Celtic Knot 2018 – How can Wikidata support minority language Wikipedias

By Delphine Dallison, Wikimedian in Residence at the Scottish Libraries and Information Council (SLIC)

At the beginning of July, I attended the Celtic Knot 2018 conference at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth organised in partnership with Wikimedia UK. As a Wikidata novice, but enthusiast, I was excited to see that the conference had an entire strand dedicated to how Wikidata can be used to support minority language Wikipedias. As the new wikimedian in residence at the Scottish Library and Information Council, my hope was to shore up my own knowledge and skills in that area and both pick up some tips on how I could encourage librarians to work with Wikidata with their collections as well as some tools which would allow librarians to work on improving the Scots Wikipædia and the Gaelic Uicipeid.

My first positive impression of the Wikidata strand of the conference was that the presenters made no assumption of prior knowledge, thus making Wikidata accessible to the most novice of us attending the conference and so I will begin this post in much the same fashion with a basic introduction to Wikidata.

What is Wikidata?

Wikidata is a repository of multilingual linked open data, which started as a means to collect structured data to provide support for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and the other wikis of the Wikimedia movement, but has since evolved to support a number of other open data projects.

Wikidata is a collaborative project and is edited and maintained by Wikidata editors in the same fashion as Wikipedia. The data collected in Wikidata is available under a CC0 public domain license and is both human and machine readable which opens it to a wide range of applications.

Data in the repository is stored as items, each with a label, a description and aliases if relevant. There are currently upwards of 46 million data items on Wikidata. Items are each given a unique identifier as a Q number (ie. Douglas Adams is Q42). Statements help expand on the detailed characteristics of an item and consist of a property (P number) and a value (Q number). Just like in Wikipedia, each statement can be given a reference, so people using the data can track where it was sourced from.

Based on the example below, one of the detailed characteristics of Douglas Adams is that he was educated at St John’s College. To translate the sentence Douglas Adams (Q42) was educated (P69) at St John’s College (Q691283) into data, you could portray it like this:

Item Property Value
Q42 P69 Q691283
Douglas Adams Educated at St John’s College
Figure 1: Datamodel in Wikidata, by Charlie Kritschmar (WMDE), CC-BY-SA

How can Wikidata support minority language Wikipedias?

As previously mentioned, Wikidata is a multilingual repository which supports all the languages supported by Wikipedia. Although English is the default, users can set their preferred language in the Preferences menu after logging in. Each Qnumber item on Wikidata has both a label and a description and you can select each one and see how many languages the label is translated into. The same principle works for properties. Wherever there isn’t a translation available for a label, description or property, it will revert back to English.

During the conference, Simon Cobb, visiting Wikidata scholar at the National Library of Wales, gave us an overview of the language gaps on Wikidata. As you can see from the graph below, the English version of Wikidata has 36.5 million labels (equivalent to 75% of the content held on Wikidata). After English, the figure quickly drops to 14.6 million labels for Dutch, 10 million for French and 8.7 million for German. UK minority languages such as Welsh, Scots and Scottish Gaelic average just over 1 million labels in their respective languages (just over 2%), meaning that all items without a translated label will automatically revert back to English or to the item’s Qnumber.

Figure 2: Languages with over 1 million labelled items, by Simon Cobb, CC-BY-SA

If we want to improve accessibility for minority languages on Wikidata, it is essential that we get more editors translating labels in their preferred languages so we can get a better representation of all languages on Wikidata. To help with this, Nicolas Vigneron, from the Breton Wikipedia, demonstrated how you can use the Translathon tool to quickly produce lists of labels missing in your language and add the translations directly in Wikidata by selecting the Qnumber you wish to translate. A new tool has since been developed on the same principle, the Wikidata Terminator, which gives a greater range of languages to work with.

Why translate labels on Wikidata?

You might be thinking that translating labels is all well and good for giving a better language representation on Wikidata, but how does it benefit editors who prefer to work on content on their language Wikipedia? We know that minority language communities are often small and disparate. Volunteer fatigue is a real and constant challenge, so why would you want to divert their efforts to translating labels on Wikidata rather than adding content to Wikipedia? The content held in Wikidata is human and machine readable. This is important because it means that using coding and tools, we can use Wikidata to automatically generate content on Wikipedia. A few of those tools were presented at Celtic Knot 2018.

Hady Elsahar gave us an introduction to the ArticlePlaceHolder tool. The concept behind this tool is that rather than having red links in their language Wikipedia to indicate articles that need created, editors can quickly and easily create a place holder for the article with content generated from Wikidata. The place holder would feature an image if available and a collection of statements associated with the item. The benefit to the reader is to be able to access pertinent information on a topic in their own language, thus relieving some of the strain on small communities of editors. The ArticlePlaceHolder can also be an incentive to new editors to create an article based on the facts available from Wikidata and supplement it with their own secondary research on the topic.

Figure 3: Example of the ArticlePlaceHolder tool in use on the Haitian Creole Wikipedia, CC-BY-SA

Pau Cabot also ran a workshop on how to automatically generate infoboxes on minority language Wikipedias by drawing the data from Wikidata. Infoboxes predate Wikidata and already foster a symbiotic relationship between Wikipedia and Wikidata. Wikipedia’s infoboxes hold basic data on a topic that is formatted to be compatible with Wikidata so they can be harvested to enrich Wikidata. However, a new trend is currently looking at how we can use Wikidata to generate the information displayed in Wikipedia’s infoboxes. This process can involve some structural work from admins on the Wikipedia’s infrastructure since each language Wikipedia have autonomy to curate infoboxes and other tools based on the wishes of their community. Pau Cabot talked us through the process that his admin team on the Catalan Wikipedia followed to decide on the infobox categories they would use across their Wikipedia, narrowing it down to a list of 8. Once the infrastructure was in place, the admins were able to generate easy templates that could be added to any relevant article and would automatically generate an infobox filled with data derived from Wikidata. Wherever the data’s labels do not currently exist in Catalan, the labels revert to the closest language available (Spanish if available, English as a last resort). However, the infoboxes also each offer the reader an easy edit tool, which allows the reader to translate the label directly in the infobox, whilst automatically adding the translation to Wikidata. This tool can therefore make the translation of labels accessible to Wikipedia editors who might not necessarily find their way onto the Wikidata project.

How can minority language communities contribute their own content to Wikidata?

