I invited Dr Ross (who, along with Dr Ardati, also of the IDEA network, and Dr Bhatti, a co-author of the below blog, have all attended Wikimedia UK Train the Trainer courses) to tell us more about one of this year’s Summer programmes. 
/ (Dr Sara Thomas, Programme Manager, Wikimedia UK)

Authors: Kirsty Ross (School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews), Saeeda Bhatti (Medical School, University of Glasgow), Pauline Souleau (School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews)

Corresponding author: ksrh1@st-andrews.ac.uk

During COVID there was a lack of summer internship opportunities for undergraduates due to pandemic lockdowns and restrictions on travel. The Summer Team Enterprise Programme (STEP) at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, was designed to fill this gap and has run every summer since 2020. STEP is an opportunity for undergraduate students to invest 6 weeks in participating in a fully-online skills development programme, where they work on a real-life project designed and supported by University staff, gain virtual team-work experience in a group of diverse students, contribute to the University’s learning and teaching through working on impactful outputs, and get this experience listed on their academic transcript.

My name is Dr Kirsty Ross and I’ve been involved in STEP since its inception. As a project sponsor, my role is to propose a suitable project and provide direction to the student teams. I’m also the co-founder of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility in Open Knowledge Network (IDEA Network for short) at the University of St Andrews which aims to address knowledge gaps in the Wiki projects by training others and building capacity. STEP has been a fantastic mechanism for introducing undergraduates to the wonders of Wiki and providing evidence of real-world impact, even resulting in a peer reviewed public engagement paper!¹

Research has shown that Wikipedia is the most common source for obtaining medical information online. Amongst medical professionals, more than 90% of medical students and 50% of doctors have turned to Wikipedia at some point². However, there is substantial variation in the length and quality of medical content in different languages. For example, pneumonia is a topic that is currently available in 134 language versions. However, the English Wikipedia article for pneumonia contains approximately 7,600 words and has 172 references, whereas the equivalent article in Urdu is just 125 words long with 1 reference. We drew inspiration from the excellent work of WikiProjectMed, which inspired the name of the project!

Over WhatsApp, Dr Saeeda Bhatti (Medical School, University of Glasgow) and I discussed how we might plug some of these medical knowledge gaps. Dr Bhatti’s background is in medical education and genetics, so we discussed targeting articles about rare genetic diseases. Using the Medics 4 Rare Diseases website, we narrowed down over 7000 rare diseases to a shortlist of 12 conditions. This shortlist formed the basis for the Healthcare Translation Task Force STEP project. 

As part of the STEP application process, students choose which projects they would like to take part in over the summer. We ended up with two teams and 11 students in total. These students could speak, read, and write in 15 languages! We then explored Wikidata to find out whether or not those languages had articles about the chosen rare genetic diseases. Some languages (Arabic, French, German, Spanish) had almost complete article coverage (92-100%). Others (Simple English, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Russian) had approximately 50% article coverage. Cantonese, Croatian, Kiswahili, Kurdish, Serbian, and Somali had either no articles or just one or two (8-12%)! As the project was just 6 weeks in duration and was often balanced alongside paid work or internships, we weren’t going to be able to plug every single gap, so it was over to the students to decide how to proceed. 

Dr Pauline Souleau (School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews) also provided training on how to adapt their translations to suit the cultural context; we wanted to avoid overly relying on the existing versions in English. When asked to reflect upon her experience of STEP, she said:

“The cross-disciplinarity of the STEP programme means that participating students are not necessarily trained linguists. Part of the Healthcare Translation Task Force STEP training was therefore to introduce students to the importance of localisation and cultural awareness when translating a wiki article.” 

“When an article did exist in English, the aim was never to translate it word for word but to a) make it clear in the target language and b) adapt it to the target culture if needed. During the training session, we therefore discussed questions of language variants, as well as specialised terms, article titles, and disease names. Students took it on board and showed nuanced translation skills throughout the project.“

The students worked together to describe and name the conditions in their languages in Wikidata. They then picked a couple of articles to research, draft, and upload. Many roped in friends, family, and medical professionals to provide feedback on their drafts. The students also hunted down references in their own languages. Wikipedia depends on reliable, secondary sources³, and readers of a specific language should be able to verify the statements in the article⁴, without having to know English as well.

The students’ enthusiasm and commitment exceeded our expectations! 11 students, speaking 15 different languages, spent the summer creating 12 brand new articles, editing an additional 38 articles, adding 61,000 words and 555 references. Table 1 links to the articles in various languages; we’d love to see the wider Wiki community get stuck in and expand them even further!

As of mid-August 2025, the newly created and edited articles have been viewed nearly 58,000 times (see Figure 1 below), a testament to the real-world impact of student contributions. We hope this project inspires further translation efforts and continues to grow through community contributions.

None of the above would have been possible without the dedication of the students and their PGR coaches. They were: Dasha Andreeva, Alistair Grant, Lila Darmon, Mingxiao Yang, Lucie Siu, Aro Aziz, Summer Kwon, Jacqueline Park, Anne Foote, Anna Mokhovik, Aleksandra Lucic, Zamzam Issack, Axel Van Den Ancker, Lareina Yang (STEP students) and Ziying Ye and Maya Fenyk (STEP PGR coaches).

