With Wikipedia’s “Bold but not reckless” rule in mind, I made small (but I think important!) edits to the page on Participatory Budgeting (username: pb&jelly).
Why Participatory Budgeting?
After a summer working on Participatory Budgeting (PB) with the New York City Council, I know and care about the topic. PB is a concept many people haven’t heard of, so its Wikipedia page is an important “first impression” point. The page as I found it was confusing and overly technical. Page view history shows a spike in early September, which coincides with the startup of the New York’s PB process. I can just picture residents getting an email from their Council Member or seeing a flyer and turning to Wikipedia to figure out what PB is — and I want them to have a better chance of getting it.
Wikipedia and PB are both participatory processes designed to include a large number of voices in decision-making. I think it’s important that the Wikipedia article about PB take advantage of this congruence to make more information accessible. Since PB is a community-owned process, sources like the New York City Council shouldn’t have a monopoly on information about PB for New York residents. And those living in areas without PB processes should be able to find out more about how the process works. Figuring out what, and how much, to share was the next challenge.
Wikipedia as history lesson
Looking through the history of edits on the page, the basic information structure really hasn’t changed over time. In contrast, the phenomenon of PB has grown exponentially since its Wikipedia page was first created.
That original structure is quite heavy on PB’s origins in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This makes a lot of sense as a decision in 2005. It still makes some sense in 2016, but it’s surprising how big of an effect these early decisions still have on the presentation of information. And at this point, the Porto Alegre case is useful as a historical origin story, not as the single example it once was. I’m curious to see whether this overall structure will ever change to limit the Brazilian background — and whether that will represent a “forgetting” of where the process has come from, or a reworking of the history that’s important to it.
What should people know about this, anyway?
In deciding what information I thought people should know about PB, I tried to picture a typical user of the page (“Know your audience”!). I imagined them (as biased towards New York as I am) as NYC residents shown a PB advertisement, potentially the kind of person the PB process is really focused on involving — low-income or marginalized residents with little access to other channels of political power. The current page was written in a formal, vague language (“PB has the potential to provide social inclusion and social equity in the decision making of the allocation of resources in communities with low socioeconomic statuses.”) — so I attempted to make it more concrete and readable (“PB processes are typically designed to involve those left out of traditional methods of public engagement, such as low-income residents, non-citizens, and youth.)
In addition to fleshing out the section on NYC, I decided to add information on the PB processes in Boston and Paris, on the idea that these examples show how the process can run differently in different places. I also wanted to give the reader a sense of how the phenomenon of PB is growing and changing over time.
The humans behind it all
But who’s to say that’s the right combination of information, or the right narrative? Editing the page, it’s clear just how human all these decisions are. I, for one, am biased to think the NYC example is super fascinating and important, and to ignore everything else. Sure, it’s a bunch of different humans, editing each other over time, but on a page that doesn’t attract a ton of attention, that’s still a small group. I’ve talked to a few of the people mentioned in the citations. Are any of them involved in editing the page? What agendas do the other editors have? How are we each using this Wikipedia page as forum for working out identity and ego issues and other conflicts? And what will happen from here on out?
The Demo in Democracy 