Everything that we have discussed so far has been focused on how you can draw data from larger language Wikipedias to translate and add to smaller language Wikipedias, but of course minority language communities don’t simply want a Wikipedia that is a translated copy of the English Wikipedia. One of the chief objectives of the minority language Wikipedias is to act as repository of their own cultural capital and I would argue that working with Wikidata can only enhance the visibility of that culture. We need to start developing strategies with GLAMs and academic researchers to add more data on minority language cultures to Wikidata.

The National Library of Wales has already been doing work in this area and after adding 4800 portraits from their Welsh portrait collection, they also added all the associated metadata to Wikidata. This work was carried out in partnership with their national wikimedian in residence Jason Evans and their visiting Wikidata scholar Simon Cobb.

The idea of working with large sets of data and contributing them to Wikidata can seem daunting, however I was most inspired by the introduction that Simon Cobb gave us to the OpenRefine tool during the unconference sessions run on day two of Celtic Knot. OpenRefine is a tool developed by Google to help clean up messy data and in more recent editions of the tool (version 3.0), it has extensions added which allow the users to reconcile and augment their data with Wikidata as well as edit data directly in Wikidata and upload reconciled datasets to Wikidata.

As part of my residency with the Scottish Library and Information Council, I can definitely see the applications for this kind of tool to openly share the metadata on some of the Scots and Gaelic collections held in libraries across Scotland. I plan on testing the concept soon with a collaboration currently in development with professor Peter Reid from Robert Gordon University who is designing a Doric literature portal thanks to funding from the Public Library Improvement fund. Out of this collaboration, we hope to enrich the data available in Wikidata on Doric literature and Doric authors as well as create/improve articles on the topic in both the Scots and English Wikipedias. I hope to see more of these types of projects emerge in the future.

A multilingual infobox for Wikimedia Commons categories | By Mike Peel

Image showing the infobox in source editor, and the resulting infobox on Commons.

Mike Peel is a UK Wikimedian who is running a session on the development of multilingual infoboxes on Wikimedia Commons at Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town. You can see the session information here.

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Wikimedia Commons is a multilingual repository holding multimedia related to all possible topics. All language Wikipedias, as well as other projects, rely on the content hosted on Commons. However, MediaWiki is monolingual by default, so the defacto language on Commons is English, with category names in English — even for non-English topics.

As a result, it can be difficult for non-English speakers to understand the context and scope of a category. Sometimes manual descriptions and translations are present, along with various different utility templates, but the amount varies dramatically between categories.

Wikidata content, however, is inherently multilingual. Topics have Q-identifiers, and statements are made using properties, all of which are translatable. Structured Data on Commons (a Wikimedia project to ‘Wikidatafy’ Commons and improve its searchability) will soon use this system on file description pages – but it can also make the categories significantly easier to use by providing information relevant to the category in the user’s preferred language through an infobox.

Implementation

{{Wikidata Infobox}} is designed to be one infobox that work for all topics in all languages. It is written using parser functions, and it primarily uses [[User:RexxS]]’s Lua module [[Module:WikidataIB]] to fetch the values of nearly 300 properties from Wikidata, along with their qualifiers (and more can be added on demand). The label language is based on the user’s selected language.

The values are then displayed in various different formats such as strings, links, dates, numbers with units, and so on, as appropriate. The main image, as well as flags and coats of arms, are also displayed, along with the Wikidata description of the topic

Coordinates are displayed with Geohack and links to display the coordinates of all items in the category. Maps are displayed in the user’s language using Kartographer, with the map zoom level based on the area property for the topic. Links to Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, etc. are displayed where they are available in the user’s language. Links to tools such as Reasonator and Wikishootme are also included.

For categories about people, the infobox automatically adds the birth, death, first name and surname categories, along with tracking categories like ‘People by Name’. Authority control IDs are also displayed as external links, and ID tracking categories can also be automatically added.

Poster on Template:Wikidata Infobox by Mike Peel – image CC BY-SA 4.0

Roll-out

You can easily add the infobox to categories that have a sitelink on Wikidata: just add {{Wikidata Infobox}}!

The infobox was started in January 2018, with several test categories. An initial discussion on Commons’ Village Pump was very positive, and by the end of February it had been manually added to 1,000 categories, increasing to 5,000 by mid-March. Work on a bot to deploy the template was started in February, and was approved by the community by the end of April, when around 10,000 categories had infoboxes. The bot roll-out was started slowly to catch any issues with the infobox design, and particularly increases in the server load – but no server load issues arose.

In parallel, over 500,000 new commons sitelinks were added to Wikidata using P373 (the ‘commons category’ property) and monument ID matching, and many links to category redirects have been fixed. This has also caused many new interwiki links to be displayed in Commons categories.

In mid-June 2018, with the use of Pi bot and friends to add the infobox to categories, uses of the Wikidata infobox passed 1 million.

Next steps

The infobox continues to evolve and to gain new features, for example the implementation of multilingual interactive maps using Kartographer was quickly added to the infobox to make it available in over 600,000 categories displaying a map. More properties are being added to the box, although striking a balance between keeping the infobox small and adding relevant new properties is an ongoing discussion.

The infobox is not used where other boxes such as {{Creator}} and “category definition” are already in use; this could potentially change so that there is a uniform look across all categories. It is also not used for taxonomy categories due to different taxonomy structures on Commons and Wikidata.

Over 4 million Commons categories do not yet have a sitelink on Wikidata, so there is plenty of scope to add the infobox to more categories! The infoboxes will update and grow as more information and translations are added to Wikidata – so if you see wrong or untranslated information in them, correct it on Wikidata!

WikidataIB and the other tools used here (or even the entire infobox!) can easily be installed on other Wikimedia projects – providing that there is community consensus to do so!

UK Election Maps shared on Open Licenses are added to Commons

Birmingham council seat changes – image by Election Maps CC BY-SA 2.0

One account I follow on Twitter which produces very useful political maps is @ElectionMapsUK. I saw the account tweeting recently that after they had finished all their maps showing the changes to council seats and the makeup of borough councils after the 2018 local elections. The account announced that they were happy for other people to use the maps for any purpose they wanted, and so I asked whether they would consider publishing the maps on Open Licenses so that we could use them on Wikipedia.

They agreed and uploaded 117 maps to Flickr which I then transferred to Commons with Magnus Manske’s Flickr2Commons tool. You can find them all here.

