It has been over a year and a half since Dundee Dental School first established the Wikipedia Editing Project, a student-led effort with the intent of improving dental articles on the site. Students at Dundee first learned of the deficiency and often absence of dental information on Wikipedia from a former Wikipedian in residence with the Cochrane Collaboration. A group of students felt change was necessary as they were disappointed from their own experience of having used Wikipedia to search for dental topics. So they decided to take the lead in establishing the UK’s first continuously running dental Editing Group.
To recruit students, an introductory event was held: a lecture was given on the type of research generally conducted and the type suitable for citation on dental Wikipedia articles. This was followed by a tutorial on how to edit. Those interested then sign up to an Editing Group which met on a regular basis to edit assigned topics. At the end of each semester, groups presented their edits before peers and lecturers. This was an opportunity for our editors to showcase their work and allowed for a chance to discuss the chosen topics and any challenges faced in the process of editing. Since the establishment of the group in early 2016, our students have made a tangible difference for the benefit of their peers, dentists and the general public, through the creation of numerous new pages as well as the expansion and improvement of existing ones. Below is just a small sample of the pages developed by our students:
Dental Extraction page- a section on post- extraction bleeding has been added
Fissure Sealant page has been expanded to further explain use, materials and techniques for success as well as other preventative treatment options for caries
Fluoride Varnish page- an image was added, resources were added under clinical recommendations
References were improved on the Dental Dam page
Orthognathic surgery page- expanded to include information on cleft lip and palate and references were also improved
The dedication and effort demonstrated by our editors at Dundee has been remarkable. Their contribution to the dissemination of evidence based dentistry has sparked the interest of many in the dental community and word quickly spread through news outlets and social media blogs. By February 2017 the Dundee Dental Wikipedia Editing Project expanded to include the growing number of schools joining the cause and so the Wikiepdia Collaboration of Dental Schools was born. The Collaboration now includes the Cairo branch of the University of Dundee (who edit in both English and Arabic), Glasgow, Aberdeen and Manchester Dental Schools in the UK as well as Tufts and Harvard Schools of Dental Medicine and New York University College of Dentistry in the USA. These schools are currently in the process of establishing their own Editing Groups as well as undergoing training, under the guidance of Dundee Dental School, with the aim of having their groups up and running by the coming academic year.
We are thrilled that others have joined our cause and look forward to the unique contribution each school will bring to the Project. Over the coming year we aim to work as an international community of students, dentists and academics to enhance the accessibility of accurate, up-to date, evidence based information through Wikipedia. Our long-term vision is to enable the existence of a large online community of editors that will work collectively to maintain, update and expand information on the Encyclopaedia. We would be delighted if any individuals or schools wish to join and welcome you to get in touch at ngeres@dundee.ac.uk or through our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/WikiCollab/
Lady Leshurr at Field Day 2017 – image by Jwslubbock
I’ve been doing some outreach to various UK music festivals and labels to encourage them to release content on their artists and to consider giving Wikimedia community members press passes to take photographs at their events.
Last weekend I did some photography at Field Day 2017, taking photos of artists like Loyle Carner, Mura Masa, Omar Souleyman, Gaika, Lady Leshurr and Sinkane, most of whom did not have photos on Commons already. You can see all the photos here.
There are lots of other festivals where Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) artists make up a large proportion of the performers, but perhaps most prominently is Afropunk Festival in London on July 22-23. Artists like Lianne la Havas, Danny Brown, NAO, Corinne Bailey Rae, Little Simz, Saul Williams and Nadia Rose are performing at the new Printworks venue in Elephant and Castle, South London.
Afropunk’s organisers are happy to have Wikimedia photographers present, so if you would be interested in coming along to take photos, please get in touch with me at john.lubbock@wikimedia.org.uk. You can also help contribute to improving content on Wikimedia projects by adding to the WikiProject Black British Music page, which lists artists who need their articles improving or creating in the first place.
We are blessed in the UK with an incredibly diverse and vibrant culture comprised of the hundreds of diaspora communities who live here. Britain grew rich and powerful by exploiting the peoples it colonised, but now we have the opportunity to open up knowledge and information so that it is accessible by everyone in the world. We also have the opportunity to animate and work in partnership with diaspora groups to encourage them to use Wikipedia as a way to make accurate information about their history and culture available to everyone.
That’s why I started the Kurdish Wikipedia Project, and why Wikimedia UK is working with Kurdish cultural organisations to train Kurdish people to edit Wikipedia and improve the its coverage of Kurdish history and culture. At the moment, there are only 28 people on Wikidata listed as Kurdish, compared to thousands of people belonging to groups with more developed Wikipedia communities.
Wikidata timeline showing all the Kurdish people with Wikidata items.
