User:EdwardNWM/Vassar needs a wiki

This article was originally published as an opinion piece for The Miscellany News.

Email was pioneered by colleges and universities in the ’80s and ’90s, back when it was revolutionary technology. Despite all the advancements society has made since, we are still tethered to the inbox. This system is really showing its age. Information is vomited at us across a million different emails, with only a small fraction actually being valuable. It is easy to miss things and hard to make sense of it all.

Attempting to remedy email’s problems, institutions have adopted other tools. Administrative information is available on official Vassar College websites, and course information is available on Moodle. These sites use a top-down model: Information is transmitted from administration and faculty to students. This model is effective for communicating major developments, but it struggles to facilitate everyday information sharing, which requires back-and-forth communication between parties.

Student orgs, academic departments, and other groups on campus have moved their advertisements to social media platforms like Instagram or Fizz. While these platforms allow more interplay between parties, they still fail as communication tools. We are at the whims of corporations that show you the content algorithms predict will make them the greatest profit, not what we think is most useful or valuable. As a result, we are bombarded with content, little of it of substance. In some ways, these social media platforms are even worse than email. This is an environment we need to escape.

Many of these problems can be simplified to a structural mismatch: Our existing platforms assume that organizations are static groups with clear leaders. But life, especially college life, is much more complex. Most student orgs act more like social stages that people can enter and exit. Responsibilities and authorities are split among many people, ever-changing as new students arrive and seniors graduate. Our existing information infrastructure does not facilitate this kind of fluid, democratic governance.

The tools we use now are clearly inadequate—so what would a better communication tool for Vassar College look like? Well, it should be easy for anyone to contribute information, meaning there should be no gatekeepers. At the same time, information should be easy to find, which requires some mechanism for organization.

This is surely a utopian vision, right? Wrong! This kind of task is perfect for a wiki: a website collaboratively edited and collectively governed by its users. Wikis offer the convenience and accessibility of today’s internet while restoring the freedom that the internet was supposed to have.

You might expect that a collectively operated website would devolve into chaos, but actually, the opposite is true. Take Wikipedia, the prime example of a wiki: It has surprisingly accurate content and orderly governance, all emerging from the collaboration of millions of regular people. It is so successful that old encyclopedias run by closed institutions have been made nearly obsolete.

How could this be possible? Well, with the right foundation, a wiki harnesses the will and wisdom of the crowd that our hierarchical institutions so often suppress. Web technology makes forms of direct democracy that were once dismissed as impractical suddenly viable. Hyperlinking allows for easy referencing of past consensus, allowing for a grounded deliberative process. Every change is logged so destructive edits can be easily undone.

Even though wikis have demonstrated that they are viable, they remain an anomaly on the modern internet because we have not properly reckoned with their success. As a result of sticking with these old systems, we are regressing into technofeudalism: Our entire society is becoming bound to cyberspace that is controlled by a small few and enshittified for profit. Technofeudalism is more expansive than medieval feudalism, because not only is our economy owned, so is our knowledge and our everyday social interactions. This process has destroyed our democracies and our communities.

Technofeudalism is by no means inevitable. We have the tools to reclaim the digital commons—we just have to use them. I believe that Vassar’s small college community is the perfect place to start.

A wiki would serve as a single, convenient hub for college life. Since a wiki makes it quick for anyone to contribute, managing information would become an easy multilateral effort rather than an arduous individual one. As a persistent resource, a wiki would allow our community to build lasting knowledge that outlives the typical four-year student turnover cycle. And a local scope will make problems like vandalism much more easily manageable relative to a project like Wikipedia, which is so incomprehensibly large that poor edits can fall through the cracks.

To make this more concrete, let me outline some example use cases:

• Not sure what’s happening this weekend? Visit the “Upcoming Events” page, where groups can advertise events all in one place. Afterwards, the advertisements can be converted into archival pages to share photos, publicize meeting minutes or document campus history.

• Want to get involved with a club but don’t know when or where they meet? Just go to their page! And because anyone can edit, student organizations no longer need to worry about getting locked out of an account. Also, we would no longer be at the whims of corporations who censor and channel information for their own political gain.

• Missed class and need to catch up? Go to your course’s page, where your class can share notes and collaborate in a common space. Then visit your professor’s page, where they can publicize their sign-up for office hours and other resources.

We are not limited to these examples; since a wiki is self-governed, it can adapt to our particular needs as a community. I am also not arguing that a wiki needs to replace every tool we use. But I believe a wiki would meaningfully strengthen campus life by removing barriers to greater involvement.

If you want to help launch a wiki at Vassar, you should contribute! All you need is five minutes and something worth sharing. We can build a community that actually belongs to us—we just have to start.