I spoke to Election Maps UK’s creator, Ed Williams, who said:

“I’ve always been a general map nerd – and an election nerd – so the election maps were the best part of election nights in my mind!  I’ve also for a good while loved the little almost cult-like gathering around local by-elections on a Thursday night (mainly thanks to Britain Elects really getting this out there) and thought as an experiment to map a couple of these (Herefordshire and West Somerset were up that week). From the start it seemed that people liked it and by the time I handed over the account after 15 months at the helm we’d passed the 13k follower mark including major politicians (Cabinet minsters, Jezza, etc) plus major journalists and a couple of best-selling authors. Obviously with the local by-election maps, followed the General Election maps – including various ones of interest covering turnout, women MPs, Blair vs Corbyn seats, etc. But it was the local election maps that really took off the most as these were things that no-one else was really covering in real-time.  Wikipedia had some, Andrew Teale slowly gets them out – but as he covers all the results in full detail too his task is mammoth and always months behind, etc.

Why did I want to give them to Wikimedia? Well, this was always a hobby and therefore nothing financial. Also the resources I used – Ordnance Survey for the maps, the council websites, Andrew Teale’s excellent Local Election Archive Project and indeed Wikipedia, are all either public domain or creative commons.  As such when you asked me to donate it seemed a reasonable thing to do. I also hadn’t set up a website and as I enjoy sharing these maps but only had them on twitter it seemed like a great place for them to go.”

You can follow Ed on Twitter at @HImpartiality, as he has now moved on from map making and @ElectionMapsUK is under new management.

As well as the election maps, we have also had donated a large selection of photos from the recent ‘People’s Vote march’ demonstration, which you can find here or under the [[Category:People’s Vote March]].

If you use any of the images that have been released to improve a Wikipedia page, why not get in contact and let us know? We’d love to know what you’re doing with these images. If you want to publish any of your photos on Wikimedia Commons under Open Licenses and need advice on how to do it, we’re here to help!

Tech dive – Alex Monk on implementing secure certificates across Wikimedia domains

Alex Monk (bottom right) working At the 2018 Wikimedia Hackathon, May 18-20, 2018, Autonomous University of Barcelona – image by Mhollo

Background

This report assumes that you know basically what HTTPS is, among other things. ‘We’ is used liberally in this post, and refers to the Wikimedia technical community in general – I am a volunteer and I don’t work for the foundation or any national chapters.

Wikimedia has several canonical domain names, the ones everyone knows about – wikipedia.org, wiktionary.org, wikibooks.org, wikiquote.org, and so on. These are fine, and HTTPS has been used to secure connections on them for a few years now.

Unfortunately, over the years we’ve also accumulated many non-canonical domains that simply redirect to the others. In that mess there’s a mix of domains that are owned by the foundation but not set up in the foundation’s name servers, domains owned by entities other than the foundation and pointed at wikipedia using external hosting, and – here’s the bit that we’re interested in today – some domains that are owned by the foundation and are set up in the name servers, and the foundation’s web servers serve redirects on.

Historically, you had to spend a lot of money to get certificates for your domain, and Wikimedia had enough of these redirect-only domains sitting around that the cost of buying HTTPS certificates to cover them all would be prohibitive. So these domains are accessed over plain HTTP only.

Fortunately, a HTTPS certificate provider named Let’s Encrypt launched in April 2016 which provides free certificates via an API named ACME – that is fully automated. Wikimedia has since begun to use the service in some obscure ‘simple’ production services such as gerrit (the code review system for developers), some private systems, and in August 2016 I used it to finally implement trusted HTTPS on the beta.wmflabs.org sites. To make this process simple, we use a script named acme_tiny.py, written by Daniel Roesler.

The problem

The thing about all the cases we’ve implemented it in is that the decryption only needs to happen on one single server. This is good enough for certain obscure services that only have one server handling encryption, but is no good for services that need to be handled by multiple such servers – e.g. anything that needs to be spread out across the data centres that Wikimedia rents space in. This is because of two things:

  1. When you go to the ACME API and ask for a certificate, you need to prove that you control the domain(s) which your certificate will match (Domain Validation or DV). The common way of doing this (and the only one that we use right now) is to write a file that the ACME server names into a /.well-known/acme-challenge/ directory on the web server running your domain. Unfortunately this means that, if one server requests a certificate for the domain, all the other servers will need to be able to serve the challenge that only one server received – so the file would need to be distributed between them, and this can be non-trivial without opening up various security cans of worms.
  2. The ACME server we’re using (Let’s Encrypt) applies rate limiting, so multiple servers requesting certificates for a domain would likely trigger the limits. (and we’d probably set off alarms with the sheer number of different domains we need to cover).

So, if we want to start protecting our redirect domains with free certificates, and serve them in a way that can handle our traffic volume, we have to come up with a way of centralising the generation of our certificates while securely distributing the private parts of the certificates to the authorised internal servers.

The solution

Myself, Brandon Black and Faidon Liambotis finally had the opportunity to sit down at the Hackathon and discuss how we were going to do this exactly. What we plan in basic terms (and I’ve begun to implement) is to have a central server that is responsible for requesting certificates, running an internal-facing service that serves certificate private/public parts to the authorised hosts, and forwarding of HTTP challenge requests through to the central service that made the request. Some of the details are far more complicated and technical but that’s the basic idea.

I’ve already got a basic setup running at https://krenair.hopto.org/ (this actually points to a server running in Cloud VPS, I didn’t use wmflabs.org as the domain name editing for that is broken right now). You can track the work on this system in Phabricator at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T194962

What next?

Right now my solution relies on some bad code that I need to clean up – the ‘client’ end (external-facing web server) also needs a bit of work to make the puppet configuration easy and remove some hard-coded assumptions. At some point we will need to determine exactly what the configuration should be for using it with the redirect domains, and Wikimedia Foundation Operations, should they decide it’s good, will need to determine how best to deploy this in production.

Another thing that we plan to do is move to using our configuration management’s system built-in support for pulling files securely from a central machine. Then of course there’s the recently-added support for wildcard certificates. To solve that we’ll need a customised acme_tiny script, and for production we’re going to need to build support for dynamic record creation into our name server, named gdnsd. (in labs this is handled by OpenStack Designate where there is already an API to achieve this, when permissions etc. have been sorted). In the distant future, after the above is done, it may actually be possible to add this as one of the canonical domains’ (wikipedia.org and friends) certificate options (Wikimedia keeps certificates from multiple authorities just in case there are problems with one of them) – that would mean we could serve those domains using certificates provided through an ACME API.

Register for our AGM and help to shape the future of Wikimedia UK

The Natural History Museum – image by Diliff CC BY-SA 3.0

Our Annual General Meeting is an important opportunity for Wikimedia UK to report to its members on the progress we have made in the past year, and to hear from our members about their views and feedback. You can register for this year’s AGM on Eventbrite here.