References

1. Cornwell RM, Ross K, Gibeily C, et al. Unearthing new learning opportunities: adapting and innovating through the ‘Antibiotics under our feet’ citizen science project in Scotland during COVID-19. Access Microbiol. 2024;6(6). doi:10.1099/acmi.0.000710.v3

2. Heilman JM, West AG. Wikipedia and Medicine: Quantifying Readership, Editors, and the Significance of Natural Language. J Med Internet Res. 2015;17(3):e62. doi:10.2196/jmir.4069

3. Wikipedia:Reliable sources. In: Wikipedia. ; 2025. Accessed August 18, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Reliable_sources&oldid=1305930263

4. Wikipedia:Verifiability. In: Wikipedia. ; 2025. Accessed August 18, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Verifiability&oldid=1305104342 

The post The 6-week Wikipedia translation sprint: A case study in fast medical knowledge equity appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

The Wikimedia Project at Durham University has been a remarkable journey of collaboration, learning, and community engagement. It all began when one of us, Merak, got involved through the university’s volunteering platform. Merak was quite active in various volunteering projects, and the Wikimedia Project caught his interest due to its approach to open knowledge. After coming back from one of the sessions, he introduced his roommate, Hoh Shan, to the volunteering project within the university. Hoh Shan had started editing Wikipedia in 2015 but had been inactive for a long time. Being able to volunteer this way within the university rekindled his interest in contributing. Mindy, another key member of the team, had no previous experience with Wikipedia editing before this. She heard about the project through Merak and Hoh Shan and was happy to help out.  

Before our sessions, we regularly update our spreadsheet of Wikipedia article edit suggestions, with different topics to improve the quality of Wikimedia content related to North-East England and Durham, while also catering to the personal interests of volunteers. We organised various workshops and sessions to keep the Wikimedia Project alive at Durham. These included regular Wikipedia edit-a-thons, WikiData workshops and WikiCommons workshops. These events were aimed at students and academic staff at Durham who had an interest in Wikimedia. The project also benefited from connections with people in London who were involved with Wikimedia UK, as well as other volunteers in the academic space. Notable collaborators included the previous project supervisor Sophie Whitfield, and Lucy Moore who helped run the Wikidata and WikiCommons workshop. The support from the academic staff at Durham University was invaluable. 

We learnt through trial and error how to explain the importance of Wikimedia to others and gained a deeper understanding of the broader Wikimedia ecosystem beyond just Wikipedia. We were eager to contribute our knowledge and time through research and editing. We also gained valuable experience organising workshops through the WMUK Train the Trainer course and promoting events through social media platforms

Despite the successes, the project faced significant challenges. It was difficult to find someone to pass the project on to, and attracting more volunteers and students was a constant struggle. The team found it challenging to identify the best way to promote Wiki events and the best way to ‘sell’ the Wikimedia Project to potential volunteers. Despite the challenges, the journey has been rewarding, and the project continues to grow, with another student taking over the project, offering valuable opportunities for those who wish to contribute.  

For those interested in getting involved with the Wikimedia Project at Durham, the team can be contacted at wikimedia.dusvo@durham.ac.uk. The project offers a unique opportunity to contribute to open knowledge, develop valuable skills, and be part of a vibrant community dedicated to improving the quality of Wikimedia content.

The post Durham University Wikimedia Project – students supporting students appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

This year marks the 10^th Anniversary of the merger of New College Lanarkshire and as part of this the college offered a large number of free evening courses. One of these courses was the Become a Wikimedian Course which was an 11 week course that was conducted online. Throughout this course 10 students learned how to make positive contributions to multiple Wiki platforms, such as Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

For many years Wikipedia has been viewed in a negative light by educators, however, this course has highlighted what a positive tool Wikipedia can be for learners.  Knowing how to use the platform properly to bolster research is key to its success.  The students quickly understand how Wikipedia can be used as a springboard to delve deep into research on a specific topic. This course used the 12 week syllabus available on Wikimedia Commons to provide a basic structure to the course. We spent the first week exploring the ‘5 Pillars of Wikipedia’ and subsequent weeks looked at creative writing techniques, critical evaluation of Wikipedia articles and research materials. The course also focussed on research skills and allowed the students ample opportunity to work in small groups and peer reviewed each other’s research and edits. 

Furthermore, the course allowed plenty of time for students to make their contributions to Wikipedia. They all felt a great sense of achievement once their edits went live and enjoyed watching the dashboard and seeing the impact their edits were having. 

Lesley-Anne, a student on the course, stated “throughout the course, my eyes have been opened to the world of Wikipedia, and my previous negative perception of how useful a tool it can be has been blown out of the water. From a further education point of view, I can’t emphasise enough how useful this would have been when I was studying for my social sciences HND. It would have been incredible to have been able to enhance my research, writing, referencing and critical analysis skills by putting them into practice at the same time as making meaningful contributions to Wikipedia. I also feel it would be a really useful module for students to take alongside various Access/NC/HNC/HND courses, and I think that the group work and peer review element would undoubtedly help so many students build up their confidence in going forward in their studies. There is genuinely so much that can be gained from participating in the course.” While Ben said he “really enjoyed the course, going through college and university you are taught that using Wikipedia is wrong… however, it is clear that we need to be taught how to use it correctly instead of being shunned away from it. This course offered me the opportunity to be taught a new skill… Fundamentally, I believe that this course… would offer an accessible and easy to use stepping stone to more academic websites for research.”

Hopefully, this course will be offered again at New College Lanarkshire and we can build on the success of this one! Personally, I felt that the student engagement on this course was brilliant. They thoroughly enjoyed the whole research process and having a tangible outcome kept them motived to continue with their edits. 

The post New College Lanarkshire: Become a Wikimedian Course appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Abstract

Wikipedia is the world’s largest information source, used daily by millions of individuals around the world – yet such is its uniqueness and dominance that rarely is the question asked: what exactly is Wikipedia? This article sets out to explore the different categories of source that Wikipedia could be defined as (primary, secondary or tertiary) alongside the varied ways in which Wikipedia is used, which defy easy categorization, exemplified by a broad-ranging literature review and focusing on the English language Wikipedia. It concludes that Wikipedia cannot easily be categorized in any information category but is defined instead by the ways it is used and interpreted by its users.

Introduction

What is Wikipedia?

At first pass, it seems like a remarkably simple question with a remarkably simple answer. The average reader knows exactly what Wikipedia is, how to access it and has probably used it on multiple occasions. Almost certainly, if asked, the average reader could explain what Wikipedia is.

