Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 3/Wikipedia's Voice

I want to suggest to you that Wikipedia's voice is easy to recognize with another example: This is a quote from the article "Nigeria". And it reads:.

"Nigeria, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north, etc., etc. ... World's sixth most populous country, borders Niger in the north, Chad in the northeast, Cameroon in the east. Nigeria is a federal republic comprising 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, where the capital, Abuja, is located."

So here I would like to ask you, what can you tell me about the person who wrote this text? From reading this text, what can you tell me about this person? Anything at all? Is it a man or a woman? Are they young or old? Are they Nigerians or not? Silence. We can't tell. There is no way to tell, just from looking at the text, who wrote it. May or may not be a Nigerian.

Someone in the chat says they think it's a Nigerian, because there is much precision about the country. So, you are a Wikipedian from Cameroon. Are you telling me that you couldn't have written about Nigeria with precision? Or that I couldn't have written about Nigeria with precision? In other words, you were only guessing. You *guessed* that it's by a Nigerian, because it seems to be precise. And maybe you're thinking, only a Nigerian would care enough to get the details so precisely. But a Serbian Wikipedian could also care enough to get it right. Or an Indonesian one. Especially on English Wikipedia, which is written by people all over the world.

So yes, I think the majority is correct here: everybody who said we can't tell, we *cannot* tell. Looking at this text, we cannot tell anything about the person who wrote this, except that they had access to a computing device and an internet connection, and that they speak English. That's what we know for certain. That's it. We don't know if they are a man or a woman. We don't know if they're young or old, Nigerian or not. We don't even know if it's one person, because it's a wiki, right? This could have been written by several people over time, each one contributing a sentence. And I want to suggest to you that *that is as it should be*. This is the ideal! A voice that is not *my* voice, or *your* voice, or a woman's voice, or a Nigerian's voice:

A voice of the encyclopedia. What I call Wikipedia's voice. Okay, this voice in which this text is written, this is the voice we want to achieve when we are writing. And we are always specifically people who are or aren't from Nigeria, men, women, other genders. We are specific people, but we aim to produce *this voice* that isn't exactly our voice, it's the encyclopedia's voice. And it's important to produce that voice because that is the voice people trust. When they read this and it sounds like Wikipedia, it sounds like someone is simply giving you the truth, serving you factual information right to your ear, rather than sounding like, say, specifically a young Nigerian woman telling you this. It's just "the encyclopedia", not any particular person.

That *illusion* is actually a pretty powerful source of the trust that people have in Wikipedia. And they *should* trust Wikipedia. Not 100%; not without verifying, if the question's important. But when they look to Wikipedia to, say, find out what the capital of Nigeria is, they should feel able to trust what it says. Partly because it says that in this "Wikipedia's voice". And again, the previous exercise about the singer showed you that you also respond differently to a text that *is* written or *isn't* written in "Wikipedia's voice".

I suggest to you that this voice is *precious*, and we must guard it. It's an asset of Wikipedia, and if we want to be successful at contributing to Wikipedia, we absolutely have to learn the skill. And it is a *learnable* skill of writing from a neutral point of view.