This year we are holding our AGM in the Natural History Museum, on Saturday 14th July, from 10.30 to 16.15, with the AGM proper starting at 14.00. There will be talks and workshops from 11am, including a keynote speech from the Campaigns Director of Liberty, Corey Stoughton, a look at our work with the Welsh Government from Welsh Digital Language Specialist, Gareth Morlais, and an introduction to the challenges and successes of the Natural History Museums’ new Data Portal.

We encourage members to participate in what we think will be a fun day in a wonderful venue, a chance for members to meet each other and talk to staff and trustees, and to listen to some interesting speakers. See you all at the Natural History Museum in July!

A look back at the 2018 hackathon in Barcelona

Wikimedia Hackathon Barcelona 2018 – group photo – image by Ckoerner CC BY-SA 4.0

Wikimedia UK staff couldn’t be in Barcelona at the end of May for the annual Wikimedia hackathon – we had our own events to organise with Amnesty International in London and Glasgow – but some of our friends did attend the event, and we are happy to have their help to tell you what happened, and what exciting projects developers are working on.

You can see a summary of some of the projects worked on over the weekend on this Etherpad, you can see opening presentations here. At this hackathon, 20% of the participants were women. This is still far from ideal, but the figure is improving. Alex Hinojo of Amical Wikimedia (the Catalan Wikimedia affiliate) who helped organise the hackathon said that they tried hard to improve gender diversity through the travel grants system.

The conference was held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, a long-term trusted partner of Amical Wikimedia and was done without funding from any major corporations, entirely with the support of local volunteers.

Watch all the presentations from the WMHack showcase here. Lots of projects are ongoing from previous years. Projects such as collaborative editing, updates to translation tools, data visualisation, the Wiki Commons app and more are exciting, but due to a lack of developers working on them, are progressing quite slowly.

 

See all #wmhack Tweets here.

 

Participants at the Wikimedia Hackathon 2018, walking to the venue at UAB – image by Tbayer (WMF) CC BY-SA 4.0

WikiChron – a tool to visualise data

WikiChron is ‘a data visualization tool that displays timeseries of metrics about a selected subset of wikis from wikia. You can use these graphs in order to explore the growth of a wiki community and compare it with other wikis along the time.’

The current set of Wikis you can compare here is small, but the developers hope to allow users to visualise the growth of larger Wikis soon.

You can watch the video presentation of this new tool here.

This tool seems pretty self explanatory – hopefully it will make gathering metrics on any Wiki project much simpler.

Creating a new language Wikipedia

The Fon language of Benin has about 4 million speakers. A Wikipedia developer and Fon speaker presented at the hackathon showcase about creating the language Wikipedia, translating buttons and functionalities, and dealing with the special characters involved in the language. The Fon community now hopes to develop a group of Fon Wikipedians to start creating content in the language.

 

 

Kartographer – Embedded maps

Embedded maps on Wikipedia are a long overdue additional functionality which could seriously improve many Wikipedia pages by employing some code to embed live OpenStreetMaps. The Collaboration team at the Foundation are in charge of the project and while this was not worked on particularly at #wmhack, it seems that a lot of improvements have been done on Kartographer recently and it may be something we can look forward to seeing on Wikipedia in the coming year.

You can read the documentation from about progress on Kartographer in 2018 here.

Some embedded maps have started to be rolled out on Wikipedia, which was brought to my attention while writing this. You can see a list of pages with maps here.

As an example, here’s the page for Bacton in Suffolk.

Wiki Commons App

A small group of developers have been working on the Wiki Commons Android app for a few years now after it was dropped by the WMF in order to concentrate on the Wikipedia app. Development is progressing slowly with a number of additions:

  • Added gamification to the app with peer-reviewing of Commons images.
  • Showing random images and allowing users to send thanks,
  • Nominating for deletion.

Wikimedia developer Neslihan Turan described the changes to us:

“When it comes to peer review we successfully implemented a gamification feature. Since last year we included notification check via app, added a featured image browsing option, improved the nearby feature and its usability, and added 2 factor authentication. In the hackathon we focused on peer review, and after 3 months users will be able to browse in app, by username, filename or notification. Then we will merge our peer review so that users can browse and then review. Our aim is improving interaction between users and giving them another option (other than upload) to improve Commons image quality.”

Structured Data on Commons session

Sandra Fauconnier from the Wikimedia Foundation has been working on the Structured Data on Commons project and ran a session on the team’s work at #wmhack. She wrote for This Month In GLAM about her work, which you can see here.

Sandra told us: ‘we held a Q&A session about upcoming technical changes in Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons (Etherpad) and a session on the GLAM perspective (Etherpad). We also informally chatted with several active Commons volunteers and tool developers. We spent quite a bit of time brainstorming together how search on Commons should work with structured data, and how the data model for some basic types of files might look.

Goodbye from #wmhack this year. See you next year!

 

Nominate your Wikimedian of 2018

It has come to that time of year when we’re taking in nominations for Wikimedian of the Year, 2018!

Nominating your Wikimedian of the Year is a great opportunity to celebrate an individual who’s made a significant impact to the Wikimedia projects in the last year.

This year, we will also be celebrating:

  • Positive Wikimedian of the Year
  • UK Partnership of the Year
  • and Up and coming, Wikimedian to Watch 2018

For some inspiration from nominations which have stood out before, here you can look at last year’s winning nominations.

To find out more details about the categories & to submit your nomination, click here!

2017’s Winning Partnership of the Year, The National Library of Wales!

Nominations close at midnight, Tuesday July 10th. The winners will be announced at Wikimedia UK’s 2018 AGM, taking place in the Flett Theatre at the Natural History Museum, London on Saturday 14th July.

We look forward to reading your nominations!

You can register to attend this year’s AGM here! At this year’s meeting, we will featuring a keynote speech from the Campaigns Director of Liberty, Corey Stoughton, a look at our work with the Welsh Government from Welsh Digital Language Specialist, Gareth Morlais, and an introduction to the challenges and successes of the Natural History Museums’ new Data Portal.

Wikipedia in Higher Education… How students are shaping the open web

Co-authored by Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian In Residence at the University of Edinburgh and Jemima John, 4th year undergraduate student at the University’s School of Law and Digital Skills intern

Since the early 2000’s, Wikipedia has acquired somewhat of a negative reputation for being unreliable. Educators are normally wary of allowing Wikipedia as a source that anyone can edit. This is due to believing it to be a source of misinformation, going directly against their role to reduce misinformation in the world.

However, what if the contrary is true?

