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Contributors

Published onOct 15, 2020
Contributors

Phoebe Ayers is the librarian for electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries. She has been a Wikipedian since 2003, is a former member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, and is the coauthor of How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It (No Starch Press, 2008).

Omer Benjakob is a journalist and researcher based in Israel. He was born in New York and raised in Tel Aviv. His work focuses on Wikipedia and the politics of knowledge in the digital age. He covers the online encyclopedia for Haaretz—Israel’s sole paper of record—in English and Hebrew. His work has also appeared in Wired UK. His academic research focuses on Wikipedia’s ties to science, and he works with scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires to map the growth of knowledge online. He’s pursuing an MA from Tel Aviv University’s Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas.

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and codirector of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He has been a leading scholar on the impact of the internet on the networked economy and society since the 1990s, with a particular focus on commons, cooperation, and decentralization. His books include Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006). His work can be freely accessed at benkler.org.

William Beutler is the founder of Beutler Ink, a digital marketing agency specializing in Wikipedia engagement. As a volunteer Wikipedia editor for more than a decade, Beutler has played a leading role in fostering dialogue between the Wikipedia community and the public relations industry and is the author of a blog, The Wikipedian, that focuses on Wikimedia topics. He is also the creator of The Infinite Atlas Project, a multimedia work mapping the locations of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” and a cohost of podcasts about Stanley Kubrick as well as other unconventional filmmakers. He is based in Washington, DC.

Siko Bouterse is an online community organizer, digital activist, and feminist who cofounded Whose Knowledge?. She grew up in the United States with family spread across three continents in both the Global North and Global South, and her interest in the internet began as a way to connect people across languages, cultures, and spaces. She joined the Wikimedia movement in 2011, becoming former director of community resources at the Wikimedia Foundation and a Wikipedian. Today Bouterse uses her white privilege to challenge injustice and inequality of many forms online, and is exploring antiauthoritarian education practices in partnership with her daughter.

Amy Carleton (BS, Simmons College; MA, PhD, Northeastern University) teaches writing and communication in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests include studying collaborative culture, design thinking, and online communities. Outside of academia, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, NPR, Los Angeles Review of Books, and others. Currently she is working on a book project about the musician Prince and online fan culture.

Stéphane Coillet-Matillon is based in Switzerland and has owned a registered account on Wikipedia since 2004. Moving through the ranks on-wiki as well as off-wiki, he joined the Swiss chapter shortly after it was founded and was ultimately elected to its board of trustees in 2014. Luck, fate, and tragedy led him to become its ad interim executive director a year later. His mission there having been completed, he spun off Kiwix, the offline Wikipedia reader for people without internet access, and launched it as an independent entity in 2017. He still serves as its chief executive officer.

Robert E. Cummings serves as executive director of academic innovation and associate professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. His research focuses on open educational resources generally and more specifically on teaching with Wikipedia in higher education as an open educational practice. He edits the open access journal Wiki Studies, which publishes peer-reviewed articles examining the intersection of Wikipedia and higher education. He serves on the board of directors for Wiki Education, and his current research focuses on how the introduction of open educational resources in the classroom impacts teaching and learning practices.

LiAnna L. Davis is the chief programs officer and deputy director for Wiki Education. With more than nine years’ experience in running programs connecting Wikipedia and academia, Davis is one of the world’s leading experts in teaching with Wikipedia. She has played a pivotal role in creating Wikipedia education programs in eight countries worldwide and has supported the work of volunteers in more than fifty additional countries. She has a master’s degree in communication, culture, and technology from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s degree in communication studies from the University of Puget Sound.

Siân Evans is the information literacy and instructional design librarian at Maryland Institute College of Art and cofounder and co-lead Organizer of Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Her writing can be found in journals such as Art Documentation and The Serials Librarian, and her work with Art+Feminism has been covered by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and more. She believes that librarianship is information activism.

Heather Ford is an associate professor and head of discipline for digital and social media in the School of Communications at the University of Technology, Sydney. She focuses on the implications of the increasing deployment of algorithms and automation to organize and construct knowledge about events, people, places, and things. Fact Factories (MIT Press, 2020) follows the ways in which history is written as it happens on Wikipedia and about how facts travel through the infrastructure of the internet.

Stephen Harrison is an attorney and writer whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, New York Times, and Washington Post. He also writes “Source Notes,” a regular column for Slate about the internet’s knowledge ecosystem. In recent years, he has published feature articles about leading figures in the Wikimedia movement. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and his master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin.