Wikipedia is a crowdsourced online encyclopaedia, indeed, the online encyclopaedia. It is one of many projects owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco and founded in 2003 to fund Wikipedia (itself launched in 2001) and other such wiki projects, which include media site Wikimedia Commons, dictionary and thesaurus Wiktionary, the knowledge base Wikidata and wikis for books, quotes, travels, a newspaper, tutorials and courses.1 However, Wikipedia is the oldest, largest, and almost certainly best known, of all the Wikimedia projects.

In terms of coverage, usage, currency and public awareness, its nearest online rival, Encyclopaedia Britannica, does not even come close. Encyclopaedia Britannica contains an estimated 120,000 articles;2 as of writing, the English language Wikipedia contains 6,552,009 and rises by roughly 17,000 articles a month.3 How the two compare in terms of perception, accuracy, bias and reliability is another issue entirely, one that has been amply addressed elsewhere.4

Much research has also been done on Wikipedia and its sister projects, and how it is used for, by and within education and research communities and the wider public – as an information source,5 a teaching and learning tool,6 a source of Big Data,7 an example of crowdsourcing,8 as a collaborative dissemination tool for museums and archives9 and many other uses.

However, little of this research has taken its analysis of Wikipedia one step further to reflect on how that varied use might provide insight into Wikipedia’s own ambiguous position as an information source; it generally proceeds from the assumption that there is a clear-cut definition of what exactly Wikipedia is.

For example, the focus on how dependable, accurate or biased Wikipedia is in comparison to other information sources rests on the assumption that Wikipedia can be compared to other equivalent information sources. Part of what this literature review intends to highlight is that there is no resource equivalent to Wikipedia, that it stands apart as a unique experiment in crowdsourced information production, synthesis and retrieval (what Mehdi et al. describe as a ‘multi-purpose knowledge base’,10 and that it straddles the traditional categories of primary, secondary and tertiary sources, requiring what Magnus describes as ‘new epistemic methods and strategies’11.

Taking an in-depth look at each of these categories, this review will draw on published research to assess how Wikipedia’s content, and the various uses to which different users can put it, conforms to each category and what the implications are for our understanding of Wikipedia.

To begin with, we must break Wikipedia down into its many component parts to adequately discern the whole: what we term ‘Wikipedia’ comprises more than just the most obvious and visible element, the articles. There is the site itself, Wikipedia, as a collective term comprising the entire contents, from articles to talk pages, policies, guidelines, statistics, documentation and user pages. There are the individual articles, what we usually think of as defining ‘Wikipedia’. There are the references and onward links, directing users to further reading and citational evidence. There is the data that Wikipedia generates – statistics on almost every element of creation and use. There are Wikipedia’s own policies, guidelines and templates. All of these elements are ‘Wikipedia’, and all are used in various different ways, depending on the user and the need.

Methodology

This literature review is not intended to be systematic and relies on mapping the themes of the intended research against the corpus of literature available, as opposed to identifying and evidencing all relevant existing research. The intention is to be illustrative of the varied research on Wikipedia usage, rather than to provide an exhaustive exploration of it. This review was not, therefore, conducted according to the relevant principles of systematic reviews. However, a rigorous search methodology and strategy was employed.

A wide range of multi-disciplinary databases were searched, both full-text and index, for articles detailing research based on, referring to or utilizing data and information from Wikipedia (including but not exclusive to EBSCO databases, Emerald, SpringerLink, ScienceDirect, Ovid, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, CINAHL Ultimate, IEEE and Scopus).

To ensure the relevance and sensitivity of the search, search terms were limited to the title and the abstract of records, where the database allowed the option to search these fields. Results were excluded if Wikipedia was not the primary focus of the article, if the article was not available in English or did not refer to the English-language Wikipedia.

Serendipitous discoveries of relevant research were also made via the WikiResearch Twitter account @WikiResearch, the ‘Wiki-research-l’ mailing list and the Wikimedia Research biannual reports.

Wikipedia as tertiary source

We shall begin with the most obvious categorization of Wikipedia – as a tertiary source. This is how encyclopaedias have traditionally been defined throughout the ages and indeed how Wikipedia defines itself: ‘Wikipedia is a tertiary source: Wikipedia summarizes descriptions, interpretations and analyses that are found in secondary sources, or bases such summaries on tertiary sources’,12 although in quoting Wikipedia’s own definition of itself in this manner I am in fact using Wikipedia as a primary source, thereby undercutting that initial apparently clear-cut definition almost immediately!

Many articles describe Wikipedia as a tertiary source without comment.13 However, there is no standard dictionary definition of what a tertiary source is, how it functions or is used. Wikipedia’s definition is one, but this research has provided others: ‘when literature is primarily used as a source to locate primary and secondary sources, and does not provide any new information, then it is called as tertiary source’;14 ‘the primary function of tertiary source is to aid the searcher of information in the use of primary and secondary sources of information’;15 ‘the synthesizing of primary and secondary sources’.16

There can be little doubt that Wikipedia articles synthesize or summarize primary and secondary sources, and that, theoretically at least, these articles serve as a means of locating those sources.

One of the three core content policies of Wikipedia is verifiability, alongside that need for a neutral point of view and the ban on original research, i.e. research that has not been published elsewhere17 – except when it comes to research about itself – undercutting that easy definition again. Wikipedia articles must reference published secondary or primary sources to verify facts or claims within articles – statements missing this means of verification are flagged with a ‘citation needed’ tag and the article itself may contain a ‘needs additional citations for verification’ template at its head, as a means of warning users of the potentially misleading or inaccurate (or at the least, unverifiable) statements contained within a given article.

One of Wikipedia’s key elements, and one that has itself given rise to a great deal of research, is the issue of notability – a subject must be considered notable enough to be covered by sufficient secondary sources.18 An article without sources will be flagged for speedy deletion. However, who or what is considered notable is often the subject of a great deal of debate and varying perspective, and the ‘notability’ policy is often used to the detriment of female subjects and topics.19 It does however highlight the significant importance Wikipedia places on independent verifiable sources for its content.