What if Wikipedia can be used to reduce misinformation in the world, an often-highlighted problem of our current times. This is the very mission of Wikimedia organization. The Wikimedia projects exist to combat misinformation[1]. Indeed, Wikipedians have been combating fake news for years as source evaluation is a core skill of a Wikipedian[2]. Researchers found that only 7 percent of all Wikipedia edits are considered vandalism[3] and nearly all vandalism edits are reverted instantly by automated programs (bots) which help to patrol Wikipedia for copyright violation, plagiarism and vandalism. If a page is targeted for vandalism it can also be ‘semi-protected’ (essentially locking the page so new edits are reviewed before being added) for one day, two days or longer as required while accounts or IP addresses repeating vandalism can be blocked indefinitely. While Wikipedia is still the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, a recent implementation is new users cannot create new pages until their account has been active for four days and accrued at least ten edits. Within the first four days, however, new users can submit their new pages for review by another editor who quality checks it is sufficiently neutral, notable and well-referenced for inclusion in Wikipedia’s live space.

Due to open licensing of Wikipedia content, it is more visible across the Internet. For example, Google scrapes from Wikipedia biographies to feature as sidebar profiles as part of its ‘Knowledge Graph’ answer engine results for notable people; among many other topics. Wikipedia articles also happen to be within the top five search results due to its preferential status in Google’s ranking algorithm. This is important when one considers ‘search is the way we live now’. According to 2011 figures, Google processed 91% of searches internationally and 97.4% of searches from mobile devices[4]. Google has also been found to have a funneling effect whereby the sources clicked upon the first page of results are clicked on 90% of the time with 42% click through on the first choice alone[5]. Indeed, more recently, research published in 2017 found that Wikipedia and Google have a symbiotic relationship whereby Google depends on Wikipedia – click through rates decrease by 80% if Wikipedia links are removed – and Wikipedia depends on Google – 84.5% of the visits to Wikipedia are attributable to Google[6]. While, just this year, researchers at MIT and the University of Pittsburgh published a paper that evidenced that science is actually shaped by Wikipedia; demonstrating the free encyclopedia’s influence. The randomised control trial the researchers undertook evidenced a strong causal impact that, as one of the most accessed websites in the world, incorporating ideas into Wikipedia leads to those ideas being used more in the scientific literature. [7]

Today Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website[8] on the Internet and sometimes more trusted than traditional news publications, according to a recent YouGov poll[9]. This poll indicated that Wikipedia was trusted by the British people more than such reputable news sites as the Guardian, BBC, the Telegraph, the Times and others. Wikipedia relies on these sources, and other similar sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, so would not necessarily advocate trusting a Wikipedia article over these other sites.

However, Wikipedia’s policies on Neutral Point of View (NPOV) and identifying reliable sources do help police its content and plainly increases trust in its content. Research from the Harvard Business School has also discovered that, unlike other more partisan areas of the internet, Wikipedia’s focus on NPOV (neutral point of view) means editors actually become more moderate over time; the researchers seeing this as evidence that editing “Wikipedia helps break people out of their ideological echo chambers”.[10] More than this, it is worth considering what value one would place on having somewhere online like Wikipedia – and unlike many other of the world’s top ten websites – where it is completely, ruthlessly transparent in how pages are put together so that you can see: when edits were made; and by whom; and so that edits can always be checked, challenged and corrected if need be. After all, all edits to a Wikipedia page are recorded in its View History which includes which account or IP address made the edit along with a date, time and edit summary. Importantly, these entries in the View History are all permanent links so that different versions of the page can be compared and, ultimately, so a page can always be reverted back to its last good state if any unhelpful edits are ever made.

Indeed, the process of researching and writing a Wikipedia article demonstrates ‘how the sausage is made’ – how knowledge is created, curated and contested online – and asks students as part of their research to consider what constitutes a reliable source. In this way, students can be introduced to the pros and cons of searching a variety of databases as part of discussions on information and media literacy[11]. Ultimately, whether it is a news article, journal article or Wikipedia article one should always evaluate what one is reading. That much has always been true. Wikipedia, for its part, has as its policy that no Wikipedia page should be cited in an academic paper. Rather Wikipedia considers itself a tertiary source; an encyclopedia of articles made up from citations from high quality published secondary sources. If one cites anything it is these sources that one should cite, not Wikipedia itself. In this way, Wikipedia reframes itself as useful place for pre-researching a topic in order to orientate oneself before delving into the scholarly literature. Hence, it is not the endpoint of research but the beginning; the digital gateway to academic research. In this way, it can then be seen as a valuable resource in itself. 2016 research confirmed that 87.5% of students were using it in this way; in “an introductory and/or clarificatory role” as part of their information gathering and research and finding it ‘academically useful’ in this context[12]. Now in its seventeenth year, Wikipedia has approaching 5.7 million articles in English[13] with about ten edits per second across all Wikimedia projects and nearly 500 articles created each day[14]. As the largest reference work on the internet, it is simply too big to fail now and too important a source of information for the world. Consequently, Wikipedia has realized this and has taken out an endowment to ensure it exists it perpetuity.

Within the boundaries of Wikipedia editing guidelines of notability, reliability, and verifiability, it can prove to be a valuable resource in education. Editing Wikipedia articles builds a number of key skills. It encourages digital creation and digital collaboration skills. It builds legal research skills through finding relevant sources. Most of all, the ability to synthesize the research in an accessible manner for a non-legal audience is an unique but incredibly valuable skill for any law student. What is amazing about editing and creating Wikipedia articles is that the articles it allows for dialogue and improvement over the article through collaboration with other editors.

Indeed, it was the ‘realness’ and collaborative element of the assignment that appealed to students on the Reproductive Biology Hons. programme along with seizing a rare opportunity to communicate medical knowledge to a lay audience[15][16]. Being able to communicate to a non-specialist audience is a key skill for new medics just as communicating legal knowledge is a key skill for new entrants to the legal profession.

For History undergraduates, it was the opportunity to improve the public’s understanding of history in a way that was active and not just passively receiving knowledge. More than this, it was recognizing that people’s understanding of the diversity of history would not be improved until staff and students actively engaged with addressing these gaps in representation; particularly in underrepresented areas such as social history, gender history and queer history.[17]

A Wikipedia assignment isn’t just another essay or presentation that students may never return to, but something that has actually been created; a way of demonstrating the relevance of a student’s degree and communicating their scholarship in a real-world application of teaching and learning. Beyond this, the experience of a Wikipedia assignment at Bucknell University was that:

“at the close of the semester, students said that simply knowing that an audience of editors existed was enough to change how they wrote. They chose words more carefully. They double-checked their work for accuracy and reliability. And they began to think about how best they could communicate their scholarship to readers who were as curious, conscientious, and committed and as they were”[18].