Heather Hart is based in Brooklyn and has received grants from Anonymous was a Woman, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Harpo Foundation, and Jerome Foundation as well as a fellowship from the New York Film Academy. Her work has been included in a variety of publications and exhibited worldwide, including at Storm King Sculpture Park, Socrates Sculpture Park, Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, Studio Museum in Harlem, ICA Philadelphia, Art in General, The Drawing Center, PS1 MoMA, Museum of Arts and Craft in Itami, Portland Art Center, and the Brooklyn Museum. Hart is invested in creating site-specific liminal spaces for personal reclamation and in questioning dominant narratives and proposing alternatives to them. She received her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts and her MFA from Rutgers University. For more information, see heather-hart.com.

Benjamin Mako Hill is a social scientist, technologist, and activist. In all three roles he works to understand why some attempts at peer production—like Wikipedia and Linux—build large volunteer communities while the vast majority never attract even a second contributor. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and a founding member of the Community Data Science Collective. He is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He has been participant in Wikipedia and Wikimedia communities for more than fifteen years.

Dariusz Jemielniak is a full professor of management at Kozminski University where he heads the MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies) department; a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; and a member of the board of trustees of Wikimedia Foundation. He published the first ethnography of Wikipedia, called Common Knowledge? (Stanford University Press, 2014). More recently, he wrote about Collaborative Society (with A. Przegalinska; MIT Press, 2020) and Thick Big Data: Doing Digital Social Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2020). He currently studies antiscience movements online.

Brian Keegan is a computational social scientist and assistant professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research explores how sociotechnical systems like Wikipedia manage bursty disruptions arising from breaking news. The mediation of bursts through information technologies enables him to understand the antecedents, processes, and consequences of these disruptions. He is particularly interested in the increasing interoperability of online social infrastructures and their vulnerabilities to bursts. He received his PhD in media, technology, and society at Northwestern University and SB degrees in engineering and science and technology studies at MIT.

Jackie Koerner is the social scientist behind action research initiatives pertaining to equity and inclusion in community spaces. Fascinated by the world around her, she loves making sense out of complex social situations. To share that love, she employs humor and relatability to inspire others to get involved in social change. Her tenacious nature and sense of justice usually get her into trouble but always for good reasons. She lives in the midwestern United States with her husband, her two daughters, and many rescued pets. Learn more and get in touch with her at jackiekoerner.com.

Alexandria Lockett is an assistant professor of English at Spelman College. She publishes about the technological politics of race, surveillance, and access. Her work appears in the journals Composition Studies, Enculturation, and Praxis and in the edited collections Humans at Work in the Digital Age: Forms of Digital Textual Labor (Routledge, 2019), Black Perspectives on Writing Program Administration: From the Margins to the Center (SWR Press, 2019), Out in the Center (Utah State University Press, 2019), and Bad Ideas about Writing (West Virginia University Digital Publishing Institute, 2017). An extended biography is available via her portfolio at www.alexandrialockett.com.

Jacqueline Mabey has been shaped by studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, McGill University, and the University of British Columbia and by diverse professional experience in commercial galleries, museums, and artist studios. Mabey works in a research-based curatorial model, exploring a set of recurrent themes: desire, power, visibility, vulnerability, and creative community. Mabey is cofounder and co-lead organizer of Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon and assistant curator at the Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers University–Newark. They work independently under the honorific failed projects (failedprojects.net).

Katherine Maher is the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects. She is a longtime advocate for free and open societies and has lived and worked around the world, leading the introduction of technology and innovation in human rights, good governance, and international development. Maher has worked with UNICEF, the National Democratic Institute, the World Bank, and Access Now on programs supporting technologies for democratic participation, civic engagement, and open government. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on Human Rights and a fellow at the Truman National Security Project.

Michael Mandiberg is an interdisciplinary artist who created Print Wikipedia, edited The Social Media Reader (NYU Press, 2012), founded the New York Arts Practicum, and cofounded the Art+Feminism. Their projects have been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, among others. They have been written about widely, from Artforum to Süddeutsche Zeitung. Mandiberg is professor of media culture at CUNY College of Staten Island and is on the doctoral faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Cecelia A. Musselman is associate teaching professor in the Writing Program at Northeastern University. She has been teaching with Wikipedia since 2006 and is an active member of the Boston-based Working Wikipedia Collaborative group of instructors and researchers. Musselman did her doctoral work in Uralic Studies with a special focus on the history of the Finnish language. She’s also a potter, gardener, and sauna enthusiast.

Eliza Myrie received her MFA from Northwestern University and BA from Williams College. Myrie was in residence at Bemis Center, MacDowell Colony, and Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago. Myrie lectures at School of the Art Institute and is a cofounder of the Black Artists Retreat [B.A.R.]. Her work has been supported by 3Arts and Propeller Fund and has been exhibited at Arts Club Chicago, Gallery 400, Vox Populi, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and New Museum of Contemporary Art. Myrie considers laboring as a physical and conceptual endeavor that complicates assignations of value across gender, socioeconomic, and racial categories. For more information, see elizamyrie.com.