An essential element of a tertiary source is that it is considered a means to further information, not an end, as per the previous definitions by Wikipedia, Durai and others. Wikipedia has been described as a ‘bridge’ to further information,20 a ‘gateway’ through which the world seeks knowledge,21 a ‘means, not an end’.22 One would expect therefore to see Wikipedia users’ behaviour reflect this.

Whilst this is a neglected area of research, and one rich with possibility for future investigation, a recent study logged all access clicks for links for external references within Wikipedia during a one-month period and found ‘overall engagement with citations is low: about one in 300 pageviews results in a reference click (0.29% overall; 0.56% on desktop; 0.13% on mobile)’.23

Follow-up research estimated that Wikipedia generated 43 million clicks a month to external websites,24 i.e. users following article citations to their source. However, that initially impressive-looking statistic needs to be balanced against Wikipedia’s estimated average monthly pageviews of roughly 7 billion,25 demonstrating that again less than 1% of users follow citations to their source.

This research demonstrates that most users (over 99%) do not use Wikipedia as a ‘bridge’, ‘a gateway’ or as a means to discovering primary and secondary sources, thereby undermining those apparently clear-cut assumptions about Wikipedia as a tertiary source, as defined by Grathwohl, Cronon, Durai and Malipatil and Shinde above.

Wikipedia as secondary source

Wikipedia defines a secondary source as a ‘document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere,’ containing ‘analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources’.26

This would appear to be the most obvious of categories into which to fit Wikipedia. There is no question that most of the material contained within Wikipedia articles comes from elsewhere, serving as a summary of the published material on a particular topic. This is an essential element of Wikipedia’s ‘no original research’ policy: Wikipedia articles must report and summarize verifiable facts, backed up by published material, largely in pursuit of another of Wikipedia’s core policies, that of the ‘neutral point of view’. Including analysis, evaluation or interpretation in articles necessarily opens the door to bias and perspective (although research has shown that this is still not entirely successful, and that Wikipedia tends to lean leftwards).27

However, intent is one thing; the reality of its use is something else. Evidence explored below suggests that Wikipedia is still frequently cited as a source, both within the academic community and outside of it, despite comments such as Bould et al.’s that ‘citing Wikipedia or any other tertiary source in the academic literature opposes literary practice’.28

This indicates blurred lines between the widely accepted perception of Wikipedia as a tertiary resource and the way in which it is used alongside secondary sources such as textbooks and journal articles. Indeed, a study by Meers, Gibbons and Laws29 identified a complex interaction between what they refer to as ‘official’ (journals, textbooks etc.) and ‘unofficial’ knowledge (Wikipedia, websites etc.), with students switching frequently between the two and using the information from one to inform their understanding of the other.

Many studies have focused on student use of Wikipedia as an information source,30 with upwards of 87% reporting using it.31 One study even demonstrated that Wikipedia was the most used resource – and the library the least – among medical students.32 It has also been used as a means of educating students on issues of systemic bias in information sources.33

Of course, it is not just students using Wikipedia. Estimating the scale of citations of Wikipedia itself as a source across published research is almost impossible, largely because there is no mechanism for assessing metrics for a crowdsourced resource with no named author, or indeed even an accepted naming convention. (Searching for ‘authors’ within references on articles about Wikipedia within a bibliographic database such as Scopus highlights this issue – ‘Wikipedia’, ‘Contributors, W.’, ‘Wikipedia contributors’, ‘contributors, W.’, ‘Anonymous’, ‘Wikipedia, C.’, ‘Wikipedia.org’ and others are all used to a greater or lesser extent.) However, given the volume of research focusing on Wikipedia’s use within specific contexts, it is clearly widespread and growing.34

Several studies have concentrated on citations to Wikipedia within scholarly publishing,35 with a study by Bould et al.36 particularly demonstrating that citations to Wikipedia were not restricted to low or no impact factor journals but could be found in journals with high impact factors. A study by Tomaszewski and McDonald37 found that the highest usage was within the sciences and the lowest within arts and humanities.

Wikipedia use is not just restricted to the academic world. In the legal field, for example, several articles have discussed the practice of Wikipedia being cited as a source within judicial opinions38 – sometimes as a source of information on legal procedure and precedent, or more frequently as a source of facts. However, this latter practice resulted in at least one case being dismissed as a result.39 Use of Wikipedia in this context is rarely presented as a positive,40 but the practice clearly was and continues to be widespread enough to be the subject of academic research. Intriguingly, one of the articles cited above even specifically describes Wikipedia as a secondary source.41

There is also research equating Wikipedia with traditional secondary sources of information such as textbooks, either implicitly or explicitly. For example, numerous articles have focused on comparing the accuracy of information within Wikipedia on a particular topic with similar information contained within textbooks – in pharmacology,42 history,43 medicine,44 sociology45 – a comparison that only makes sense if the two resources are considered to be comparable.

An intriguing study by Rahdari et al.46 even focused on how concepts of smart learning could be used to provide recommendations for external supporting material, namely Wikipedia articles, when students were finding e-textbook material challenging to understand, again equating the two.

Wikipedia as primary source

One topic in which there can be no question that Wikipedia serves as a primary source is that of Wikipedia itself.

As can be seen from this review alone, there is no way of writing about Wikipedia without referring frequently to the content it puts out about itself – from its own policies and guidelines to the statistics about the site, articles and its usage. There can be no denying that whilst ‘citing Wikipedia or any other tertiary source in the academic literature opposes literary practice’, as Bould et al. have argued, ‘Wikipedia may be the most appropriate source to cite … in situations in which Wikipedia is used as part of the scientific methods’.47 Note the implicit acceptance of the definition of Wikipedia as solely a tertiary source.

For example, a search within the bibliographic database Scopus for references of the page ‘Wikipedia: Statistics’,48 which contains data and statistics for various elements of Wikipedia, including edits, views, size, growth, editors, demographics, etc., returned 155 individual journal articles. A similar search on Wikipedia’s page on its notability guidelines49 returns 33 journal articles. With these instances as examples, it is noticeably clear that Wikipedia is being used and referenced as a primary source, at least when it comes to content that relates to itself. (As a further example, Wikipedia as a source has been cited eight times in this literature review.)

