“We’re volunteers — and we want to contribute to this encyclopedia of our time.” ~ Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight

According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and its sister sites, people spent an estimated 2.9 billion hours reading English Wikipedia in 2024.

I wondered: What does it take to be a trustworthy repository for all that curiosity?

Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight has been a Wikipedia editor since 2007, and an administrator since 2009. With 100,000+ edits to her credit, she has created more than 4,000 new articles, with concentrations in geography, architecture, and women’s biographies. In 2015, she co-founded a volunteer project intended to address the current gender bias in Wikipedia content and in 2021 she was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Who better to talk with?

What’s different about Wikipedia is one of our pillars, called “verifiability”. You can actually click the link of the source that you see there and go to that website and see what was written. You can verify the fact.

The conversation took us from how curiosity inspires us to action, to the power of collaborative projects, setting goals versus just trying to move the needle, and the lasting ripple effects of cultural biases.

Listen to Choose to Be Curious #269: Wikipedia & Where We Entrust Our Curiosity, with Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight

Rosie Stephenson-Goodnight co-founded Women in Red in 2015 after learning that only 15 percent of biographies on Wikipedia at the time were about women.

Learn more about the Wikimedia Foundation. Can you guess the most viewed English-language articles were in 2024?

Want to become a Wikipedia editor? Learn more here.

With information being stripped from US government websites, what becomes of the verifiable links on Wikipedia? The Internet Archive ((IA) the “Wayback Machine”) keeps track; Wikipedia editors have information about how IA works, and how to fix dead links.

Check out this recent research on styles of curiosity expressed through use of Wikipedia. I’m excited to have lead author Dale Zhou lined up for an interview in the weeks ahead.

Listen to my conversation with historian Susan Strasser about the ever-evolving nature of history.

If you enjoyed this conversation, you might like these C2BC Classics: Is Curiosity Feminine, with Tonya Howe?, Imagining Worlds Otherwise: Learning from Black Feminist Curiosity, with Ayanna Spencer; and A Mile in Their Shoes: Shared History.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Great Is the Contessa” by Contessa, via Blue Dot Sessions.

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