Research
My research travels the broad stretches of the past and the present conditions of encyclopedic media to understand the democratic potential of knowledge, the gender inequalities that emerge from knowledge systems, and the way practices of knowing shape digital culture.
Most of my research began with short a question: What is it about Wikipedia that makes it a new? I found that this question was not answerable by looking at Wikipedia alone. In my graduate studies I looked to the history of encyclopedias and compared Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica within the genre of encyclopedias; as well as the broader topic of the political design of encyclopedic media. In the process, I encountered the fact that Wikipedia's knowledge is fundamentally shaped by its reliance on contradictory definitions of consensus and that these definitions resonate with the democratic design of Wikipedia's interface in a myriad of ways.
This has lead me to a consideration of how Wikipedia's techniques play a part in its multilingual policy development.But it is not just Wikipedia that gravitates towards consensus, there are other digital projects that have either repurposed Wikipedia or consensus for their own epistemological and political goal. In fact, the history of digital culture's relationship to knowledge in the early twenty-first century is bound to the Wikipedia imaginaire. On a different front, democratically-oriented digital projects such as blockchain technologies or the Internet Engineering Task Force use consensus as a technique and consensus as a metaphor.
Projects & Publications
- Jankowski, S., Bueno, C. C., Kemper, J., and Sabbah, O. (2022–2024). Slow Editing Towards Equity. Funded by the Wikimedia Foundation.
- Jankowski, S. (2024). Consensus Techniques. Internet Policy Review, 13(2), 1-9.
- Jankowski, S. (2023). The Wikipedia Imaginaire: A new media history beyond Wikipedia.org (2001–2022). Internet Histories, 7(4), 333-353.
- Jankowski, S., Bueno, C. C., Kemper, J., and Sabbah, O. (2023). Global Platform Governance: Multilingual Policy Development on Wikipedia. In Proceedings of Wiki Workshop 2023.
- Jankowski, S. (2022). Making Consensus Sensible: The transition of a democratic ideal into Wikipedia's interface. Journal of Peer Production, 15, .
- Jankowski, S. (2022). Imaginary Parliaments: Excavating the metaphor of consensus within blockchain technologies. In AoIR 2022: The 23rd Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, Dublin, Ireland, 2022.
- Jankowski, S. (2021). The Trouble with Knowing: Wikipedian consensus and the political design of encyclopedic media. Ph.D. dissertation, York University.
- Jankowski, S. (2015). No Consensus on Consensus: A paradox within Wikipedian governance and collective action. In Torres, C. and Mateus, S. (Eds.), From Multitude to Crowds-Collective Action and the Media (pp. 177–196). Peter Lang.
- Jankowski, S. (2013). Wikipedia and Encyclopaedism: A Genre Analysis of Epistemological Values. Masters thesis, University of Ottawa.