Part of the core tenet of Wikipedia is transparency. Because everything about Wikipedia is openly available, from its guidance and policies to its inner workings and data, it can serve as an immensely useful source of data for vast swathes of research.

Wikipedia editing and pageview activities have been used as a tool to predict everything from movie box-office success50 to electoral results51 and stock market movement.52 Studies have investigated how Wikipedia pageviews can correlate with official tourism indicators,53 how copyright restrictions affect citations and knowledge reuse54 or to determine whether the ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’ increased people’s awareness of ALS.55

One area in which Wikipedia data (most particularly statistics allowing for the tracking, quantification and geolocating of pageviews) has been heavily drawn upon is in the field of health research. Wikipedia is the most used resource globally for medical information,56 by both members of the public57 and healthcare professionals,58 and as such can provide an enormous source of information on both individual and group information-seeking behaviour and the implications and motivations of that behaviour.59

For example, research has focused on the use of trends in, and analysis of, Wikipedia searches and pageviews as an indicator of global disease outbreaks,60 from measles,61 influenza62 and swine flu63 – to even predicting deaths from coronavirus.64

Further evidence could be drawn from almost any field of study – in sociology, for example, exploring the democratic creation of knowledge and the concurrent promises and pitfalls65 or the under-representation of women.66

In the field of conservation, Wikipedia pageviews have been used for exploring the cultural importance of global reptiles,67 to evaluate public interest in protected areas68 and online sentiment towards iconic species.69

Data harvested from Wikipedia has informed demographic studies on social media use and topic diversity,70 in disambiguating and specifying social actors in big data by using Wikipedia as a data source for demographic information,71 even in assessing the life expectancy of professional occupations via the mean age of death data available via Wikipedia biographies!72

Focusing on citations in the reverse direction, some research has focused on academic citations within Wikipedia articles as a means of evidencing the reach and dissemination of research within the wider general public, alongside more traditional academic citation-focused measurements.73

Several studies have compared references to research from Wikipedia alongside Facebook, Twitter and other social media resources and found strong correlation between these altmetrics and the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) reviewers’ scores, indicating that altmetrics from sources such as Wikipedia could be used as a formal means of assessing the impact of scholarly research.74

Conclusion

Drawing on published research demonstrating the variety of ways in which Wikipedia has been, and continues to be, used (many of which defy the initial simple categorization of Wikipedia as a tertiary source), this review has hopefully demonstrated how the everyday usage of Wikipedia by millions of individuals globally differs markedly from the stated intentions and function of the encyclopaedia itself.

The concept of variation theory is frequently used to explain how different learners, participating in the same learning experience and with access to the same learning materials, can come to understand a concept differently.75 In this context, it can be used to demonstrate how an object of learning (i.e. Wikipedia) ‘changes shape during its way from the intended (planned), enacted (offered) and lived (discerned) object of learning’.76

As can be seen from the research drawn on within this literature review, many of the uses Wikipedia can be put to could almost certainly not have been foreseen by founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger when they set out to ‘pretty single-mindedly [aim] at creating an encyclopaedia’,77 since these uses have resulted from the way it has been structured (enacted) and the lived experience of those using it. This review can begin to serve as an explanation of how individuals’ understanding of Wikipedia’s categorization as an information source can, according to variation theory, similarly differ based on a range of distinct factors, but in this context, most particularly how they use Wikipedia. Leaving the world of literature review and theory behind and moving into practice, further research would seem to be required on how an individual’s use of Wikipedia is shaped by their own understanding of what kind of source it is and how it should be used, both for education, research and general knowledge seeking.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

A list of the abbreviations and acronyms used in this and other Insights articles can be accessed here – click on the URL below and then select the ‘full list of industry A&As’ link: http://www.uksg.org/publications#aa.

Competing interests

The author is a trustee of Wikimedia UK, which is an unpaid voluntary position.

The post Defying easy categorisation: Wikipedia as primary, secondary and tertiary resource appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

By Tatjana Baleta, Wikimedia Visiting Fellow at Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter

I am a South African conservationist and science communicator with an interest in the power of knowledge to drive change. As the Wikimedia Visiting Fellow at the GSI, I will be working with researchers and the Wikimedia community to make climate change knowledge more accessible, expand and strengthen the quality of climate change information available on open knowledge platforms and to combat dis- and misinformation.

My fascination with the natural world led me pursue a BSc in Ecology & Evolution and Genetics and a BMedSc(Hons) in Cell Biology. With a growing understanding of the global environmental crisis, I then completed an MPhil in Conservation Leadership.

I have worked internationally in research and communications on marine species monitoring, marine litter monitoring, marine protected area design research, conservation technology, species prioritisation and conservation-decision making.

As an avid science communicator, I am passionate about sharing my love for the natural world, and particularly about using that communication to instigate positive change.

I’m really excited to dive into this opportunity to explore open knowledge systems and contribute to climate change resource accessibility.

Keen to brainstorm? Let’s connect! Contact me at t.baleta@exeter.ac.uk.

The post Welcome Tatjana Baleta, Wikimedia Visiting Fellow for climate appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

In Summer 2020, I organised my first Wikipedia Editathon as part of the Women in STEM Connect series. With an eye-opening talk, physicist and Wikipedia diversity advocate, Dr Jess Wade introduced me to the issue of underrepresentation on Wikipedia and left me, and seemingly all our attendees, feeling inspired to start editing Wikipedia. With training from University of Edinburgh Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, and a total of 15 editors, we were able to contribute fourteen thousand words, edit forty-two articles and add five new articles to Wikipedia by the end of the event. I created my first Wikipedia article on Dr Jessica Borger, an Australian T-Cell immunologist, and caught the editing bug!