People in the music industry I have spoken to recognise that articles about their artists are often not very good, but they usually don’t understand how they can go about improving them without it being a conflict of interest, and why copyright makes it hard for them to release content to illustrate articles with. I spoke to representatives from two music labels a couple of weeks ago, but I found that content releases would be difficult as they would have to get permission from photographers who had granted them the rights to use photos of their artists, but might not be happy to release them on Open Licenses.
So that’s why we would like to encourage our community to get out there and help increase the diversity of content on Wikimedia. Perhaps you have photos of places outside Europe where little content exists currently on Commons? Perhaps there is a festival or cultural event you would like to go to but need help getting a press pass or with expenses? We can help.
Lots of organisations will be happy to give someone a press pass once they understand the content will be used to improve the Wikipedia articles about their event or artists. Tell us what events you would like to attend and we can see if we can get you a press pass.
Everyone can take part in improving the diversity of the content on Wikimedia projects. If we are to create the best, most accurate encyclopaedia in the world, it cannot only reflect the interests and culture of European people. So tell us your ideas, and let’s make Wikipedia more diverse.
By Martin Poulter, Wikimedian-in-Residence at Bodleian Libraries
Wikipedia has more than five million articles in its English language version. No article is an island: with few exceptions, they have multiple incoming links as well as multiple links to other articles. Articles connect in a web, or like the cells in a brain. Take two widely different articles—say, Genghis Khan and Resonator guitar—and there is likely a path from one to another, but it will take quick thinking and ingenuity to find it. This is the idea behind Wikipedia racing.
A race can involve any number of players. At their computers, they “get on the starting line” by finding the start article on Wikipedia; in this case Genghis Khan. Once everybody is ready, the target article Resonator guitar is revealed, ideally on a screen to avoid it being misheard. There are variations of the rules, but in a straightforward example, the winner is the first to reach the target, only by following links in the body of the article. They cannot use the category links at the foot of the page, nor the links in the left sidebar, and definitely not the Wikipedia search box. They are allowed to use ctrl-F (command-F on Macs) to search the current page, as well as copy and paste. So if you see the word “guitar” on a page but it isn’t linked, you can save some keystrokes by copying and pasting it into the browser’s search box.
The Gregory Brothers—YouTube stars known for their hugely successful comedy songs—have made a series of Wikipedia racing videos which they call “Wiki-Wars”. They add post-match interviews, over-the-top graphics, and hilarious in-character commentary.
Ewan McAndrew and I ran a session on games at this year’s Open Educational Resources conference and discussed Wikipedia racing as an educational activity. It helps that players can reflect and discuss at the end of each round: the browser history (click and hold the back button of your web browser) show the articles visited in sequence. So players can easily retrace their path and analyse why their strategy won or lost.
In his keynote at the EduWiki 2013 conference, David White observed that assessment in schools and even universities usually assumes a scarcity of information; a scarcity that Wikipedia and other online resources have ended. Much more relevant to today’s world are overwhelming excesses of information and of options, where a person has to quickly evaluate the situation and make a choice. White challenged the audience to devise assessments that encourage the skills of leadership, including asking questions rather than just answering them.
While I wouldn’t be happy to see students sitting Wikipedia races for their university grades, it’s an activity that tests the skills White was talking about. Since the Open Educational Resources conference took place in the London district of Holloway, we got our audience to race from the Open educational resources article to Holloway, London. Success often involves moving from the starting article to a broader, more abstract concept, then zooming in to specifics to reach the target. London can be thought of as an aggregation of boroughs and districts; as an example of a large city, a capital city, or a city built on a river; or as the location of many notable events. Any of these facts might help with the race. A good racer will think of an article at multiple levels of abstraction at the same time.
A wiki race is not a situation where the teacher has “the answer” and the learners either find it or not. There will be an astronomical number of “correct” answers in the form of pathways from one article to the other, but most are prohibitively long. The players need to devise a strategy, carry it out quickly, and change tack if they do not make progress. They may well discover a path that is quicker than any the teacher had thought of.
Subject knowledge certainly helps in wiki racing, but not decisively. If you know that one of the central documents of the OER movement is the Paris OER Declaration, then you have a short-cut from Open educational resources to Paris and thence to London. If you don’t know this but can skim an article, find links, and judge which ones will take you towards the target, you can still win.
Having observed races on video and in real life, what stands out is a common theme in the psychology of problem-solving. People can get stuck in an inappropriate mental set: a set of assumptions and labels that they bring to the problem. Getting stuck in two-dimensional thinking for a puzzle that requires three dimensional thinking is an example. Progress involves changing a mental set that is no longer useful: people who can jump between ways can be very effective problem solvers. In wiki racing, people can hatch a plausible strategy but the link that they expect to see isn’t there. The rational thing to do is to backtrack and try another path, but it is easy for people to get stuck on the idea that their strategy should work. These are the players who read through same article again and again while others leap on to other articles.
