[Air-L] Reflecting on Wikipedia at 20 (MIT Press, expected 2020)

[Joseph Reagle]

  Wikipedia at 20, MIT Press
  <https://reagle.org/joseph/2018/wp/at-20>
  
  Joseph Reagle (Northeastern University)
  Zachary McDowell (University of Illinois at Chicago)
  
  CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: We welcome essay proposals from all-comers
  toward a MIT Press collection about Wikipedia, to be developed via
  open review on MIT’s PubPub platform and resulting in a CC-BY-NC
  licensed book. Initial abstracts of 300-500 words are due 2018-Nov-01,
  details are below.
  
  DESRIPTION
  
  As Wikipedia’s twentieth year anniversary approaches, many of the
  site’s early peers have fallen by the wayside; those that survived
  have been overrun with ads and misinformation. Wikipedia, the free
  encyclopedia founded on radical collaboration and reliable sourcing,
  persists. What was once a scrappy experiment has become the world’s
  most popular reference work. Recently, Wikipedia was even enlisted by
  its peers—unknowingly—to counteract their problems with fake news.
  
  Yet, the online encyclopedia was not always looked to as the grownup
  of the web. Within its first ten years, some labeled the project a fad
  bound to fail, others claimed it as a harbinger of the Web’s future.
  Wikipedia did not fail, nor has the open collaboration it exemplifies
  become the template for most online platforms. Wikipedia’s legacy is
  an opportunity to reflect on this project and online communities more
  generally.
  
  To see what insights we can draw from _Wikipedia @ 20_, we are asking
  researchers, Wikipedians, and cultural critics _three questions_:
  
  1.  What initially attracted your attention to Wikipedia?
  2.  What has changed since then?
  3.  What do these changes portend for the future of Wikipedia, online
      community, and beyond?
  
  We hope that across the domains of _community_, _contributors_,
  _ecosystem_, and _meaning_ we’ll find compelling and accessible
  insights to more specific questions, such as:
  
  -   How has Wikipedia changed? How much of this is unique to Wikipedia
      and how much is common across online communities?
  -   Was its precipitous growth and plateauing of contributions the
      problem that it was thought to be at its midlife?
  -   What has come of efforts to increase contributor diversity,
      increase its global reach, counter systemic bias, and recruit
      newcomers?
  -   How did Wikipedia succeed or fail to meet the early expectations
      of proponents and critics alike?
  -   Is Wikipedia the heart of a new data ecosystem or the lone
      survivor of an older and better web?
  
  Our audience will be a general one. Each contribution should be short
  (three-to-five thousand words) and accessible to anyone interested in
  Wikipedia. This will be a collection of thoughtful essays (expected
  2020), rather than a venue for original research findings. Essays that
  make use of such research, of course, are welcome.
  
  SUBMISSION
  
  To participate, please send a 300-500 word abstract/proposal to
  wp20 at reagle.org by 2018-NOV-01. Give us a sense of how the three
  questions above will lead you to a specific insight, argument, or
  explanation. (If you wish for more detail provocation, see the draft
  introduction.) Invitations for contributions will be sent by
  2018-Dec-20, with submissions due 2019-MAY-15. Submissions will be
  made available for a two-month open review on MIT’s PubPub platform.
  Revised essays are due 2019-AUGUST-01 and those included in the
  printed collection will also be available under the Creative Commons
  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.