Jake Orlowitz is a seeker of well people and sane societies, an internet citizen, a digital project manager, and an ally and activist for radical culture change. Orlowitz founded and ran the Wikipedia Library research access and library outreach program and built the Wikipedia Adventure interactive learning tutorial. Orlowitz lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife and stepdaughter.

Ian A. Ramjohn is the senior Wikipedia expert at Wiki Education. He discovered Wikipedia in 2004 and was able to correct errors in the Wikipedia article about his native Trinidad and Tobago. The experience of sitting in the developing world and changing the way your country was presented in an international reference world was life-changing. He has a PhD in ecology from Michigan State University and a bachelor’s from the University of the West Indies and has spent a decade teaching in higher education before joining Wiki Education in 2014.

Joseph Reagle is an associate professor of communication studies at Northeastern University. In 1998 and 2010 he was a resident fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and he taught and received his PhD at New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. As a research engineer at MIT, he served as an author and working group chair within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on topics including digital security, privacy, and internet policy. He has written about Wikipedia, online culture, and geek feminism. His latest book, Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents, was published by MIT Press in 2019.

Anasuya Sengupta is an Indian feminist activist, scholar, and cofounder of Whose Knowledge? who lives and works across multiple continents and online as a Wikipedian. She joined the Wikimedia Foundation in 2012, became chief grantmaking officer, and then began in earnest to edit and amplify marginalized knowledges on Wikipedia as a volunteer. She’s led and supported social justice initiatives in India and the United States, particularly against caste-based and sexuality-based discriminations, religious fundamentalisms, and gender-based violence. She acknowledges the multiple positions of power and disempowerment she holds, especially as an “upper caste” savarna brown woman from the Global South.

Aaron Shaw is an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University and a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Together with Benjamin Mako Hill, he cofounded the Community Data Science Collective.

Melissa Tamani is an art historian who graduated from the National University of San Marcos (Lima). She’s developed a career in the fields of cultural management and museum education at various cultural institutions in Peru. She has been part of Art+Feminism since 2015, formerly as a regional ambassador in Latin America and currently as a lead co-organizer. She is also a promoter of Wikimedia culture in Peru, organizing and taking part in campaigns focused on gender, human rights, and ecology. The axes of her work are the empowerment of marginalized communities and the promotion of culture as a catalyst for social mobilization.

Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze teaches writing, rhetoric, and professional communication at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing department. She grounds everything she does in a philosophy of extreme collaboration cultivated throughout her experiences with the Working Wikipedia Collaborative. She earned her PhD in literature from Northeastern University. Her interests range widely and include active learning pedagogy, improv comedy, rhetoric of science, animal studies, and theory of the novel. She has published essays on literary realism and modernism as well as Working Wikipedia Collaborative projects—in collaboration with her collaborators, of course.

Jina Valentine is an associate professor of printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at venues including the Drawing Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the CUE Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation, MCA Chicago, Southern Exposure, and Marlborough Gallery. Her work has received recognition and support from the North Carolina Arts Council, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Art Matters, and the Institute for Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her interdisciplinary practice is informed by the intuitive strategies of American folk artists and traditional craft techniques, and interweaves histories latent within found texts, objects, narratives, and spaces. Valentine received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and her MFA from Stanford University. For more information, see jinavalentine.com.

Matthew A. Vetter is an assistant professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Composition and Applied Linguistics PhD program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His research asks questions related to technology, writing, pedagogy, and digital culture, with a specific interest in investigations of the ideological and epistemological functions of digital communities. Vetter’s work has appeared in journals such as College English, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, Pedagogy, and Postdigital Science and Education. He edits and teaches in Wikipedia as user:Matthewvetter and maintains a digital portfolio at mattvetter.net.

Adele Godoy Vrana is an Afro-Brazilian feminist, social justice activist, and cofounder of Whose Knowledge? who joined the Wikimedia movement in 2012. As the former director of strategic partnerships at the Wikimedia Foundation, she led initiatives to help increase access to Wikipedia in the Global South. A Wikimedian against all odds, she decided to stick around to make the point that black women belong everywhere, with or without an edit count. She first learned of Wikipedia in her mid-twenties when she couldn’t afford to buy books and remains determined to make the knowledges of people like her visible, heard, and affirmed in this movement.

Denny Vrandečić is the founder of Wikidata, the Croatian Wikipedia, and cofounder of Wikibase and Semantic MediaWiki, used by the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other institutions. He works at Google AI and has worked previously on the Google Knowledge Graph, at Wikimedia Deutschland, and at the University of Southern California. Vrandečić gained a PhD while at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He was a community-elected member of the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. His research interests are in massively collaborative knowledge creation. He lives with his wife and daughter in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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