Wikipedia as a Community Garden

New Moon Blessings – January 29, 2025

Wikipedia as a Community Garden

Are you someone who routinely uses Wikipedia for information? It is the 7^th most popular website in the world, so there is a good chance you are. But do you realize how different it is from other websites?  Wikipedia’s purpose is to be a widely accessible and free encyclopedia.  

Information is available to all. There is no pay wall. They are not selling you anything. There is no advertising – and they are not invading your privacy by collecting your data and selling it to others. But most importantly, the information on Wikipedia is researched and posted by volunteers – volunteers who love the idea that information should be free and/or love the subject they are writing about so much that they want to volunteer.  Over 48,000,000 people have signed up as volunteer editors, and about 123,000 contribute each month.

Wikipedia embraces the spirit of the early internet where people came together in community around ideas and activities. The internet had a collaborative feel at the beginning. It was a way to connect with people of similar interests and with friends in faraway places – with no strings attached. In retrospect there were probably always people trying to figure out ways to turn it into the big data collecting, privacy violating, money making machine it is today. (And yes, there are lots of online communities now, but most are only available when you sign in so they can track your thoughts, movements, and purchases.)

What is the Community Garden Aspect?

Wikipedia is run by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. The foundation creates the organizational and technological space for Wikipedia to exist. No small feat with 4,000 page views a second. And the volunteer Wikipedian editors do the rest, creating thousands of pages of information for you to harvest when you need it.

So you may be thinking, “OKAY, that is pretty cool about Wikipedia, but why is it like a community garden?”.  Think about all of the gifts of a community garden and you will see that Wikipedia has many similarities.

Community gardens include shared spaces with individual plots, display gardens tended by volunteers, and food forests. In gardens with individual plots, gardeners share plants, tools, and information. They may may help each other with watering and weeding. There is also the camaraderie of gardening with each other. In a food forest the fruit and produce is available to all. Display gardens may be big or small but they bring beauty and produce to the community. (One place to learn about all these variations of community gardens is on Wikipedia.)

The common theme of these gardens is people coming together to create and contribute to community in some way. The gardens provide beauty, sustenance, community connections, a healthier and more beautiful environment, and ways for people to give back.

Wikipedia has the same theme of people coming together to build and contribute to a community of information seekers. It contributes to the online environment with free resources, the beauty of information, community connections, and makes the internet ecosystem a healthier and more sustainable place. It is very much like a community garden where there are volunteers tending it.

You don’t have to be a gardener to appreciate the cross fertilization of ideas when editors collaborate on an article, or the idea of people sharing seeds of knowledge and learning from one another.

Garden Vandalism

This often comes up in discussions about Wikipedia. Has there been vandalism on Wikipedia or in community gardens?  Yes to both, because we live in a world where those things sometimes happen. Sometimes people who are not part of the garden space destroy things or take too much. On Wikipedia, there have been some instances of individuals posting things that are not true or trying to sway objective facts. Those are taken down as quickly as people find them.  Like the rest of life, it is not perfect and it can be messy occasionally. But there are checks in place to prevent vandalism and the benefit to our world is overwhelmingly positive for both community gardens and Wikipedia.

Supporting and Celebrating

It is a good time to support a website whose intention is to provide free and accurate information to all! If you use Wikipedia and appreciate what they are doing, please consider supporting them with a regular donation. At the very least, when you are at the website and get a pop up asking for support, think about how often you use the free encyclopedia, and make a donation.

Beyond Wikipedia, please pay attention to the other “community-garden-type” organizations in your life – both on and off the internet. What organizations are cultivating beauty, sharing resources, creating community, and supporting the value of connection? Let’s celebrate and show our gratitude for those places and support them in whatever way we can.

I would love to hear your thoughts on other online places that feel like a community garden to you. Let me know if the comments.

(Reminder – Qigong with me on Zoom is taking place February 23rd – 7:30 AM – contact me for the Zoom link.)

About this Blog Post & and Qigong Practice 

This post is part of my lunar blog series. For the time being I’ll be posting on each new moon as that is a great time to begin projects and set intentions with the increasing light.  Topics are related to related to plants and ideas featured in my book,  Growing Mindful.  or on other topics related to mindfulness, gardens, qigong, and intentional living. For more details and a list of past lunar blog posts, click here. 

An invitation to healing circles. I have partnered with other graduates of the IIQTC (Institute of Integral Qigong and Tai Chi) to offer virtual HeART of Body Compassionate Self Care Practice Circles based on qigong and tai chi. Check out the information here: Global Healing Circles or contact me if you need more information.

I’m also offering qigong practice on Zoom during the colder months and at Bluff Lake Nature Center in Denver in the warmer months.  You can find the schedule in announcements on the home page.