The CCCC WIkipedia Initiative, in partnership with the Critical Commons Research Network, led by Dr. Zach McDowell, is excited to share a Call for Proposals for a sponsored panel at the 2027 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), to be held in Milwaukee, WI, April 14-17, 2027.
Writing Common Futures / Future Writing Commons
Writing Studies’ commitment to (digital) commons-based ethics, the belief in the value of shared, co-produced, and co-owned knowledge resources for learning, teaching, and advancing scholarship, is evident in projects such as WAC Clearinghouse, Writing Spaces, Writing Commons, Computers and Composition Digital Press, Kairos, and the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative. At the same time, rarely do we focus our attention on these initiatives as political and economic challenges to proprietary and exploitative systems and models. While copyleft licensing (e.g. Creative Commons) enables tiered structures for access, reproduction, and modification, these same licenses also create opportunities for exploitation. In the contemporary digital environment, commons-based writing is increasingly captured, only to be transformed, and redeployed commercially as data for AI-powered Large Language Models (LLMs). In other words, our open-access scholarship, OERs, and other forms of public writing now serve as training data for proprietary models, raising important questions about the future of digital commons projects. This panel makes space for acknowledging and reframing the value of commons-based initiatives while critically interrogating the extraction logics of big tech, AI, and other entities, and considering the threats such extraction poses. While our work is informed by scholars who have identified the importance of the digital commons to a thriving and more democratic Internet (Fuchs, Pentzold) and an alternative to market-based production models (Benkler, Fuster Morrell), we also draw inspiration from compositionist James Daniel Rushing’s reframing of collaborative writing as anticapitalist practice and invocation of the common as “an attitude of solidarity that opposes the divisive and destructive project of capitalist accumulation” (25). Threading together these ideas, scholars, and projects invites the following questions panelists might explore:
- How might writing studies more explicitly frame commons-based initiatives as political and economic interventions rather than simply pedagogical resources?
- In what ways does the increasing use of commons-based writing as training data for AI systems reshape our understanding of authorship, ownership, and labor?
- What does it mean to treat writing as infrastructure—as something that is built, maintained, and extracted from—rather than as expression or communication?
- How should we protect open access initiatives against new forms of digital capture and exploitation?
- What forms of resistance, refusal, or redesign are available to scholars, teachers, and students working within commons-based systems increasingly targeted by AI extraction?
- How might the concept of the common as solidarity against capitalist accumulation reshape how we understand, practice, and design collaborative writing in classrooms and public platforms?
- How are platforms such as Wikipedia negotiating the tension between openness and protection in response to large-scale data scraping and AI use?
- What responsibilities do writing scholars have in sustaining the digital commons amid pressures from platform capitalism and AI-driven enclosure?
- How might futures-oriented approaches help us imagine alternative trajectories for commons-base?
- Whose labor and knowledge are most vulnerable to extraction in AI systems, and how might writing studies address issues of equity, representation, and inclusion within the commons?
Please send 200-300 word proposals via email to CCCC Wikipedia Initiative co-chairs Matthew Vetter (mvetter) and Jennifer Johnson (jjohnson) by May 10, 2026.
Learn more about the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative
One of the most visited websites in the world, Wikipedia has emerged within living memory as a key knowledge-broker and perception-shaper for readers and writers worldwide. Writing expert knowledge into Wikipedia is one important way we can address knowledge gaps, imbalances, and misinformation online. Established in 2019, the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative proceeds from the conviction that it matters to edit Wikipedia, especially for academics committed to knowledge equity as a fundamental groundwork for social justice. The CCCC Wikipedia Initiative is working to develop skills, cultivate inclusive community, and build structures of support and recognition for past, present, and future CCCC members who recognize the importance of engaging with Wikipedia as a form of global public humanities scholarship.
Works Cited / Bibliography
Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press, 2006.
Bergin, Jeffrey. “Entering the Digital Commons: Using Affinity Spaces to Foster Authentic Digital Writing in Online and Traditional Writing Courses.” The Emerging Learning Design Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, Feb. 2018, https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/eldj/vol5/iss1/1.
Daniel, James Rushing. Toward an Anti-Capitalist Composition. Utah State University Press, 2022.
Deckelmann, Selena. “Wikipedia’s Value in the Age of Generative AI.” Wikimedia Foundation, 12 July 2023, https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/07/12/wikipedias-value-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/.
Fuchs, Christian. “The Ethics of the Digital Commons.” Journal of Media Ethics, vol. 35, no. 2, Apr. 2020, pp. 112–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/23736992.2020.1736077.
Fuchs, Christian. “The Digital Commons and the Digital Public Sphere: How to Advance Digital Democracy Today.” Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, vol. 16, no. 1, March 22, 2021. https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.917.
Fuster Morell, Mayo. “Governance of Online Creation Communities for the Building of Digital Commons: Viewed Through the Framework of the Institutional Analysis and Development.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2842586.
Reeves, Neal, Wenjie Yin, and Elena Simperl. “Exploring the Impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia Engagement.” Collective Intelligence, vol. 4, no. 3, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/26339137251372599.
McDowell, Zachary J., and Matthew A. Vetter. “Rethinking Artificial Intelligence: Algorithmic Bias and Ethical Issues: The Realienation of the Commons: Wikidata and the Ethics of ‘Free’ Data.” International Journal of Communication, vol. 18, no. 0, no. 0, Dec. 2023, p. 19. ijoc.org, https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/20807.
Pentzold, Christian. “Mundane Work for Utopian Ends: Freeing Digital Materials in Peer Production.” New Media & Society, vol. 23, no. 4, April 1, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820954203.
Vetter, Matthew A., Jialei Jiang, and Zachary J. McDowell. “An Endangered Species: How LLMs Threaten Wikipedia’s Sustainability.” AI & SOCIETY, February 19, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02199-9.
Thank you,
Matt Vetter, PhD (he/him)
Professor of English
Dept. of Language, Literature, and Writing
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Managing co-editor, Writing Spaces
Co-chair, CCCC Wikipedia Initiative