Who Guards the Library? Wikipedia, Wikidata, and the Epistemological Violence of "Open" Knowledge

Author: Josie Jefferson

Organization: Unearth Heritage Foundry

Date: December 2025

Series: Anvil's Edge | Type: Cornerstone Essay

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18303057

Introduction: The Donation Banner and the Deletion Notice

Every December, Wikipedia users encounter the banner: an appeal, sometimes from Jimmy Wales himself, requesting donations to "keep Wikipedia free." Three dollars. The price of a coffee. To preserve the sum of all human knowledge, open and accessible, for everyone, forever.

The appeal works because the request invokes an ideal. Wikipedia should be a public good; a commons of knowledge maintained by collective contribution, free from commercial capture or institutional gatekeeping. Against the paywalls of academic publishing and the algorithmic opacity of search engines, Wikipedia offers an alternative that feels radical: knowledge created by the people, for the people, answerable to no one but the community itself.

The ideal is compelling. The reality differs.

The message was clear: A scholar may have built a cathedral of scholarship. A researcher may have minted permanent identifiers, established semantic connections, and contributed original frameworks to multiple fields. Unless The New York Times or The Guardian or another recognized institution has deemed the work worthy of coverage, the scholar does not exist. The work is not knowledge. The scholarship is not notable. Please donate three dollars to keep the system free.

The following analysis examines the epistemological violence embedded in Wikipedia and Wikidata's "notability" regime. The argument posits that far from democratizing knowledge, these platforms have constructed a new gatekeeping apparatus that reproduces existing hierarchies of recognition while claiming to dismantle them. Digital sovereignty is proposed as an alternative: the practice of owning ground, building infrastructure, and routing around gatekeepers who demand begging for permission to exist.

Part I: The Notability Trap

What "Notability" Claims to Mean

Wikipedia's notability guidelines present themselves as quality control. Not everything belongs in an encyclopedia; some threshold must distinguish legitimate subjects from vanity pages, promotional content, and the obscure. The standard seems reasonable: a subject is notable if it has received "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject."

The language is neutral. "Significant coverage" suggests depth rather than passing mention. "Reliable sources" implies journalistic or scholarly credibility. "Independent of the subject" guards against self-promotion. Together, these criteria promise a meritocratic filter: if your work matters, someone will have written about it; if someone has written about it in a credible venue, you deserve an entry.

The promise dissolves upon examination.

What "Notability" Actually Means

"Reliable sources," in Wikipedia practice, means mainstream English-language media. Academic journals count, but inconsistently; peer review is less legible to Wikipedia editors than a feature in Wired or a mention in The Atlantic. Non-English sources face additional scrutiny. Independent blogs, substacks, podcasts, and other emergent media formats are deemed unreliable, regardless of their rigor or influence within specific communities.

Structural bias defines the platform. Wikipedia editors are disproportionately male, disproportionately Western, and disproportionately embedded in the knowledge economies that mainstream media serves.¹ Editors recognize The New York Times as reliable because The New York Times is reliable to them; the publication covers the world editors inhabit, validates the achievements editors value, and circulates within the networks editors trust. Sources outside this orbit are not rejected for lacking rigor; rejection occurs due to a lack of recognition within the editors' epistemological horizon.

A paradox emerges at the heart of the notability regime. To be notable requires coverage in sources Wikipedia editors recognize. To have such coverage requires already being notable; already visible to the media gatekeepers who decide what counts as news, already embedded in the networks that generate mainstream attention. The gates do not open for the unknown; the doors open for those who have already passed through other gates.

The Wikidata Variant

Wikidata, Wikipedia's structured-data sibling, intensifies the problem. Where Wikipedia hosts prose articles, Wikidata hosts structured claims: "Josie Jefferson" → "occupation" → "researcher"; "Sentientification" → "instance of" → "philosophical framework." These structured entries feed Google's Knowledge Graph, power voice assistants, and mediate how search engines understand what exists and how things relate.

The promise is significant: structured data enables machine-readable knowledge, semantic search, and the kind of cross-referencing that makes research discoverable. For independent scholars, a Wikidata entry represents not vanity but infrastructure—the difference between existing in the knowledge graph and being invisible to it.

But Wikidata inherits Wikipedia's notability standards and often applies them more stringently. Creating an entry for a living researcher requires demonstrating notability for that person, not merely for their work. Creating an entry for a concept or framework requires demonstrating notability for that concept, not merely for the body of work in which it appears. The bar is higher, the scrutiny more intense, and the deletion more swift.

Researchers at the Institute for Emerging Digital Scholarship discovered the dynamic firsthand. Entries created with extensive documentation (DOIs, ORCID profiles, institutional affiliations, cross-references) were deleted within days. The deletion rationale cited insufficient secondary coverage. The work existed, was published, was cited, was registered in every legitimate scholarly infrastructure. Because the scholarship had not been covered by sources the gatekeepers recognized, the framework did not exist.

