Produsing Nationhood in Post-Soviet Countries through Wikipedia

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Elena Gapova, whose focus is on the Belarusian Wikipedia. Nations emerged at a particular historical moment, supported in part by a growth in print journalism, and subsequent changes to global communication structures, including the Internet, were at first seen as a as undermining nation states; yet more recent developments – including Wikipedia itself – have also been understood as tools for nation-building and nation-reinforcing.

This has been especially obvious in the case of the 16 post-Soviet nations, each of which have had to reposition themselves as independent, distinct nations separate from the previous Russian hegemony – precisely during the time that the Internet and World Wide Web became mass media. This functioned in part through a form of banal nationalism that generated daily reminders of national identity through specific, widely repeated cultural markers – down even to the daily TV weather forecasts showing a map of the nation.

In the time of the Internet, such markers have also moved online, and are now generated also through user-led produsage rather than simply by official, state actors. The entirely user-generated Wikipedia is an obvious example of this; it can be seen as creating a national cognitive universe both for domestic users and for the wider world. But this is driven only by those users who choose to participate, and these may be driven by shallow ideological motivations rather than deep domain knowledge in some contexts – perhaps especially so in the case of topics of national importance.

In Belarus, drivers of participation include covering topics that are not covered sufficiently in the English or Russian Wikipedia; creating a domestic Wikipedia version as a marker of independence from English or Russian knowledge hegemonies (this is done at first by creating basic translations of content from other language versions); and using the Belarusian Wikipedia as a tool of national or nationalistic propaganda.

As a result, Belarus ended up with multiple Wikipedias, however: one using the standard Cyrillic alphabet, and one using a different Belarusian orthographic system developed in the pre-Soviet era in 1918. The latter has considerably fewer articles – and takes a very different ideological approach to a number of critical topics of national significance. This fragmentation of the Belarusian Wikipedia effort can be seen as an example of the tragedy of the commons.