To celebrate International Womens’ Day 2021, Edinburgh University Women in STEM (EUWiSTEM) has joined forces with 5 other female and gender minority lead societies: Edinburgh University Women in Business, Women in Law, Women in Politics and International Relations, EconWomen, and Hoppers, the society of women and gender minorities in Informatics. Together we are hosting Women EmpowerED, a week-long celebration aiming to showcase the achievements of women in different fields and discuss the issues women currently face, with a focus on cross-disciplinary inclusion. 

The theme of International Womens’ Day 2021 is #ChooseToChallenge. Fitting with that theme, it is important we acknowledge the achievements of diversity and inclusion initiatives but it is equally crucial that we continue to challenge the norms and push for further improvements. Women EmpowerED has chosen to kick-off our celebrations on March 6th with an event that fits these aims perfectly – a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. At this event, we aim to improve the representation of women and gender minorities on Wikipedia, focusing on those who have chosen to challenge societal norms, and inspirational women in the host societies’ fields. Ewan McAndrew will be providing editing training during the event, helping us to make Wikipedia editing accessible to all. 

We are pleased to be welcoming Bruce and John Usher Professor of Public Health in the Usher Institute, Dr Linda Bauld, to give a talk on the importance of representation online at the Edit-a-thon. Online platforms now have a massive influence on society, and most of these platforms are rife with internet ‘trolls’, and political agendas. As the fifth most visited website worldwide, and what is designed to be a source of reliable information for users, it is crucial that Wikipedia is free from bias and abuse. As Jess Wade explains in a 2018 TEDXLondon talk, “the majority of history has been written by men, about men, for other men.” 

But we can start to change that through Wikipedia. 

In our event, not only will we add and improve articles for women and gender minorities, but we also hope to increase the diversity of its editors, making a lasting impact on Wikipedia. 

If you would like to learn how to edit articles or assist in our mission to improve diversity on Wikipedia, you can get tickets to our editathon on eventbrite.

For more information on Women EmpowerED visit our website.

The post Women EmpowerED: Wikipedia Editathon appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

I have steered my students away from Wikipedia for years, envisioning my role as a teacher to show students how to carry out ‘real’ research. But this year convinced me it was time to change my attitude, and so for 2020’s Fall term I put editing Wikipedia at the heart of Stars, Robots and Talismans: Science, Magic and Medieval Islamic Visual Culture, my fourth-year Honours module. I normally approach my undergraduate classes as workshops, encouraging collaborative experiments with digital tools, so experimenting with Wikipedia was a natural step. But unlike previous class experiments, I didn’t know the first thing about editing Wikipedia and neither did the students. And while a few of the students had studied Islamic art with me before, none  came with any background in history of Islamic science and technology. Moreover, all of us were facing the uncertainties of our first online semester necessitated by Covid-19 restrictions. It was completely unfamiliar terrain that we would have to navigate together, in some cases while in different countries and time zones.

What better time for a new experiment?

Luckily for me, Edinburgh has its own Wikimedian-in-Residence, Ewan McAndrew, whose Wikimedia in Education guide (created by Wikimedia UK and the University of Edinburgh) provided a helpful overview of case studies that illustrate how other academics were using Wikipedia in the classroom. Ewan and I met and discussed my initial inspiration, which came from my colleague Stephennie Mulder’s experience with scrapping a traditional research paper in favour of Wikipedia editing in her Islamic art course at the University of Texas.

To work out the project logistics Ewan connected me with two other academics, Alex Chow, in Edinburgh’s School of Divinity and Sasha Litvintseva, in Film Studies, Queen Mary University of London, who generously shared their advice and experience. Thanks to them I was able to get the idea off and running quickly without having to reinvent the wheel. Following Mulder’s example, I asked my students to imagine they had been hired as consultants for a major museum. Their mission for my course was to use their art history research and writing skills to improve the public’s knowledge of Islamic science and the occult in advance of an exhibition. They were to research and improve an article by editing and adding new text to existing articles, adding bibliography. In addition to revising text and adding citations to existing articles I asked the students to illustrate them with images of scientific instruments and illustrated manuscripts. Thanks to Ewan, the students and I learned about a new landmark partnership between Wikimedia UK and the UK-based Khalili Collections, to release research content and high resolution images of world art masterpieces on Creative Commons licenses. The Khalili Collections encompass one of the world’s great assemblages of Islamic visual culture, including scientific instruments and manuscripts. This image component of the editing project gave the students experience with Wikimedia and introduced them to issues around image copyright, which is key for art historians.

I provided the students with a pre-selected list of Wikipedia articles keyed to our weekly course topics. Based on the topics they chose I divided them into small groups of 2 or 3 students and asked them to work collaboratively on the Wikipedia article (the groups also functioned as their autonomous learning groups, or ALGs for the term). At mid-term the groups would present briefly on what they had accomplished.  Ewan set up a Wikipedia project page on Islamic Visual Culture with the list of target pages the students would be editing, and which provided helpful links to training and other resources. He also created a Dashboard page so that we could monitor and quantify the edits being made as part of the assignment. In the first week of the course he led the class through an optional live two-hour online Wikipedia training session to get the students started with Wikipedia accounts and basic skills. We recorded the session for those who couldn’t attend the live session.

With Ewan’s help, the students rose to the challenges. They organised digital meet-ups in small groups, brainstormed, discussed, and coordinated drafts. They researched and wrote new content on medieval Islamic contributions to history of science, technology and the occult, diversifying articles that had previously represented these topics mainly from an Anglo-European perspective. And since most of the students in my course were female, simply by participating in the assignment they contributed to a more diverse Wikipedia (editors have tended to be a homogenous group: white, male, 30s, from tech disciplines). Regardless of gender, all the students contributed strong research and writing skills to a more interdisciplinary Wikipedia. They brought perspectives from art and architectural history and Fine Arts to the work of editing History of Science articles, creating their own  intersections between science and art. They contributed images to articles that previously had privileged text and intellectual content exclusively. Collectively the students contributed some eight thousand words and eighty-five references to nine articles, which have received some 772,000 views to date.

