating a new research agenda that focuses on Wikipedia as a significant global, political space.