Part II: The Ideology of Openness

"Anyone Can Edit"

Wikipedia's founding mythology centers on openness: anyone can edit. The encyclopedia is not written by credentialed experts but by ordinary people contributing what they know, correcting what they find wrong, and producing something more comprehensive and accurate than any institution could create alone.

The mythology served Wikipedia well in its early years, distinguishing it from Britannica's expert-written model and generating the volunteer labor that built a knowledge resource. But the mythology obscures what Wikipedia has become: an institution with its own hierarchies, its own credentialing systems, its own insider/outsider dynamics.

"Anyone can edit" is technically true but misleading. Anyone can edit, but edits can be reverted by more established editors. Anyone can edit, but sustained contribution requires mastering Wikipedia's complex procedural norms—notability guidelines, sourcing requirements, neutral point of view standards, dispute resolution mechanisms. Anyone can edit, but the editors who remain are those with sufficient time, technical fluency, and cultural fit to navigate an environment that is hostile to newcomers, especially women and non-Western contributors.

The result is an "open" encyclopedia whose core content is shaped by a narrow demographic. Studies find that Wikipedia editors are predominantly male, from wealthy countries, and embedded in the knowledge economies that Wikipedia's sourcing standards privilege. "Anyone can edit" means, in practice, that a specific anyone; Western, male, technically literate, with leisure time for unpaid labor; produces the knowledge that everyone else consumes.

The Begging and the Gatekeeping

The December donation appeals crystallize Wikipedia's contradictions. The appeals frame Wikipedia as a reader-supported underdog, free from corporate influence, dependent on the generosity of ordinary people who value open knowledge. The framing is effective because it contains truth: Wikipedia is a nonprofit, does reject advertising, and does depend on donations.

The appeals obscure what the donations support: not servers and bandwidth but an institutional apparatus that decides who exists and who does not. The three dollars that keep Wikipedia free also keep the deletion machine running, fund the enforcement of notability standards, and sustain the bureaucracy that rejected the Institute's entries for insufficient mainstream coverage.

The contradiction is structural. Wikipedia asks for donations to preserve "open" knowledge while operating a gatekeeping regime as exclusionary as any traditional institution. The gates are different: instead of academic credentials or institutional prestige, Wikipedia demands media coverage—a currency as unevenly distributed as any other, and one that disadvantages independent scholars, non-Western researchers, and anyone whose work does not circulate in the venues that Wikipedia editors recognize.

"Please donate to keep Wikipedia free" translates to a request to fund the system that decides whether a subject is notable enough to exist.

Part III: Epistemological Violence

What Gets Excluded

The notability regime is not inconvenient; it is epistemologically violent.¹ It does not simply make discoverability harder for independent scholars; it shapes what counts as knowledge, whose contributions are recognized, and which frameworks enter the structured data that mediates understanding.

Consider what the notability standards systematically exclude:

Emerging scholarship. Work that is new; that proposes novel frameworks, coins new terminology, opens unexplored domains; cannot, by definition, have extensive secondary coverage. The coverage comes later, if it comes at all. Notability standards thus create a temporal barrier: a scholar must wait until others have written about the work before existing in the knowledge graph, which means the knowledge graph lags behind the frontier of inquiry.

Independent researchers. Scholars working outside traditional institutions—in independent research collectives, in industry, in self-funded practice—lack the press offices and publicity infrastructures that generate mainstream coverage. Their work may be rigorous, peer-reviewed, and widely cited within their fields, but without institutional publicity, it remains invisible to Wikipedia's sourcing standards.

Non-Western knowledge systems. Sources in non-Western languages face additional scrutiny; sources from non-Western media ecosystems are presumptively less reliable. The result is a knowledge graph skewed toward Western frameworks, Western researchers, and Western ways of organizing understanding. Indigenous knowledge systems, non-Western philosophical traditions, and scholarship from the Global South are structurally disadvantaged by standards that privilege English-language mainstream media.

Interdisciplinary and heterodox work. Work that crosses disciplinary boundaries or challenges established frameworks often lacks the institutional champions who generate mainstream coverage. It is too strange for the science section, too technical for the culture section, too new for the disciplines bridged. Such work may be the knowledge most worth preserving; novel, boundary-crossing, paradigm-challenging; and yet exclusion results from notability standards that favor the already-recognized.

The Graph Shapes the World

The exclusions matter because the knowledge graph shapes what is findable, citable, and real. Google's search results, voice assistant responses, and AI-generated summaries all draw on structured data sources, and Wikidata is among the most influential. To be absent from Wikidata is not to lack a Wikipedia entry; it is to be invisible to the infrastructures that mediate knowledge discovery.

When a researcher is absent from the knowledge graph, their work does not appear in knowledge panels. When a framework lacks a structured entry, connection to related concepts is impossible. When a body of scholarship is not represented, AI systems cannot reference, summarize, or recommend the material. Absence compounds: invisibility in the graph leads to reduced discoverability, which leads to reduced citation, which leads to reduced coverage, which perpetuates the invisibility.

