Steven Davi­son on how Wikipedia describes Quak­ers—and how we might respond.

This rais­es a con­cern for me about how the Quak­er move­ment might over­see this kind of pub­lic pre­sen­ta­tion of our faith and prac­tice going for­ward. In the spir­it of Wikipedia’s plat­form as a peer-to-peer project, and in keep­ing with the non-hierarchical gov­er­nance struc­tures so impor­tant to Friends, and, of course, with the guid­ance of the Holy Spir­it, I pro­pose a peer-to-peer process for the over­sight of such pre­sen­ta­tions, a long-range project of review that would hope­ful­ly include Friends with real exper­tise in the many areas of Quak­er his­to­ry, faith, and prac­tice cov­ered in this entry and what­ev­er oth­er entries we find

This relates to a long-term con­cern of mine that so much of the most pub­lic infor­ma­tion on Friends isn’t cre­at­ed by us. Wikipedia’s rel­a­tive­ly benign (there’s actu­al­ly a bit of a Quak­er process con­nec­tion) but our par­tic­i­pa­tion on social media like Face­book and Twit­ter are medi­at­ed by algo­rithms favor­ing con­tro­ver­sy. I edit Wikipedia entries a cou­ple of times a year but am also a small part of Friends Jour­nal efforts to built out Quak​er​.org to make it a use­ful, accu­rate, and pub­licly vis­i­ble intro­duc­tion to the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends.

There’s some good dis­cus­sion on Mastodon by some Wikipedia edi­tors who explain that Davi­son’s plan would be seen with some sus­pi­cion by Wikipedia. As com­menter Dan York wrote:

Wikipedia has a very strong ethos around “con­flict of inter­est” with the sense that peo­ple too close to a top­ic can’t write in a neu­tral point-of-view. There’s def­i­nite­ly val­ue in folks work­ing to improve the pages, but they need to keep these views in mind — and back up every­thing they do with reli­able sources.

Quak­ers on Wikipedia 

While work­ing on an essay on Quak­er meta­physics — what’s going on in our per­son­al mys­ti­cal expe­ri­ences, and espe­cial­ly, in…

Through the Flam­ing Sword