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Critical Wikimedia Research Bibliography

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This page is a Bibliography of humanities and social scientific publications that is useful for critically studying Wikimedia as infrastructure.[1]

It is organized according to the 10 calls-to-action found in A Manifesto for Wikimedia Research[1] and builds on the literature that inspired the journal article Uniting and Reigniting Critical Wikimedia Research.[2] Please help expand the bibliography and if you are unsure of how to add a citation using Wikitext, look at the examples here.

See also

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1. Map the dispossession of the commons

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Research that focuses on peer production, digital commons, as well as value and labour.

Yochai Benkler wrote The Wealth of Networks (2006) which was one the first books to take Wikipedia seriously as an object of study and as a means for theorizing the commons in terms of non-market cultural production.
  • Pentzold, Christian (2021). "Mundane work for utopian ends: Freeing digital materials in peer production". New Media & Society 23 (4): 816–833. doi:10.1177/1461444820954203. 
  • Fuchs, Christian (2013). "Wikipedia: A New Democratic Form of Collaborative Work and Production?". Social media: A critical introduction. London, England: SAGE Publications. 
  • Bruns, Axel (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From production to produsage. Peter Lang. 

Related theory in this area

  • Hess, Charlotte; Ostrom, Elinor (2007). Understanding knowledge as a commons. MIT Press. London, England: MIT Press. 
  • Lessig, Lawrence (2006). Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0. New York, NY: Basic Books. ISBN 0465039146. 
  • Euler, Johannes (2018-01-01). "Conceptualizing the Commons: Moving Beyond the Goods-Based Definition by Introducing the Social Practices of Commoning as Vital Determinant". Ecological Economics 143: 10–16. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.06.020. 

2. Recognise Wikimedia’s role as a hub of global knowledge infrastructure

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Research on the sociotechnical mediation of truth, meaning, facts, and data.

Three books (Writing the revolution: Wikipedia and the survival of facts in the digital age, Wikipedia and the representation of reality, Semantic media: Mapping meaning on the internet) were published all in 2022, marking a shift in scholarly attention towards the role that Wikipedia has with this infrastructure. This poster depicts Heather Ford's theory of digital facts from her book."
  • Lawrence, Amanda; van Wanrooy, Brigid (2024). "Sourcing public policy: Organisation publishing in Wikipedia". New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 30 (3–4): 181–200. doi:10.1080/13614568.2024.2343845. 
  • Ford, Heather; Iliadis, Andrew (2023). "Wikidata as semantic infrastructure: Knowledge representation, data labor, and truth in a more-than-technical project". Social Media + Society 9 (3). doi:10.1177/20563051231195552. 
  • Gildersleve, Patrick; Lambiotte, Renaud; Yasseri, Taha (2023). "Between news and history: identifying networked topics of collective attention on Wikipedia". Journal of Computational Social Science 6 (2): 845–875. doi:10.1007/s42001-023-00215-w. 
  • Iliadis, Andrew; Ford, Heather (2023). "Fast facts: Platforms from personalization to centralization". Social Media + Society 9 (3). doi:10.1177/20563051231195546. 
  • Jankowski, Steve (2023). "The Wikipedia imaginaire: A new media history beyond Wikipedia.org (2001–2022)". Internet Histories 7 (4): 333–353. doi:10.1080/24701475.2023.2246261. 
  • Ford, Heather (2022). Writing the revolution: Wikipedia and the survival of facts in the digital age. MIT Press. 
  • McDowell, Zachary; Vetter, Matthew (2022). Wikipedia and the representation of reality. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003094081. 
  • Iliadis, Andrew (2022). Semantic media: Mapping meaning on the internet. Polity Press. 
  • Vincent, Nicholas; Hecht, Brent (2021). "A deeper investigation of the importance of Wikipedia links to search engine results". Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5 (CSCW1): 1–15. doi:10.1145/3449078. 
  • Roued-Cunliffe, Henriette (2017). Roued-Cunliffe, Henriette; Copeland, Andrea, eds. Forgotten history on Wikipedia. Facet Publishing. pp. 67–76. 
  • Lindgren, Simon (2014). "Crowdsourcing knowledge: Interdiscursive flows from Wikipedia into scholarly research". Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 6 (3): 609–627. doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.146609. 
  • Langlois, Ganaele; Elmer, Greg (2009). "Wikipedia leeches? The promotion of traffic through a collaborative web format". New Media & Society 11 (5): 773–794. doi:10.1177/1461444809105351. 

Related theory in this area

  • Halavais, Alexander (2018). Search engine society. Polity Press. 
  • Jürgen Habermas, Frank Lennox (Autumn 1974). "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)". New German Critique 3: 49–55. 

3. Examine power relations

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This research focuses on identity representation and inequality as well as broader questions about authority and sociotechnical agency.

