Olsztyn · Warsaw · Cambridge
Contact

Est. 1975 · Sociologist

Dariusz
Jemielniak

I study how the internet makes knowledge, ignorance, and the way we work together. Wikipedia, AI, anti-science, and peer production are the threads I keep pulling on.

WikipediaENPLDE

Portrait of Dariusz Jemielniak
fig. 01 the author, in habitat
§
02

About

My work began with knowledge workers and software engineers, then drifted to Wikipedia, where I spent years as an ethnographer inside the project. Common Knowledge? (Stanford, 2014) came out of that. Since then I've kept asking the same family of questions in different shapes: how do strangers collaborate at scale, what counts as expertise, and what happens when bots, trolls, and generative models start crowding the room.

These days I write about anti-science, the architecture of non-knowledge, and the social consequences of AI. I founded the NeRDS group at Kozminski in 2013, head the MINDS department, and run a small AI photography company on the side. I am married to Natalia Banasik-Jemielniak, a psychologist of irony.

I serve on boards (Wikimedia Foundation for a decade, now EIT and Copernicus Science Centre) and review grants for the European Commission. I also write columns in Nowa Fantastyka when I want to think about space, nanotech, or the strangeness of digital life without footnotes.

§
03

What I work on

Wikipedia & peer production

Twenty years of ethnographic and governance work inside the encyclopedia that everyone uses but few understand. Recent pieces in Nature, Computer, and IEEE Spectrum.

AI in society

Gender and racial bias in image generators, AI in academic writing, the limits of Asimov's laws, and what happens to expertise when models can fake it.

Thick big data

A methodology that refuses the choice between computational social science and ethnography, and is the anthropological swiss knife used by UNESCO. The book is out with Oxford.

§
04

Selected books

2026 Routledge

Anti-Science

A short, urgent book on the social machinery behind the rejection of science. Forthcoming.

2020 Oxford University Press

Thick Big Data

Doing digital social sciences without choosing between scale and depth.

2020 MIT Press

Collaborative Society

On the social form behind Wikipedia, open source, and platform cooperatives. With Aleksandra Przegalińska. Named a top-20 read of the year by Polityka.

2014 Stanford University Press

Common Knowledge?

An ethnography of Wikipedia. The book that started a research career inside the encyclopedia.

§
05

Recent writing

Full publication list on Google Scholar →

§
06

Talks & media

Keynotes

Regular keynote speaker on AI, peer production, and digital society. Recent venues include Wikimania (Katowice, 2024), Telus International Summit (Vienna), NISO (USA), Bibliothèques Européennes de Théologie (Lviv), Madeira ITI, Viadrina University, and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

Corporate & policy

I have spoken or consulted for Rossmann, Samsung, BNP Paribas, Nationale-Nederlanden, and clients in the energy sector, plus the Polish Ministry of Science, the European Commission, and the Wikimedia Foundation, among others.

Press

Quoted in Wired, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Forbes, Slate, Inside Higher Ed, and across Polish media (Newsweek Polska, Gazeta Wyborcza, TVN, Polsat). I write a popular-science column in Nowa Fantastyka.

§
07

Get in touch

Open to keynotes, collaborations, doctoral supervision, and serious questions about ignorance.