Today, May 20, 2021, Wikipedia in Spanish turns 20 years old and I am still surprised by its mere existence. Although I opened an account more than 13 years ago, I started brujulear in an anonymous way, correcting spelling and punctuation errors found while reading it. It seemed magical to me that one could contribute in this way to a cultural project with universal ambition. I recognize that, since I learned more about its operation, I was fascinated by the collaborative documentation system that involves the Semantic wiki. I realized that, for the first time in history, there was a tool that allowed us to develop collectively and distributed what was happening around us. Isn't it truly amazing?
Twenty years after his birth, I still see it as something profoundly powerful that anyone, from anywhere, can contribute to a group narrative, learning a very accessible technique. Although it seems very radical what I am going to say, I consider that this is a class revolution in which we can break with the traditional elite who have traditionally established historical truth. Access to this technology has allowed us to question static and immutable facts from a multitude of points of view, and understand history as a process of processes, and never again as a still photo.
Conceptually, I think Wikipedia has also won what I like to call ‘anyone’s revolution’.. Despite the contempt that many people show in public that ‘anyone can write it’ and, therefore, ‘you cannot trust it’, the triumph is in the millions of daily queries it receives and its use as a starting point to know or investigate something. The idea that something built by many volunteer people, whose identity cannot be known, has no value or quality has almost completely disappeared. Although it is still essential that we be critical of what we read, inside and outside Wikipedia, and we must learn to contrast the information no matter where it comes from.
It is also necessary that, apart from criticizing the lack of content or quality that the articles we read may have, we incorporate the action of contributing and correcting what we can. It's about not just being Wikipedia readers and this is a paradigm shift: instead of delegating to others (experts, elite, representatives ...) the excellence of something from which we benefit daily and free, we take individual and collective responsibility for making that place better through our contributions, however small. You do not know how important it is to correct errors or update information of any kind. Contributing to the common good is an altruistic goal of the Wikimedia movement that we must never give up.
In these two decades of life, the free, open and free online encyclopedia has been consolidated before public opinion. From my point of view, despite the obvious achievements it has made, should be much more present in the world of academia as a working tool, and not only for consultation. Turning female and male students of any grade into young researchers and content editors should be one of the main goals of the movement for the coming years. Hopefully the next stage will be education WITH Wikipedia.
One thing we can be proud of is that Wikipedia is one of the few sites that maintains its principles of a free, open and collaborative tool of the entire Internet.. Where before we thought that a digital society could be built with other parameters far from the market, now we see that most spaces have become private and closed areas where our data is trafficked and we are bombarded with advertising. Wikipedia stands in the middle of that wild and hostile New World as a small-great oasis where we can still boast of defending a system that, despite its problems and imperfections, biases and lack of diversity, remains the best experience of universal and free access to knowledge.
English (UK)