2011 was an important year for critical Wikimedia research. Organized through the Institute of Network Cultures, a number of scholars produced a collected edition called "Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader" which set the research agenda towards a critical form of inquiry about Wikipedia. In this same year, a well-known survey was conducted that announced that the majority of Wikipedian contributors were men and identified Wikipedia's gender gap. While others had begun this research, these events ushered in a shift towards examining power relations as part of a new agenda. The Critical Wikimedia Research Manifesto was heavily inspired by this text.[3]


  • Melis, Beatrice; Paolini, Chiara; Fioravanti, Marta; Metilli, Daniele (2024). "What does it mean to be queer in Wikidata? Practices of gender representation within a transnational online community". Communication, Culture & Critique 17 (3): 200–207. doi:10.1093/ccc/tcae029. 
  • Jankowski, Steve (2024). "Becoming Wikipedian women: A sociotechnical history of the Gender Gap Task Force (2013–2023)". Internet Histories 9 (1–2): 1–22. doi:10.1080/24701475.2024.2425150. 
  • Ford, Heather; Pietsch, Tamson; Tall, Kelly (2023). "Gender and the invisibility of care on Wikipedia". Big Data & Society 10 (2). doi:10.1177/20539517231210276. 
  • Mandiberg, Michael (2023). "Wikipedia's race and ethnicity gap and the unverifiability of whiteness". Social Text 41 (1): 21–46. doi:10.1215/01642472-10174954. 
  • Lemieux, Mackenzie Emily; Zhang, Rebecca; Tripodi, Francesca (2023). "“Too soon” to count? How gender and race cloud notability considerations on Wikipedia". Big Data & Society 10 (1). doi:10.1177/20539517231165490. 
  • Rijshouwer, Erik; Uitermark, Justus; de Koster, Willem (2023). "Wikipedia: a self-organizing bureaucracy". Information, Communication & Society 26 (7): 1285–1302. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2021.1994633. 
  • Ferran-Ferrer, Núria; Agustí, Lluís; Centelles, Miquel (2023). "Banned books and Wikidata" (PDF). CILIP, Focus on International Library and Information Work 54 (2): 4–10. 
  • Adams, Julia; Brückner, Hannah; Naslund, Cambria (2019). "Who Counts as a Notable Sociologist on Wikipedia? Gender, Race, and the “Professor Test”". Socius 5: 1–13. doi:10.1177/2378023118823946. 
  • Shaw, Aaron; Hargittai, Eszter (2018). "The pipeline of online participation inequalities: The case of Wikipedia editing". Journal of Communication 68 (1): 143–168. doi:10.1093/joc/jqx003. 
  • Ford, Heather; Wajcman, Judy (2017). ""Anyone can edit," not everyone does: Wikipedia's infrastructure and the gender gap". Social Studies of Science 47 (4): 1–17. doi:10.1177/0306312717692172. 
  • Wagner, Claudia; Garcia, David; Jadidi, Mohsen; Strohmaier, Markus (2015). "It’s a Man’s Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia". Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 9 (1): 1. doi:10.1609/icwsm.v9i1.14628. 
  • Leitch, Thomas (2014). Wikipedia U: Knowledge, authority, and liberal education in the digital age. Johns Hopkins University Press. 
  • Eckert, Stine; Steiner, Linda (2013). "(Re)triggering Backlash: Responses to News About Wikipedia’s Gender Gap". Journal of Communication Inquiry 37 (4): 284–303. doi:10.1177/0196859913505618. 
  • O'Neil, Mathieu (2009). Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and authority in online tribes. Pluto Press. 

Related theory in this area

  • Nakamura, Lisa; Chow-White, Peter (2012). Race After the Internet. New York: Routledge. 
  • Blas, Zach; Jue, Melody; Rhee, Jennifer, eds. (2025). Informatics of Domination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

4. Explore the juxtapositions of Wikimedia policies and practices

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Reagle's enthnographic study of Wikipedia was one of the first to connect its encyclopedic history, to its policies, and to explore how these ideas played out in practice."


This research covers sociotechnical governance in terms of the politics of Wikimedian policy environments, policy as an infrastrcture and burecracy, and epistemological critiques.

  • Van Dijck, Jose (2013). "Wikipedia and the Neutrality Principle". The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford University Press. 
  • Reagle, Joseph (2010). Good faith collaboration: The culture of Wikipedia. MIT Press. 
  • Kriplean, Travis; Beschastnikh, Ivan; McDonald, David W.; Golder, Scott A. (2007). "Community, Consensus, Coercion, Control: CSW or How Policy Mediates Mass Participation". GROUP '07, 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work. 

Related theory in this area

  • Harding, Sandra (1992). "Rethinking standpoint epistemology: What is “strong objectivity”?". Centennial Review 36 (3): 437–470. 
  • Jasanoff, Sheila (2004). "Ordering knowledge, ordering society". States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order (Routledge): 13–45. 
  • Rancière, Jacques (2010). Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum. 

5. Investigate linguistic and cultural plurality

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In response to Wikimedia Movement’s 2030 strategic direction, the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation developed a framework to understand and measure knowledge gaps. Known as A Taxonomy of Knowledge Gaps for Wikimedia Projects [4], this framework aggregated previous research as well as inspires new research questions.

This research focuses on knowledge diversity, equity asnd gaps; as well as multilingual governance.