I was worried going into the term that the students would dislike the experiment, that they would be put off by the necessity of having to learn yet another new digital tool at an already difficult time. A few weeks into the course they had spoken frankly about the stress of knowing that what they created would be out there in the world as free and public knowledge, their sense of worry and responsibility to do this work ‘right’. I was therefore surprised at mid-course feedback that specifically mentioned the Wikipedia project as something that was going well in the course. They appreciated how the editing process had gotten them thinking about knowledge dissemination. Thanks to their efforts Wikipedia’s freely-available knowledge is now a bit more diverse and globally representative. In a year that brought pervasive systemic injustices into stark relief,  our experiment in applying our knowledge outside the classroom gave us a sense that we were creating something positive, something that mattered. As one student commented, “Really love the Wikipedia project. It feels like my knowledge is actually making a difference in the wider world, if in a small way.”

Find out more about Wikimedia UK’s education initiatives in the blog tag, and visit Glaire Anderson’s website here.

The post Editing Wikipedia: Stars, robots and talismans honours course appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Back in April and May we collaborated with London College of Communications students and staff around decolonising Wikipedia, building on work they’ve been doing to decolonise the curriculum. As part of that we are looking at a partnership with a focus on decolonisation, the visibility and credibility of under-represented figures connected to teaching and research across their subject disciplines. On the 25th November the college will launch a new Decolonising Wikipedia Network that aims to support students and staff to become Wikipedia editors and creators.

Decolonisation is not a metaphor or synonym for diversity and inclusion work (read Tuck and Yang, 2012); it is about equity, justice and reparation for people whose lives and life chances have been and continue to be negatively affected by colonisation. Under British colonial rule, entire communities and nations suffered the loss or oppression of traditional knowledge and ways of knowing (aka epistemicide).

To this day, the white western elite dominates global understanding of what and how to know, whilst the ways of knowing of those colonised, their ancestors and diaspora, continues to be oppressed, marginalised, othered and exoticized. And even knowledge production systems that are intended to be democratic and inclusive still maintain practices which can exclude and marginalise, for example through the credibility criteria of academic writing and notability criteria of Wikipedia.

Work to decolonise university curricula and collections has highlighted that it’s not just a matter of including more diverse authors on reading lists, but a matter of diversifying knowledge production itself, to allow for different knowledge and different ways of knowing to be visible and valued. LCC Changemakers are working with Wikimedia Education on this basis, to develop skills and confidence in LCC students and staff to play an active role in decolonising knowledge production and increasing the visibility and credibility of under-represented figures connected to our subject disciplines.

Building on the LCC Wikipedia Editathon in May-June 2020, this new network supports students and staff to edit and create Wikipedia entries through a decolonial lens at a scale and pace that suits them, supporting them to make anything from a small intervention to an existing Wikipedia page in a day, to a writing one new Wikipedia page over a month. The network will be launched here on 25 November with a video introduction and instructions for joining. Watch this space!

The post London College of Communications – decolonisation through Wikipedia appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Earlier this year we produced a booklet with the University of Edinburgh, bringing together a collection of case studies from across the UK in order to provide insight into the use of the Wikimedia projects in education. It is our belief that the Wikimedia projects are a valuable tool for education, and that engagement with those projects is an activity which enriches the student experience as much as it does the open web itself. As such we have a number of education projects, and have managed to introduce Wikimedia teaching as a part of the Welsh baccalaureate. You can find what we’ve blogged about these projects in the education tag.

Educators worldwide are using Wikimedia in the curriculum – teaching students key skills in information literacy, collaboration, writing as public outreach, information synthesis, source evaluation and data science. Engaging with projects like Wikipedia – particularly through becoming a contributor – enables learners to understand, navigate and critically evaluate information as well as develop an appreciation for the role and importance of open education. Once published, material produced by students becomes immediately accessible by a global audience, giving students the satisfaction of knowing that their work can be seen by many more people than just their tutor.

As individuals working in the open web in the twenty-first century it is incumbent upon us to embrace innovative learning, embedding into our practice those tools which equip our students to work collaboratively, be skilled digitally, and think critically.

Of our 13 examples, 12 pertain to Higher Education, and one to Secondary; but although this work has thus far been more common in Universities than schools or colleges of Further Education, it is far from being restricted solely to them. This resource has been designed for anyone involved in education, and will be of particular interest to those teachers, lecturers and learning technologists involved in open pedagogy and course design, or who have an interest in innovative learning, working on the open web, co-creation, collaborative working, or digital skills.

Feedback from both students and course leaders, at the University of Edinburgh and beyond, has consistently highlighted:

• Student-led creation of academic quality content, available to be shared and used by wide audiences
• Students and course leaders having the opportunity to examine their subject area reflectively through a global, publicly engaged perspective
• Students having the opportunity to learn and practice beginner-level coding skills and increase their digital competencies

Wikimedia and Skills development

The Wikimedia projects are more than just Wikipedia.  There are 13 projects in all, four which are of particular interest here: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wiki Commons, and Wikibooks.  

Wikimedia UK has produced a report mapping engagement with the projects to existing digital skills frameworks in the UK, which can be read on Wikimedia UK’s website. and a report on The Potentials of Wikimedia Projects in Digital, Information and Data Literacy Development in the UK context. 

The skills which can be enhanced through engagement with the Wikimedia Projects include:

Wikipedia  the online encyclopedia

• Computer and internet literacy, from opening an account to searching and critically evaluating information online.
• Creating, preparing (digitizing, editing, converting), uploading, categorising, translating information and digital content
• Collaboration, communication and consensus building in an online environment
• Understanding reliable, verifiable sources, licences, consents, and copyright
• Encyclopedic writing in the public domain, using citation softwares and referencing

WikiData an open database and central storage for structured data

• Understanding data concepts, data types, data functions and data characteristics
• Importing, exporting, linking, reusing, and combining datasets
• Understanding of Creative Commons database rights 
• Engaging with the development of data models, exploring and visualising your data 
• Collaborative data management 

Wiki Commons a host of media files and their metadata

• Understanding of free digital file types and formats
• Understanding organisation of information and discoverability
• Understanding of the educational value of different types of content
• Content reuse skills, including editing and improving images

Wikibooks a collaborative, instructional non-fiction book authoring website

• Wring in Wikitext or in a combination of Wikitext, HTML, and CSS 
• Content creation, collaborative editing, translation
• Editing skills (like spelling and grammar or formatting errors) 
• Understanding of licensing (GFDL and Creative Commons)

Here’s one of the case studies included in the booklet…

Life Sciences BSc degrees, Science Communication, Imperial College London

Final year Biochemistry and Biological Sciences BSc students at Imperial College London selected and improved Wikipedia articles within their Science Communication module by adding content to existing pages, including adding their own illustrations.

