An Overview of Wikipedia’s Structural Framework

Wikipedia is a living, breathing encyclopedia—constantly evolving and reshaped by the hands of its global community.

Wikimedians often joke that Wikipedia is a project that, in theory, should never work—but somehow, it does. And the reason it works is simple: the people. It’s the vibrant global community of contributors, paired with a framework of smart technology, thoughtful policies, and streamlined workflows, that keeps Wikipedia reliable, relevant, and always in motion.

So what kind of knowledge actually lives on Wikipedia, and how is it structured and maintained on Wikipedia? In this blog series, we’ll examine the nature of Wikipedia’s knowledge. We’ll explore its fundamental characteristics, examine how it’s organized, uncover the “gaps” in knowledge that inevitably arise, and discuss how these knowledge gaps are prioritized and addressed. We’ll also look at real-world examples of how community-driven efforts are actively shaping Wikipedia.

What knowledge can be included on Wikipedia?

The global reach of Wikipedia throughout our society often leads to a common misconception: that it’s an unfiltered digital repository for every piece of information ever conceived. However, contrary to that idea of a giant “digital dump”, not everything can be added to Wikipedia. Instead, it’s designed to host a particular type of knowledge—one that is valuable, akin to what you’d expect from a robust and reliable encyclopedia.

This isn’t to say Wikipedia is static. As our collective understanding expands through research, innovation, and inquiry, Wikipedia’s content endeavors to evolve in parallel. Wikipedia adheres to a set of guiding principles that act as a quality filter, ensuring that what makes it onto it is not just available but truly valuable.

So what exactly makes the cut?

Wikipedia curates and presents knowledge that is fundamentally dynamic, factual, verifiable, collectively significant, and neutral. All of this is packaged in a digital format that is both meaningful and accessible to people and usable by machines. 

Unpacking Wikipedia’s Core Characteristics

At its heart, Wikipedia is more than just a website; it’s a living repository of human knowledge, defined by a set of interconnected principles that shape its very essence. Let’s explore what makes Wikipedia’s knowledge so valuable.

Dynamic: Unlike the static pages of a printed book, Wikipedia is alive. It’s a constantly evolving entity, adapting and growing with the world it mirrors. Every single moment, across its hundreds of language editions, articles are being revised, expanded, clarified, or corrected. Consider the English Wikipedia alone, which sees more than 250,000 pageviews and over 150 edits every minute. This means Wikipedia isn’t just a static reference but a resource in constant motion, continuously striving to reflect the most current understanding of any given topic.

Factual: The core of Wikipedia is built upon a commitment to facts and verifiable evidence. It rigorously avoids personal opinions, subjective interpretations, or original research to instead focus on established knowledge supported by reliable sources. The commitment to factuality doesn’t mean Wikipedia is just a collection of cold, hard data points. Wikipedia articles offer structured, contextual explanations, often weaving in theories and interpretations that are backed by robust evidence. Think of it less like a simple dictionary providing definitions and more like a comprehensive encyclopedia. You won’t find step-by-step “how-to” guides, like instructions on sewing buttons. Instead, you’ll discover a detailed description of concepts, such as the intricate mechanics of how a sewing machine operates.

Verifiable: Arguably one of Wikipedia’s most critical pillars, verifiability dictates that every single claim, assertion, or piece of information contributed to Wikipedia must be backed by reliable, published sources. If a claim cannot be checked or confirmed, then it doesn’t belong on Wikipedia. This rigorous standard empowers readers to scrutinize the information presented and trace it back to its origins. Of course, the definition of a “reliable source” is complex and often hotly debated, especially when it comes to knowledge from marginalized communities that might not have traditional, widely documented sources. For now, we’ll acknowledge that this is a complex issue, worthy of its own discussion.

Collective Significance: Wikipedia isn’t interested in what’s important only to an individual; it’s concerned with what holds importance to many. This concept, often referred to as “notability,” determines whether a topic is significant enough to warrant its own article. For example, there is a Wikipedia article about Larry the cat, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office of the United Kingdom. It is not just that many people know Larry, but many are also aware that others know him. This collective awareness, knowing that others also know Larry, makes him a collectively significant figure. To gauge if an entity has crossed the threshold of collective significance, Wikipedians use notability guidelines, a set of criteria designed to help contributors determine whether a topic matters enough to be included in Wikipedia. 

Neutral: Neutrality is a critical pillar of Wikipedia’s editorial philosophy. It requires that all information within an article is presented impartially and with due weight. This means articles must offer a balanced view, giving space to all significant perspectives in proportion to their presence in reliable sources. For example, when tackling a controversial political issue, Wikipedia won’t simply echo one side’s argument. Instead, it will lay out all major viewpoints, supported by verifiable evidence, allowing readers to gain a comprehensive and unbiased understanding of the topic’s complexities. This commitment to neutrality fosters trust and allows Wikipedia to serve as a platform for impartial information, not advocacy.

How Knowledge is Presented and Used on Wikipedia

Digital Format: Wikipedia is more than a text-based encyclopedia uploaded to the web. It was conceived and designed specifically for the digital world. Its content is enriched with digital essentials: internal links that allow for continued exploration between related topics, structured metadata that organizes data, and multimedia elements like images, audio, and video that enhance the experience. These digital enhancements bring subjects to life that traditional, printed books cannot, offering a dynamic and interconnected web of knowledge.

Meaningful: Wikipedia contains meaningful knowledge, and its policies are designed in such a way as to achieve this ultimate goal. This means contextualizing complex topics in a way that makes sense to general audiences. For instance, while it is possible to know the value of π (pi) accurately to a trillion digits, Wikipedia doesn’t list it in its entirety. Why? Because that extreme level of detail, while mathematically accurate, isn’t meaningful or practically useful for the vast majority of its readers. Wikipedia prioritizes information that provides meaningful understandings for its diverse global audience.

Accessible: Universal access to knowledge is core to Wikipedia’s mission. Articles are written in straightforward language, actively avoiding unnecessary jargon and overly technical complexity wherever possible. The goal is always to make knowledge easier to understand, not harder, ensuring that a broad spectrum of readers, regardless of their background or expertise, can benefit and engage with the information presented.

Usable for Machines: While Wikipedia is primarily written by and for humans, its inherent structure is designed with machines also in mind. Through structured data and consistent markup (wikitext), Wikipedia content can be parsed and reused by artificial intelligence tools, digital assistants, and advanced search algorithms. This design serves as a powerful backbone for machine learning projects, advanced research tools, and countless other digital products. This approach allows for Wikipedia’s impact to extend beyond direct human consumption to also play a key role as a backbone of knowledge in the digital knowledge ecosystem.

Wrapping Up

We’ve now explored the foundational principles that define the unique nature of knowledge on Wikipedia: it is dynamic, factual, verifiable, collectively significant, and neutral content, all presented in a way that’s digital, meaningful, accessible, and usable by machines. These core characteristics are what allow Wikipedia to function as the living encyclopedia we know.

While Wikipedia’s knowledge is vast and carefully curated to meet these high standards and formats, that doesn’t mean Wikipedia is perfect or complete. There’s a lot of valuable knowledge still waiting to be added, and on the flip side, some content may have found its way in that doesn’t fully belong. These gaps and excesses in the knowledge on Wikipedia are what we’ll call knowledge discrepancies.

In our next posts, we’ll build on this understanding of Wikipedia’s structural framework to explore knowledge discrepancies, what they are, and how we can categorize, find, and flag them. Stay tuned!

With inputs from Lodewijk Gelauff and Mary Mark Ockerbloom.