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Paper short abstract

Wikipedia is a critical knowledge infrastructure but struggles to integrate matters of care into articles related to AI, ethics and healthcare. We show a bias toward computer science and sci-fi over bioethics and the humanities, with long-term risks emphasised over the short-term.

Paper long abstract

Wikipedia is a critical knowledge infrastructure, acting both as a bastion of objectivity and an influential site of public participation within fragmented media ecosystems. Yet Wikipedia also represents a web epistemology under increasing pressure from the politicisation of science and technology. We explore these countervailing currents through the ethics of AI healthcare. This interdisciplinary issue combines knowledge from the humanities, medical science and computer science, challenging Wikipedia’s definition of objectivity and resurfacing the platform’s troubled relationship with care practices (Ford et al., 2023). We take a diachronic, digital methods approach, tracing the development of three Wikipedia articles (English and German languages) which link these issues: ethics of artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence in healthcare and bioethics.

We find ethics in artificial intelligence to be the liveliest article, within a dense network of articles making prominent reference to computer science, science fiction and other non-academic sources. Ethical issues are represented as mainly long-term, with comparatively little discussion of near-term harms and risks. There are weak links to bioethics and humanities, historically important sources of expert knowledge about the ethical dimensions of new healthcare technologies.

We discuss the implication of these results for ethics in AI healthcare as a public issue and Wikipedia as a knowledge infrastructure configuring that issue. We also reflect on existing critiques of gender biases and the absence of care in Wikipedia's knowledge production. We conclude with a call for greater participation by academic researchers in Wikipedia editing, in order to make their knowledge more public.