Course leaders: Prof. Stephen Curry, professor of Structural Biology, and Dr. Steven Cook, Principal Teaching Fellow in the Department of Life Sciences.

Class size: 30 students.

Course duration: 1 academic term, featuring a 3-hour workshop introducing Wikimedia, Creative Commons, and practising Wiki mark-up language.

Learning outcomes

• Developing writing skills suited for a public audience.
• Increasing critical thinking, information and digital literacy.
• Introducing basic illustration and graphic design skills.
• Introducing collaborative writing, useful for future academic and work-based projects.

Further support and resources used

• Wikimedia UK’s Programmes team.
• The Wikipedia Manual of Style guidelines.
• Science communication and illustration workshops run by staff on the Science Communication module.
• Wikimedia Commons and the RCSB Protein Data Bank.
• User:Polypompholyx’s Wikipedia page includes guidance for students.

Impact beyond the classroom

• 100 articles improved since 2012.
• Several illustrations and photographs were created and uploaded to Wikipedia pages to support the relevant compound’s Wikipedia page.
• Contributed to the growing Wiki culture and community within the University.

“There are plenty of incomplete and missing articles on Wikipedia, and it would be great to get students involved in editing articles much earlier in their Careers.”

“The articles have to be on a scientific topic, and they typically choose life science topics, as that is their expertise (biology and biochemistry students). Some articles are created from scratch, others take existing articles and improve them. This is typically by rewriting the text to make it clearer, more complete and more up to date. Most articles end up with new sections, updated references, and additional media: either from Commons, or media they create and CC license themselves.” Dr. Steven Cook, Course Leader

For more of the education booklet case studies, take a look at the free digital copy here. For more information on our education projects, follow the blog tag, sign up for our newsletter, or get in touch with us. To support Wikimedia UK projects like this one, please consider donating or becoming a member today.

The post Education booklet – Imperial College London appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

The project Mapping the Scottish Reformation is an attempt to track all of Scotland’s ministers between the Reformation Parliament in 1560 and the Glorious Revolution in 1689. And by ‘track’, I mean that the project seeks to trace their movements: the big milestones in clerical careers, where and when they lived, and where they moved, where they were educated, who they married, and what happened to their children. The end result will be a weather map of sorts, that will allow us to observe ministers’ movements and the process of religious change.

How do we find out about these people? We rely on surviving documents that were made at the time, usually by Church courts known as presbyteries. These documents are all housed in the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, must be searched by most users on site, and must be transcribed by each visitor. There are no real indexes to help. Here’s an example of a two-page spread, typical of the manuscripts we use:

To date, as part of our first case study, we have parsed around 3,500 pages of manuscript material like this, extracting twenty-two different data points: including ministers’ names, the parishes they served, the dates when they were appointed, the dates they transferred to other parishes, where they were educated, the locations to which they moved, when they were disciplined, when they died, etc.

Most of the individuals we have found are obviously relatively obscure and have no item entry in Wikidata. Some were captured as part of the recent project the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, but most remained unknown to Wikidata. As such, we have created around one thousand new items over the last two months, all of which serve as a framework to record the key parameters of a cleric’s career.

To ensure our data entry was as quick and reliable as possible, it was essential that we structured each new cleric on Wikidata by using existing properties. We followed the structure for most ‘human’ (Q5) entries to Wikidata, but then added ‘occupation’ and ‘residence’ properties. We added ‘start time’ and ‘end time’ qualifiers to ‘residence’ so we could track precisely when a minister arrived and left his parish.

To capture the complexity of clerical careers in early modern Scotland, we made use of the ‘Significant Event’ property (P793). We had to get a little creative here, because some of the specialist terminology relating to the Church did not exist in Wikidata’s reams of items. As such, we created the following items that can be classified as ‘significant events’:

• deposed (Q89273000)
• suspension (Q89273310)

In some rather more fruity cases, we made use of existing items such as ‘illness’, ‘repentance’, and even ‘execution’, as other ways to capture significant events. Coupled with the ‘point in time’ qualifier, we were able to record this information in quite a detailed way.

One of the essential parts of this project is that we need to meticulously record where we obtained our information. As such, we had to devise a method to record manuscript information in Wikidata’s referencing system. Again, after lengthy consideration, we made use of existing properties already on Wikidata to capture the information we required. Incredibly, when used together, the properties ‘collection’, ‘inventory number’, and ‘folio(s)’ allowed us to recreate an academically robust system to reference manuscripts in their complexity. Here is an example:

In summary, Wikidata’s existing menu of properties and items provides significant amounts of flexibility in designing schema that can capture the messy and complex world of the early modern cleric. Indeed, the scope of Wikidata’s flexibility could accommodate a range of projects that gather data from manuscript sources. During the several months we have been working with Wikidata, we have successfully ported over thousands of data points from manuscripts kept under lock and key at the National Records of Scotland, traced the careers of over 900 clerics and started, tentatively to manipulate this data through the Wikidata Query Service. Keep watching our website mappingthescottishreformation.org and our Twitter account, @MappingScotsRef to see how our project, and our integration with Wikidata, develops.

Chris R. Langley is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Newman University, Birmingham. Mapping the Scottish Reformation is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Strathmartine Trust.

The post Introducing Mapping the Scottish Reformation: Clerics, Manuscripts, and Open Data appeared first on Wikimedia UK.