  • Rogers, Richard (2013). "Cultural points of view: Comparing Wikipedia language versions". In Rogers, Richard. Digital Methods. London: SAGE Publications. 
  • Borra, Erik; Weltevrede, Esther; Ciuccarelli, Paolo; Kaltenbrunner, Andreas; Laniado, David; Magni, Giovanni; Mauri, Michele; Rogers, Richard; Venturini, Tommaso (2015). "Societal controversies in Wikipedia articles". Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 193–196. 
  • Niesyto, Johanna (2011). "A Journey from Rough Consensus to Political Creativity: Insights from the English and German Language Wikipedias". In Lovink, Geert; Tkacz, Nathaniel. Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader (PDF). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. pp. 139–158. 
  • van der Velden, Maja (2011). "When Knowledges Meet: Wikipedia and Other Stories from the Contact Zone". In Lovink, Geert; Tkacz, Nathaniel. Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader (PDF). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. pp. 236–257. 

Related theory in this area

  • Hall, Stuart (1997). et al.. "The spectacle of the other". Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (Sage London) 7: 223–290. 

6. Assess the implications of algorithms

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This research studies governance that is shaped through algorithms, post-human relations, and various social forms of automation.

Related theory in this area

  • Suchman, Lucy (2007). Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge University Press. 
  • Latour, Bruno (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
  • Gillespie, Tarleton (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press. 

7. Historicise Wikimedia’s epistemology

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While Wikipedia is different from other encyclopedias, it is stil "an encyclopedia" that borrows many of the techniques and values concerning knowledge from the Enlightenment, such as those described within Denis Diderot's Encyclopedie.

This research focuses on the geneaologies of concepts, ideas, and techniques that are important to Wikimedian projects, such as consensus, openess, transparency, universalism.

  • Tkacz, Nathaniel (2014). Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness. University of Chicago Press. 
  • Spree, U. (2014). "How Readers Shape the Content of an Encyclopedia: A Case Study Comparing the German Meyers Konversationslexikon (1885-1890) with Wikipedia (2002-2013)". Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 6 (3): 569–591. 
  • Burke, Peter (2012). A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopaedia to Wikipedia. Polity. 
  • Akdag Salah, Almila; Gao, Cheng; Suchecki, Krzysztof; Scharnhorst, Andrea (2011). "Generating Ambiguities: Mapping Category Names Of Wikipedia To UDC Class Numbers". In Lovink, Geert; Tkacz, Nathaniel. Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader (PDF). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. pp. 63–77. 
  • Liang, Lawrence (2011). "A Brief History Of The Internet From The 15th To The 18th Century". In Lovink, Geert; Tkacz, Nathaniel. Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader (PDF). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. pp. 50–62. 
  • O'Sullivan, Dan (2011). "What Is An Encyclopedia? A Brief Historical Overview From Pliny To Wikipedia". In Lovink, Geert; Tkacz, Nathaniel. Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader (PDF). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. pp. 34–49. 
  • Gleick, James (2011). The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Vintage. 


Related theory in this area

  • Darnton, Robert (1979). The business of enlightenment: A publishing history of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-08785-2. 
  • Eisenstein, Elizabeth L (1980). The printing press as an agent of change 1. Cambridge University Press. 
  • Foucault, Michel (2002). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415267374. 

8. Study Wikimedia’s data as partial, temporary, fallible and shifting

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This research highlights the ways that researchers need to be sensitive to the medium and the flow of data.

  • Jemielniak, Dariusz (2020). Thick Big Data: Doing Digital Social Sciences. Oxford University Press. 

Related methodologies in this area

  • Daly, Angela; Devitt, S. Kate; Mann, Monique (2019). Good data (PDF). Institute of Network Cultures. 

9. Situate research practice

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This research concentrates on the ethics of doing research, community-centered methodologies, and ethnographic approaches.

Related frameworks in this area

10. Build a shared project of critical investigation across disciplines

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These works advocate for different approaches across disciplines and communities.

  • Lovink, Geert; Tkacz, Nathaniel (2011). "The ‘C’ in CPOV: Introduction to the CPOV Reader". In Lovink, Geert; Tkacz, Nathaniel. Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader (PDF). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. pp. 34–49. 

References

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  1. ↑ a b Ford H, Avieson B, Bailo F, et al. (2025). A Manifesto for Wikimedia Research: Critically Studying Wikimedia as Infrastructure. University of Technology, Sydney. https://manifesto.wiki
  2. ↑ Jankowski, S., Ford, H., Iliadis, A., & Sidoti, F. (2025). Uniting and Reigniting Critical Wikimedia Research. Big Data & Society, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251357292
  3. ↑ Lovink, Geert (2025-07-10). "Heather Ford on Why Critical Wikipedia Research Is More Important Than Ever". Institute of Network Cultures. Retrieved 2025-07-25. 
  4. ↑ Redi, Miriam; Gerlach, Martin; Johnson, Isaac; Morgan, Jonathan; Zia, Leila (29 January 2021). "A Taxonomy of Knowledge Gaps for Wikimedia Projects (Second Draft)". arXiv:2008.12314. 
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