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Abstract
This paper presents a media biography of Wikipedia’s data that focuses on the interpretative flexibility of Wikipedia and digital knowledge between the years 2001 and 2022. To do so, I not only follow a strand of media historians who argue that the imagination is an important component for understanding how media change, but I also argue that Wikipedia’s data has been incorporated, re-imagined, and repurposed by sociotechnical projects in ways that have often been side-lined despite acting as the boundary lines of what is considered digital knowledge. It combines Patrice Flichy’s longitudinal theory of technical development as an imaginaire, Frederik Lesage and Simone Natale’s historical approach of biographies of media with an analysis of the interpretative flexibility of new media. Through an eclectic corpus of project websites, new articles, press releases, and blogs, I demonstrate the unexpected ways the online encyclopedia has permeated throughout digital culture over the past twenty years through projects like the Citizendium, Everipedia, Google Search and AI software. As a result of this analysis, I explain how this array of meanings and materials constitutes the Wikipedia imaginaire: a collective activity of sociotechnical development that is fundamental to understanding the ideological and utopian meaning of knowledge with digital culture.
Conflict of interest
The author was funded by the Wikimedia Foundation for a separate research project during the writing of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
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Steve Jankowski
Steve Jankowski is a Lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD in Communication and Culture from York University and Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada for his dissertation on Wikipedian consensus and the political design of encyclopedic media. He also holds a MA in Communication from the University of Ottawa and an Honours Bachelors of Design from the York\Sheridan Design Program. His research examines the intersections between digital culture, design and historical imaginaries of democracy and knowledge.