Once the article becomes live on Wikipedia and indexed in Google’s top five results, students realise that there is agency to sharing their scholarship with the world. By way of example, Reproductive Biology Honours student Áine Kavanagh’s scrupulously researched a brand new article on high-grade serous carcinoma, one of the most deadly and most common forms of ovarian cancer[19]. This article, including over sixty references and open-licensed diagrams Áine herself created, has now been viewed over 33,000 times since it was published in September 2016[20]; adding a well-referenced source of health information to the global Open Knowledge community. Hence, rather than students’ work being disposed of at the end of an assignment, it can become a community project that can then be added to and improved over time; either by the students themselves or by other editors anywhere around the world. This has been a key motivator for students taking part in Wikipedia projects at the University of Edinburgh.

Of these other editors, there are some 2000+ WikiProjects on Wikipedia where editors come together to focus on a particular area of Wikipedia because they are passionate about the subject and/or have expertise in that area. If you check the Talk page of an article on Wikipedia you will see the WikiProject that has been assigned to ‘look after’ the article. In this way, content on Wikipedia is monitored and curated by a team of subject specialists; amateur enthusiasts and professionals alike. WikiProject Law aims to organise the law-related articles that consist of defining concepts spanning jurisdictions. There is a need for more articles focused on Scots law and there is scope to start a WikiProject to organise articles regarding Scots law.

There can be a number of applications within the law school. A Wikipedia assignment can be run in a single afternoon or over the course of an entire semester. It can be done as individual work, paired work or group work. Starting small and building up over time has proven a sensible methodology although best practice has been developed over a number of years at the university and elsewhere if bolder approaches are warranted.

Jemima presenting at the University of Edinburgh Law Editathon in May

It can be a formative assessed from a student perspective, it should be noted that if software seems too difficult to learn, students may feel like it is not worth the formative assessment and that it should be summative in nature. Indeed, recent experience is that students have been enthused to take part in Wikipedia assignments and put great efforts in to complete the assignment so receiving some feedback on their efforts always goes some way to ensuring they are fully satisfied by the experience: be it a group discussion; using a Wikipedia marking rubric; individual assessment; peer assessment; blogging their reflections on the project; or providing an oral presentation. The timing of the assignment may also help ensure its success. If it is assigned during a time of the term where other summative assessments may be due then the students may be more strategic in where they place their priorities.

Hence, past experience at the University of Edinburgh has suggested that a Wikipedia assignment incorporating such elements as students having discussions around information literacy and learning how to edit/ how to use a new form of educational technology may work best in the first semester as part of inducting the students into good digital research habits for the rest of the year before the course programme becomes busier in the second and third semesters. World Christianity MSc students and Psychology undergraduate students have also reported in recent interviews how the experience of adding references to Wikipedia was both a motivating and “very exciting”[21] moment for them; partly because of the “slick” way Wikipedia allows you to add citations easily and partly because of the fact they were able to draw from relevant news articles and bring them together with books and journal articles (and more) to holistically convey the subject they were writing about.[22]

In terms of how hard or difficult Wikipedia editing now is, Wikipedia has a new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Visual Editor interface which is easy to learn in an hour and just takes a little practice. It makes use of dropdown menus much like one experiences in word processing applications such as Microsoft Word and WordPress blogging and has been described variously as “super easy”, “fun”, “really intuitive” and “addictive as hell.”

There is also scope for a Wikipedia assignment to form a proportion of the summative element of the course as they have done on the World Christianity MSc.[23] It should be noted that contributions made to Wikipedia are not static, but rather they are picked up by other Wikipedia editors to improve the reliability of the site. In educational contexts, this could be seen negatively but students have intimated that they like their work surviving beyond the life of the assignment and becoming a community project that can be added to over time. Beyond this, students can download their finished pages as a pdf, create books of their finished articles and, because all edits are recorded as permanent links in the View History of a page, they will always have a permanent link to their version of the page, no matter what changes are made to improve or expand it by other editors.

Wikipedia is an useful source but it can never replace formal legal education which teaches specialist knowledge, analytical skills, ethical standards, and importantly impart a love of democracy and justice. Wikipedia in legal education will only supplement these activities.

For further information – refer to:  

References

[1] Kamenetz, Anya (2017). “What Students Can Learn By Writing For Wikipedia”. NPR.org.

[2] Davis, LiAnna (2016). “Why Wiki Education’s work combats fake news — and how you can help”. Wiki Education.

[3] Adler B.T., de Alfaro L., Mola-Velasco S.M., Rosso P., West A.G. (2011) Wikipedia Vandalism Detection: Combining Natural Language, Metadata, and Reputation Features.

[4] Hillis, Ken; Petit, Michael; Jarrett, Kylie (2012). Google and the Culture of Search. Routledge. ISBN9781136933066.

[5] Beel, J.; Gipp, B. (2009). “Google Scholar’s ranking algorithm: The impact of citation counts (An empirical study)”. 2009 Third International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science: 439–446. doi:1109/RCIS.2009.5089308.

[6] McMahon, Connor; Johnson, Isaac; and Hecht, Brent (2017). The Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship Between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies.

[7] Thompson, Neil; Hanley, Douglas (2018). “Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence From a Randomized Control Trial”. Rochester, NY.

[8] https://www.alexa.com/topsites

[9]https://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/08/09/more-british-people-trust-wikipedia-trust-news/

[10] Guo, Jeff (2016). “Wikipedia is fixing one of the Internet’s biggest flaws”. Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286.

[11] “Wikipedia and Information Literacy – Academic Support Librarian Ruth Jenkins”. Media Hopper Create – The University of Edinburgh Media Platform.

[12] Selwyn, Neil; Gorard, Stephen (2016). “Students’ use of Wikipedia as an academic resource — Patterns of use and perceptions of usefulness”. The Internet and Higher Education. 28: 28–34. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2015.08.004. ISSN 1096-7516.

[13] “Wikipedia:Statistics”. Wikipedia.

[14]https://tools.wmflabs.org/wmcharts/wmchart0002.php

[15] “Wikipedia in the Classroom – Interview with Aine Kavanagh (Reproductive Biology Hons. student)”. Media Hopper Create – The University of Edinburgh Media Platform.

[16] “Wikipedia in the Classroom – Eve Sealy, Senior Honours student on the Reproductive Honours programme”. Media Hopper Create – The University of Edinburgh Media Platform.