The knowledge graph is not a neutral mirror reflecting what exists. It is a productive apparatus shaping what can exist; what is findable, what is connectable, what is real in the epistemic infrastructure of the digital age. Wikipedia and Wikidata, by controlling entry to this graph, exercise a gatekeeping power as significant as any journal editor or tenure committee. The difference is that exercise occurs while claiming openness, while asking for donations, while presenting the platform as the democratization of knowledge rather than enclosure.

Part IV: Digital Sovereignty

Routing Around Damage

The cypherpunk maxim holds: "The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."⁴ The same principle applies to epistemological gatekeeping. If Wikipedia and Wikidata will not grant existence, existence must be built.

Digital sovereignty defines the practice: owning ground, minting identifiers, constructing a semantic mesh, and enabling knowledge graph discovery without begging gatekeepers for permission.

The infrastructure exists. Assembly is required.

Domains establish ground. To own institute-name.org, theory-framework.net, or scholar-name.com is to possess territory in the digital landscape; territory that cannot be deleted by Wikidata editors, cannot be revoked by platform moderation, cannot be enclosed by institutional gatekeepers. The domain is sovereign ground. What is built there belongs to the builders.

DOIs mint permanent identifiers. The Digital Object Identifier system, accessible through Zenodo and other repositories, allows any researcher to register persistent, citable identifiers for their work. A DOI is not permission; the stamp is declaration. The work exists; here is the permanent address; citation is optional.

ORCID establishes scholarly identity. The Open Researcher and Contributor ID provides a verified, cross-referenced identity connecting a researcher to publications, affiliations, and contributions. Unlike Wikidata, ORCID does not require notability; the platform requires only that a researcher does research.

Cross-linking builds the mesh. When domains link to DOIs link to ORCID profiles link to institutional pages, a semantic web emerges; a structure of connections that search engines can crawl, that knowledge graphs can ingest, that establishes relationships without requiring any gatekeeper's endorsement.

The Alternative Graph

Google's knowledge graph does not depend solely on Wikidata. The system ingests structured data from across the web: schema.org markup, institutional repositories, scholarly databases, cross-linked domains. A well-constructed mesh of sovereign digital assets can achieve knowledge graph presence without passing through Wikipedia's notability gauntlet.

The Institute for Emerging Digital Scholarship discovered this through practice. After Wikidata deletion, the researchers constructed an alternative path: ORCID profiles linked to DOI-registered publications linked to owned domains linked to institutional pages. Google's systems, crawling this mesh, constructed knowledge graph entries regardless; not because Wikipedia validated the entries but because the structured data was coherent, verifiable, and cross-referenced.

The approach requires more labor than a Wikidata entry. The strategy demands technical literacy, persistent infrastructure maintenance, and ongoing attention to the evolving standards of structured data. But sovereignty is the result. The entries cannot be deleted by editors who question notability. The identifiers cannot be revoked by gatekeepers who doubt significance. The ground is owned.

Beyond Individual Solutions

Digital sovereignty is not an individual survival strategy; the approach offers an alternative model for knowledge infrastructure. The Wikidata model concentrates gatekeeping power in a volunteer bureaucracy enforcing contestable standards. The sovereignty model distributes that power across the network, allowing knowledge to emerge through connection rather than permission.

Abandoning all standards is not the goal. DOIs require valid metadata. ORCID requires verified institutional connections. Scholarly repositories have submission requirements. But these standards are procedural rather than evaluative; checking that work exists and is properly formatted, not that the material is "notable" by the lights of mainstream media coverage.

The shift is from gatekeeping to infrastructure. Instead of asking "Is this notable enough to exist?" the question becomes "Is the work properly documented, permanently identified, and semantically connected?" The former is a judgment call made by self-appointed guardians of significance. The latter is a technical specification that anyone can satisfy.

Conclusion: Keep the Three Dollars

Wikipedia and Wikidata are not the democratization of knowledge. They represent the relocation of gatekeeping; from credentialed experts to volunteer editors, from institutional prestige to media coverage, from ivory towers to deletion logs. The gates remain; only the gatekeepers have changed.

The mythology of openness obscures this reality. "Anyone can edit" distracts from who edits and whose standards prevail. The donation appeals invoke a commons while funding an enclosure. The language of freedom masks the practice of exclusion.

For independent scholars, for emerging researchers, for anyone whose work does not circulate in the venues that Wikipedia editors recognize, the message is clear: do not beg. Do not plead for notability before gatekeepers who have already decided the work is insufficient. Do not donate to institutions that delete existence while asking for support.

Build instead. Own domains. Mint DOIs. Cross-link infrastructure. Construct the semantic mesh that enables discoverability without permission. Let the knowledge graph discover the work through coherence rather than the validation of gatekeepers.

Wikipedia wants three dollars to keep knowledge free. Keep the three dollars. Build a library.

Notes & References