User:Bigtimepeace/Why We Are Here

(This essay is intentionally written very generally and avoids Wiki terminology.)

We all know why we are here—or at least why we are supposed to be here. We are here to write an encyclopedia. At the end of the day we must always remember that.

But the many means to that end—i.e., everything that happens behind the scenes on the Wiki in order for us to create and publish encyclopedia articles—are also why we are here. Some editors might be pure editors of an encyclopedia, so to speak, who for the most part spend their time on Wikipedia as one would in a room full of fellow-editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica. For most of us, however, what we do en route to writing the encyclopedia is also a big part of why we are here, for better or for worse.

Perhaps we are not honest enough about that, often feeling compelled as a matter of course to invoke only our commitment to writing a high-quality encyclopedia as the motivation for contributing to Wikipedia. Perhaps it’s better to acknowledge all of the other reasons so many of us have spent so many hours here.

So why are we here? To edit the encyclopedia, yes, but also:

To read
To write
To discuss topics of interest
To argue, sometimes to fight
To participate in something greater than ourselves
To tidy things up
To gossip
To share our knowledge
To teach
To troll
To speak truth
To vent
To create
To avoid something else in life
To pontificate
To practice technical skills
To kill time, or avoid boredom
To make friends
To achieve
To publicize
To shame, to mock
To feel empowered
To show off in front of a crowd
To find something new
To be “famous”
To be helpful
To control
To offer expertise
To bring harmony
To bring discord
To be at the forefront of change
To receive and bestow approbation
To take on a different identity
To right a wrong
To police
To judge
To make a martyr of oneself
To be entertained
To volunteer
To be part of a community
To learn
To remember
To keep from forgetting

None of us do all of these things, and many do only a few. Some are clearly positive, some rather negative, and some more ambiguous. The list is necessarily partial in two senses in that it is both limited and subjective.

What this list tells us is something we should already know: Wikipedia is not merely a source of information. It is a sui generis subculture. It is also a social experiment in which we are all willing participants, a reality which all-too-often goes unacknowledged. It will be studied in that light by many, many people for many, many years to come. There is a lot more going on than here than mere encyclopedia writing, and in the long run it’s healthy and indeed necessary for all of us to acknowledge that.

Because while the goal of collectively writing a free encyclopedia is undoubtedly a noble one, most of us have our own individual reasons for being Wikipedians that go beyond that, reasons of which we as individuals may or may not be fully conscious. The incredible, idealistic, and perhaps ultimately naïve idea behind Wikipedia is that a conglomeration of random individuals—widely separated in space and time, and with their own often selfish reasons for being here—will somehow end up creating and maintaining the greatest and most accessible organized information source in the history of humanity.

That’s a rather remarkable notion, and implicit within it is a profoundly optimistic view of human nature. Perhaps it will be easier to make that remarkable notion a reality if we view all of the “non-encyclopedic” reasons why we are here not as obstacles to writing a terrific encyclopedia, but indeed as the only possible means to that end.