[17] “Wikipedia and History – Tomas Sanders, History undergraduate at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology”. Media Hopper Create – The University of Edinburgh Media Platform.

[18] Stuhl, Andrew (2014-10-14). “Wikipedia and Student Writing”. Wiki Education.

[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-grade_serous_carcinoma

[20] https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=all-time&pages=High-grade_serous_carcinoma

[21] “Wikipedia in the Classroom – Psychology student Karoline Nanfeldt”. Media Hopper Create – The University of Edinburgh Media Platform.

[22] “World Christianity MSc students on the Wikipedia literature review assignment”. Media Hopper Create – The University of Edinburgh Media Platform.

[23] “Wikipedia in the Classroom – Interview with Dr. Alex Chow (World Christianity MTh/MSc programme)”. Media Hopper Create – The University of Edinburgh Media Platform.

Aaron Morris at WiciMon! Promoting the Welsh language with WikiWales

Hi, I’m Aaron Morris and I was appointed WiciMôn Project Officer nearly two years ago. I’m based at the offices of Menter Iaith Môn, the project organisers, at Llangefni, Anglesey, North Wales. We are funded by the Welsh Government and Horizon and have received valuable support from Wikimedia organisations in Wales: both Wikimedia UK and the newly formed Wikimedia User Group Wales.

One of the aims of the Wici Môn project is to raise the profile of the Welsh language nationally and internationally, by creating new articles on the historical, scientific and linguistic elements of Anglesey. We also attempt to educate people on open access and the benefits of sharing the sum of all human knowledge.

In partnership with Wicipedia Cymraeg (the Welsh Wikipedia) we have been running workshops on the Island with young people, and members of the wider community, in schools and community libraries.

Having been appointed, and trained into the Wici world (the Welsh alphabet has no ‘k’) by the Wikimedia UK’s Wales Manager, sessions were held at local libraries. Included in the taster sessions was a presentation on the benefits of  Wikipedia projects, explaining the background of Wikipedia as well as hands-on editing and uploading images onto Wikimedia Commons. Many articles were created using sources from the Coleg Cymraeg (Welsh Federal College) website which were released on a CC-BY-SA licence by our Wikipedian in Residence Mark Haynes in 2013 – articles on places and buildings in Anglesey such as wells, chapels, and beaches.

Getting Wicipedia on the National Curriculum

Having previously worked in secondary schools I immediately started to present the world of Wikipedia as taster sessions (or presentations) to the secondary schools on the Island.

This led to talks with the WJEC (Welsh Joint Education Committee) who immediately wanted to know more about our work.

A brief was submitted to WJEC (the Curriculum body of Wales)  in November to try and weave the WiciMôn project into the Welsh Baccalaureate as one of the ‘Community Challenges’. We were told in December that we had been successful: the first time that Wikipedia skills are officially on the curriculum of any of the countries of Britain (or Europe?!) The brief is now on the WJEC website, here!

The Community Challenge sets out a template which enables other enterprises to copy in their area, so as to strengthen the use of Wikipedia in all secondary schools in Wales. With the Welsh Government’s campaign to reach 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050 this challenge is going to encourage schools to enrich existing and new Wikipedia articles in the Welsh language. The Challenge is also available in English.

The module focuses on elements related to STEAM subjects to encourage people to pursue courses through the medium of Welsh. The project will promote the correct use of neutral sources through research and planning in order to contribute unbiased, rock-solid information on the Welsh Wikipedia. The challenge will allow pupils to develop their literacy skills as well as their communication skills to get others online by training new editors from the wider community as well as within the school.

Prior to the implementation of the BAC initiative, three schools piloted the Community Challenge.

One of the main towns in Anglesey, Amlwch, celebrates 250 years since Roland Puw discovered copper on Parys Mountain and this was a fantastic opportunity for the sixth form pupils of Sir Thomas Jones School to join the Copper Kingdom museum in Port Amlwch to create articles about the scientific and historical history of the copper industry. Another school, Ysgol David Hughes has worked with The Thomas Telford Centre Museum in Menai Bridge – which has agreed to share their information with the school so that pupils can create new articles on Wikipedia. This year, Anglesey celebrates The Year of the Sea and this is going to be important to the project, as it is completely relevant to the pupils.  Ysgol Gyfun Llangefni is another school that that will pilot the Community Challenge. As part of their project, the school is currently focusing on resources available at Llangefni Library – old photographs, copies of local newspapers etc. An evening will be held where pupils can showcase their skills and to show the public how to share information on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Clubs

Pupils are currently organising Wikipedia clubs in the schools during lunchtimes and Wiki Ambassadors will be appointed from the 6th forms, encourage junior pupils to be involved in the project. They will have the opportunity to edit and create articles, take pictures, upload images and create audio clips etc. This is a great opportunity for the sixth who have received training on how to work Wikipedia to transfer their skills and gain confidence.

Audio clips of 1,200 name-places in Wales

In August 2017 the National Eisteddfod of Wales was in Llangefni, my home town, and I took the opportunity by its horns, and started to record people from all over Wales pronouncing the names of places such as villages, cities and communities – in their native dialect.

This attracted not only the people of Anglesey but the whole of Wales. The audio clips are in the process of being uploaded onto Wikimedia Commons by secondary school pupils and placed on the Wicipedia Cymraeg (and all other language wikis) so that everyone can enjoy them. Over 1,000 place-names have been done so far. A session with Ysgol Gyfun Llangefni Comprehensive School was held in February, where over 100 audio clips were uploaded to Wikipedia, and others followed.

I foresee that the audio files will be used by BBC presenters and others, who continually mispronounce Welsh place-names, and who now will have no excuse! It’s been a great local project, of immense benefit to both young people and adults… but will also benefit the wider world!

We may be an island surrounded by sea, but using open Wikimedia projects, we reach out into a brave new world, a small but important part of that rich diversity of the planet… while it exists!

By Aaron Morris, WiciMôn Project Officer, Menter Iaith Môn

Wikipedia in the History Classroom

By Charles West, Lecturer of History and Wikipedia Advocate at the University of Sheffield

Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in the world, and as the digital revolution continues to unfold, its dominance seems unlikely to be challenged in the near future. The rate at which new pages are created has slowed, but the website itself continues to grow, as existing pages are constantly edited, improved and elaborated.

