Jan 15, 2021 7:00 AM

Wikipedia Is Basically a Massive RPG

Sure, the metaphor is imperfect. But as the encyclopedia enters its 20th year, it's worth reflecting on the "rules of the game"—and how they might change.

Illustration: Sam Whitney; Getty Images

The first-ever edit to Wikipedia took place on January 15, 2001. Today, the online encyclopedia officially turns 20 years old, on the date known as Wikipedia Day. One of WIRED’s earliest stories about Wikipedia once compared it to the ancient library of Alexandria. For the site’s volunteer editors, however, there’s another metaphor that has long been popular: Wikipedia is a role-playing game.

At first blush, there do not appear to be many similarities between editing the internet encyclopedia and playing Dungeons & Dragons. Yet proponents of the RPG metaphor see numerous resemblances to both table-top RPGs and their online counterparts. According to this humorous and continuously evolving essay composed by Wikipedians, the Wikipedia “game world” consists of 6.2 million “unique locations” (read: English Wikipedia articles), 40.6 million “players” (Wikipedia editors), and the common villains are the trolls who disrupt articles in “boss fights” (the edit wars that sometimes take place regarding the content published on an article). The “game designer” is Jimmy Wales, who started the site 20 years ago, and was reportedly a big fan of MMORPGs of the 1980s, like Island of Kesmai and Scepter of Goth. More recently, Wales sent across a box of D&D Beyond books and swag for his Christmas 2020 Reddit Secret Santa gift.

“Comparing Wikipedia to a role-playing game is useful, as it helps people understand why Wikipedians are so reluctant to recognize external expertise,” Dariusz Jemielniak, a professor at Kozminski University and author of Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia and coauthor of Collaborative Society, wrote in an email.

Consider this example: A new user logs onto Wikipedia, changes the content of an article, and writes, “I’m entitled to make this change because I have a graduate degree in this subject!” Not only would this person likely be perceived as a prig, but their reasoning is unlikely to succeed on Wikipedia. That’s because Wikipedians generally believe that arguments must stand or fall based on their merit and alignment with Wikipedia policies, such as whether the statement is verified with citations to reliable third-party sources.

Editors build their online street credentials—or, in gaming terms, experience points—by developing articles and increasing their edit counts. As Jemielniak explained, it feels very bizarre when somebody from the “brick-and-mortar world” swoops in and claims that they should have the same credibility in the Wikipedia RPG because of their credentials. That would be like a character in a D&D adventure suddenly proclaiming that they were in charge of the Medieval Literature dungeon because they happened to have a doctorate in the subject. Basically, it’s cheating by not recognizing the rules of the game itself.

The ability to create an in-game persona or character is another similarity between RPGs and Wikipedia. The most prolific contributor to the English language version of Wikipedia is Steven Pruitt, a 36-year-old resident of the Washington, DC, area who has made over 3.8 million edits since 2006. But within the Wikipedia community, he is more often referred to by his username, Ser Amantio di Nicolao, the handle he took from a minor character in a Puccini opera.

Users may gravitate toward a particular type of role that they want to play, with the roles outlined in the WikiFauna, a taxonomy that’s heavily based on nerd culture and fantasy RPGs. Some editors, for example, identify as WikiEagles, using their keen vision to detect and fix small errors like misplaced commas, or WikiFairies that beautify Wikipedia by organizing messy articles or making stylistic improvements. For his part, Pruitt declares on his user page that he’s a WikiGnome, the kind of user who tends to make small, incremental edits such as adding categories to articles (e.g. the blue links that appear on the bottom of a Wikipedia page).

There is even an opportunity to choose one’s “quest” within the gameworld. When Jina Valentine and Heather Hart were undergraduate art students, they noticed that Black artists were treated differently in their art history courses. “If they covered Black artists at all, they were segregated to one week on the Harlem Renaissance,” Hart recalled. Later, they found that Black artists did not have Wikipedia pages due to the lack of historical coverage of minorities. Together they cofounded the project Black Lunch Table, whose mission is to fill in the holes of art history. The project has hosted dozens of Edit-a-thons, community events to expand Wikipedia’s coverage of Black artists.

Valentine and Hart identify as WikiEnts, a role that’s focused on improving Wikipedia and promoting peaceful interactions. But the Wikipedia RPG types are not all sunshine and roses. For instance, the cofounders have noticed that articles developed at Edit-a-thons about notable Black artists are sometimes fast-tracked for deletion by anonymous users. “It seems so destructive, rather than productive and constructive, which is what we are trying to do as a project,” Valentine said. She added that these drive-by deletions can leave new Wikipedia contributors feeling particularly discouraged. According to Wikipedia policy, editors should only nominate an article for speedy deletion under limited circumstances, such as pure vandalism, and not mark legitimate pages without good faith discussion. The heartless, slash-and-burn approach is more fitting of a WikiOrc or a WikiTroll, two villains of the site’s taxonomy.

In the past year, especially, readers flocked to Wikipedia for a degree of informational accuracy that they were not able to find on social networks. The list of the most highly-trafficked English Wikipedia articles from 2020 reveals that people turned to the encyclopedia for information about the global pandemic, with the top three Covid-19 articles on the list receiving over 144 million collective pageviews. That number doesn’t even include the ways that Wikipedia information is used on platforms like Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant or to populate Google’s knowledge panels. In the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential Election, the Wikipedia editing community and the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation took significant steps to protect the site from being used as a tool for political misinformation.

Clearly, Wikipedia is more than a game, and the RPG comparison is at best an imperfect metaphor, but it’s nonetheless worth considering how the “rules of the game” might change in the next two decades, as the service relies less on manual edits and more on tools and technologies to streamline article creation and updates. Jemielniak also predicts that there will be further blending of human and machine systems on Wikipedia relatively soon. He expects that the power editors, those who are familiar with the website’s more advanced features, will have access to special tools to monitor disinformation and stave off bad actors.

As Jemielniak put it: “We will see the rise of a new paladin class—those who are not code sorcerers, and who are not writer warriors, but someone in-between—using powerful, pre-prepared spells to fight vandals and abusers, as well as to improve content overall.”