From CPOV to the Manifesto for Wikimedia Research
I was a Master’s student at UC Berkeley’s iSchool when I traveled to Bangalore for INC’s first Critical Point of View conference in January 2010. Two more CPOV conferences followed, in Amsterdam and Leipzig. Bangalore was a pivotal moment for me. I had been an activist in the free and open source software and open content movement for many years prior to going to graduate school. I left because I had become disillusioned by what I felt was a lack of global solidarity around the problems of exclusion facing open culture and a belief that open copyright licenses were not the key to liberation that I once believed they were. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia was the jewel in the crown of the open movement at the time. But from my perspective, in Johannesburg and then Nairobi, everything was not as it seemed. There was a growing number of examples that Wikipedia editors were actively rejecting articles about Majority World topics, that some areas of the encyclopedia were riddled with enduring conflict and that large parts of the world remained dark on maps of Wikipedia place articles.
The CPOV conference was like coming home. There I met so many who charted my career path, including the internet geographer, Mark Graham who became my PhD supervisor at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Wikipedian, Dror Kamir, who taught me about the mechanics of conflict on Wikipedia. More importantly, though, I learned the power of critical research from Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz who said that the “C” in “Critical” is not about being negative or dismissive about Wikipedia but rather about taking Wikipedia seriously by asking critical questions about its important place in the world.
The resulting INC CPOV (Critical Point of View) Reader, published in 2011, established a new way of thinking about Wikipedia that emphasised the platform’s socio-cultural, political, and economic implications. It is hard to over-emphasise the importance of this humble reader. It established a new space and frame for Wikipedia research, radically independent from the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation and led by methods and theories from humanist tradition which continues (to this day) as a tiny minority in the sea of positivist, computational social science approaches to Wikipedia research.
15 years later, nurturing a space for Wikipedia researchers, artists and activists in the humanist tradition is more important than ever, as is articulating what questions are important for researchers to answer. Wikipedia has became one of the most critical sources of knowledge about the world, defining what counts as the consensus truth about people, places, events, and other phenomena for a generation. Wikipedia has been joined by other sites under the Wikimedia banner, offering a range of free images, books, definitions and data and establishing the goal of becoming “essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge” by 2030.
Today we continue the work of the CPoV project by launching the Manifesto for Wikipedia Research. The manifesto marks an important milestone for critical Wikipedia research, setting out ten principles for critical research on Wikipedia and its sister projects in the larger Wikimedia stable. Like CPoV before us, the manifesto was seeded at a meeting of critical, humanist Wikimedia researchers at the wikihistories symposium in Brisbane last year where we gathered to discuss Wikimedia’s changing role “and/as data”. We asked: “What would need to change in our research practice if we accepted that Wikimedia has become public knowledge infrastructure?”
Wikimedia projects are generally recognised as readily available data sources for public research and private extraction. But the circulation of this data without a critical understanding of how it is being produced can lead to Wikipedia’s socio-cultural biases becoming exacerbated. In an age where Wikimedia operates as public knowledge infrastructure, it is necessary to rekindle the critical spirit of CPoV i.e. where critique is in aid of specific understandings of current issues and problems, rather than wholesale, knee-jerk negativity or conservatism.
Recognising and investigating Wikimedia’s implications for shaping public understanding of issues, debates, and controversies across various domains, we present 10 principles for Wikimedia researchers working to understand its role in the global information and knowledge ecosystem. The manifesto is a call to “Together, interrogate and reconstitute Wikimedia as public knowledge infrastructure”. With it, we continue the legacy of CPoV and provide a path for those who want to better understand exactly which lessons we will learn from Wikipedia as its importance continues to grow.
The Manifesto for Wikipedia Research (https://manifesto.wiki/, republished below) is authored by Heather Ford, Bunty Avieson, Francesco Bailo, Michael Davis, Michael Falk, Sohyeon Huang, Andrew Iliadis, Steve Jankowski, Amanda Lawrence and Francesca Sidoti
An A3 printable poster of the manifesto: https://wikihistories.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/WikiPoster_a3.pdf
A commentary in Big Data & Society Journal written by Steve Jankowski, Heather Ford, Andrew Iliadis and Francesca titled “Uniting and reigniting critical Wikimedia research”.
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A manifesto for Wikimedia research
In an age where Wikimedia operates as public knowledge infrastructure, we must ask new questions concerning open data, public knowledge, the agency of Wikimedia contributors, and the outcomes of their labour. Here, we present 10 principles for researchers working to understand Wikimedia’s role in the global knowledge environment.
We witness the ongoing struggle to determine what it means for information to be “free” and for whom this freedom generates value. We follow Wikimedian data as it circulates within techno-legal regimes of the public domain, copyright, and intellectual property law in ways that provide radical openings and concerning enclosures that alienate the altruism of community labour.
We trace how Wikimedia projects intersect, combine, and feed into other applications, platforms, systems, and knowledge institutions. We work to understand how Wikimedia operates at the level of knowledge infrastructure, supplying and being supplied by data that affects the coverage of topics far from the Wikimedia platform. We also examine how its existence is influenced by the ready supply of volunteer labour, expertise, and funding.
We study the role of AI models and algorithms in shaping the production, circulation, and reception of Wikimedia projects and data. Studies of production include bots and bespoke code such as templates that frame subjects and direct editorial activity. Circulation studies include applications such as chatbots, search rankings, and recommendation systems that shape sustainability, knowledge integrity, and information discovery for Wikimedia projects. Reception studies analyse how users across the web who interact with Wikimedia data via search engines, social media platforms, chatbots, as well as galleries, libraries, archives, and museums interpret and make meaning from the Wikimedia data they encounter.
We resist treating facts, information, and policies as finalised, even though data’s fluctuation does not mean it has less impact on those it represents, however fleetingly.
We reflect on our positionality as researchers based in particular places, with particular understandings and theories of knowledge, and in positions of power concerning global knowledge systems. This also means being cognisant of the ethics of studying online spaces as groups of people and not just as text, information, or data.
Background
A manifesto for Wikimedia research was formulated at a meeting of critical, humanist Wikimedia researchers in Brisbane, 2024. We gathered to discuss Wikimedia’s changing role “and/as data” as Wikipedia and its sister sites have become increasingly important as a foundation of knowledge circulating via AI tools. We asked: “What would need to change in our research practice if we accepted that Wikimedia has become public knowledge infrastructure?”
Contributors