Growth in size of Wikipedia content (all categories). Source: Wikipedia

Not all of its content is historical, but a great deal is, and these pages are popular. For instance, Wikipedia’s pages relating to the early medieval Carolingian rulers of Francia – a relatively specialised historical topic – have been consulted over the past year by over 50,000 people a day. (1)

But Wikipedia is not only getting bigger, it is also becoming ever more authoritative. Long promoted by the extraordinarily powerful Google search engine, Wikipedia is now the go-to for Amazon’s Alexa smart speaker, and may soon play a role in Facebook’s fact-checking. Its pages increasingly appear high up even in university library catalogue (or ‘library portal’) searches.

However, historians working in universities usually act in their research and above all in their teaching as if Wikipedia didn’t exist – although nearly every academic and certainly every student uses it on a routine basis to inform or remind themselves of basic information.

That contrast between official and private practice is partly rooted in a general disconnect between how historical research is done these days (increasingly online) and how it’s officially presented – for instance, the way that modern historians cite newspapers as if they’d read them on paper or microfilm, when in fact they’ve often consulted an electronic database. (2) In a hybrid digital/paper research context, academic referencing practices are strangely conservative, with potentially serious methodological consequences.

It’s partly also down to lecturers’ suspicion about Wikipedia’s content – after all, as everyone knows, anyone can edit Wikipedia, and edits are usually done by pseudonymous users. That doesn’t seem to affect its overall reliability, but it does affect its reputation in an environment where individual academic prestige carries lots of weight, more or less justifiably.

Moreover, getting students out of the habit of assuming that the answer to any question is just one Google search away is an increasingly important aspect of first-year university courses, and Wikipedia certainly doesn’t help in that respect. As ‘educators’ we need actively to counter digital lock-out: i.e., the systematic exclusion of print-only texts from consideration.

But when it comes to teaching, the core problem is that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, whereas – and contrary to what is sometimes assumed by people who surely ought to know better – we historians teach our students that History is about critical argument from evidence, not the discovery and declaration of supposedly neutral facts. I think everyone in principle would like to see more integration of Wikipedia and university History, as a way of bringing academic research out of the ivory tower and into public attention (as Wiki editathons can do), and equipping our students for the digital world. But given the gap between the nature of argument-based academic history and ostensibly neutral encyclopedia writing, achieving that integration isn’t as straightforward as one might expect.

Squaring this circle was however precisely the aim of the course that I’ve just finished teaching. The course – a short 20-credit module taught to a small cohort of six MA students studying for an MA in Medieval History here in Sheffield, UK – had a theme that relates to my current research. It focused on the question of clerical exemption, that’s to say the way in which clerics and priests in early medieval Europe were treated differently because of their special legal status. For instance, if a priest committed a murder, he might expect to be tried by a church court, not the king’s court like everyone else.

So, in class we discussed articles and sources that related to the question of the church’s relationship to ‘secular’ forms of authority in the early Middle Ages. But I also asked the students to apply the expertise they’d gained in this field to improving one or two Wikipedia pages on relevant topics, broadly defined – church councils, medieval chroniclers, bishops, etc. This could be just a matter of adding extra references; but it could be rewriting poor-quality entries, or even creating brand-new pages. Wikimedia UK very kindly provided a short but useful and free training session to show the students (and a few other interested attendees) the ropes.

As this graphic suggests, Wikipedia’s coverage of the early Middle Ages, and of pre-modern history altogether, currently leaves lots to be desired. And many of the pages that do exist are based on out of copyright, and therefore very old, printed encyclopedias. So, to have improved eight pages is a step in the right direction. (3)

A representation of Wikipedia’s coverage of human history. Source: http://histography.io/

However, the module’s assessment itself rested on a third step. Having learned about a medieval topic, and having applied that knowledge to Wikipedia, the students on the course then had to write a essay reflecting on the changes they had made. In other words, the students’ grades weren’t based on the editing, but on their reflections on the editing process, drawing upon their hands-on experience as well as their wider reading on early medieval history and ‘Wikipedia studies’. (4)

This assessment structure was partly born of prudence – after all, Wikipedia is a public website, so changes could easily be reversed or vandalised through no fault of the student. Given that one student actually saw all her changes systematically reverted by another editor, this precaution proved wise. Rather than demolishing her assessment portfolio, the reversions actually gave the student more material to discuss in the essay. In pragmatic terms, it’s also easier for historians to grade essays, for which there are established marking criteria, rather than devise new criteria for marking Wikipedia entries (though I know of several historians who have done this successfully, and it’s common in the sciences too).

But the decision to assess the reflection rather than the editing direct also reflected a pedagogical imperative. It seems to me that what’s urgently needed is critical reflection on the role of technology in mediating and creating historical knowledge, born out of first-hand experience, rather than simply unguarded embracing of its undoubted possibilities – or for that matter armchair condemnation of its dangers. And to my great satisfaction, critical reflection is indeed what the students produced.

One student pointed to how an erroneous date for a church council, based on an uncritical reading of a primary text, had spread from Wikipedia across the internet, and potentially from there into print (a phenomenon that’s been observed in other contexts). Another student discussed the instant transformation of his own informed opinion, based on secondary reading, into international historical fact. As all historians know, encyclopedias necessarily present interpretation as historical truth, if only through implicit judgements about relative importance, and despite its technology Wikipedia is no different in this regard. A third student emphasised how the old Wikipedia page before her editing had promoted a now outdated interpretation of a key early medieval figure, in an unholy alliance of new technology with nineteenth-century ideology. In fact, all the students made useful and perceptive comments on the implications of Wikipedia for public and scholarly knowledges about the past.

So as a consequence of this course, and thanks to Wikimedia’s support, Wikipedia’s coverage of the early Middle Ages has been incrementally improved and updated, and six new experts have joined the ranks of Wikipedia’s editors. But maybe more important, six students have learned how to be critical users of this technology – not just how to engage and manipulate it, but to reflect on its epistemological limitations as well as its democratic advantages. And I think that’s the most important course outcome of all.

  1. Wikipedia page view statistics, Category: Carolingian period, 29.04.17-19.05.18: linked here.
  2. See for instance T. Hitchcock, ‘Confronting the Digital – or how academic history writing lost the plot’, Cultural and Social History 10 (2013), pp. 9-23, which I read via a free Dropbox link provided by the author. Cf https://mistakinghistories.wordpress.com/2018/04/28/the-internet-for-historians/ by Helen King (@fluff55).
  3. These pages are the entries for the First Council of Orléans, the Council of Hertford, Regino of Prüm, Louis the Pious, Hincmar of Laon, Victor Vitensis, the Vandal Kingdom and Praetextatus of Rouen.
  4. A good starter Wikipedia reading list is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alarichall