Variations of the game and tips for customising are documented on a Wikipedia project page. You can choose widely different articles to make the game a test of information skills, or have similar articles (e.g. species, politicians) to make it more of a test of subject knowledge. You can make the race more difficult by forbidding the use of certain articles, or make it easier by allowing category links.
Our experience was that people found the game powerfully absorbing: it was hard to get people to stop and do something else! The feedback suggests that we showed people a different role for an educational resource such as Wikipedia: not like a book to be read from beginning to end, but like a public space in which you can run around, explore, and play games with other learners.
In 2016 volunteers gave us a massive 20,000 hours of their time, from running events and teaching people how to edit to organising the UK branch of the world’s largest photography competition. Volunteers play a very important role in the charity’s work and shape our strategy. Putting in that much time shows that there our community of volunteers is thriving and enthusiastic.
The results of the volunteer survey were published recently, and if you haven’t seen them yet they show that Wikimedia UK is moving in the right direction and we are doing our best to support our volunteers. The feedback included some useful suggestions from the community, and we will be doing our best to continue improving.
So thank you from everyone at Wikimedia UK for your help!
We are holding a train the trainers workshop in Edinburgh in July. You can find out more and sign up on the event page.
Reproductive Medicine undergraduates – September 2016 (CC-BY-SA)
This was originally posted on Ewan McAndrew’s blog where he writes about his role as the University of Edinburgh’s Wikimedian in Residence
Wikipedia as an important source of health information and not medical advice.
“The Internet, especially Wikipedia, had proven its importance in everyday life. Even the medical sector is influenced by Wikipedia’s omnipresence. It has gained considerable attention among both healthcare professionals and the lay public in providing medical information. Patients rely on the information they obtain from Wikipedia before deciding to seek professional help. As a result, physicians are confronted by a professional dilemma as patients weigh information provided by medical professionals against that on Wikipedia, the new provider of health information….
We state that Wikipedia should not be viewed as being inappropriate for its use in medical education. Given Wikipedia’s central role in medical education as reported in our survey, its integration could yield new opportunities in undergraduate education. High-quality medical education and sustainability necessitates the need to know how to search and retrieve unbiased, comprehensive, and reliable information. Students should therefore be advised in reflected information search and encouraged to contribute to the “perpetual beta” improving Wikipedia’s reliability. Therefore, we ask for inclusion in medical curricula, since guiding students’ use and evaluation of information resources is an important role of higher education. It is of utmost importance to establish information literacy, evidence-based practices, and life-long learning habits among future physicians early on, hereby contributing to medical education of the highest quality.
Accordingly, this is an appeal to see Wikipedia as what it is: an educational opportunity. This is an appeal to academic educators for supplementing Wikipedia entries with credible information from the scientific literature. They also should teach their protégés to obtain and critically evaluate information as well as to supplement or correct entries. Finally, this is an appeal to medical students to develop professional responsibility while working with this dynamic resource. Criticism should be maintained and caution exercised since every user relies on the accuracy, conscientiousness, and objectivity of the contributor.”(Herbert et al, BMC Medical Education, 2015)
Reproductive Medicine Wikipedia assignment at Edinburgh University – September 2016
Reproductive Medicine undergraduates – collaborating to create Wikipedia articles.
In September 2016, Reproductive Biology Honours students undertook a group research project to research, in groups of 4–5 students with a tutor, a term from reproductive biomedicine that was not yet represented on Wikipedia. All 38 were trained to edit Wikipedia and they worked collaboratively both to undertake the research and produce the finished written article. The assignment developed the students’ information literacy, digital literacy, collaborative working, academic writing & referencing and ability to communicate to an audience. The end result was 8 new articles on reproductive medicine which enriches the global open knowledge community and will be added to & improved upon long after they have left university creating a rich legacy to look back upon.
One of the new articles, high-grade serous carcinoma, was researched and written by 4th year student, Áine Kavanagh.
Rather than a writing an assignment for an audience of one (the course tutor) and never read again, Aine’s article can be viewed, built on and expanded by an audience of millions. Since creating the article in September 2016, the article has now been viewed 6,993 times.
Since September 2016 the article has amassed nearly 7,000 views, and growing day by day.
Guest post:
Reflections on a Wikipedia assignment
BY ÁINE KAVANAGH.
Reproductive Medicine students – September 2016
The process of writing a Wikipedia article involved me trying to answer the questions I was asking myself about the topic. What was it? Why should I care about it? What does it mean to society? I also needed to make the answers to those questions clear to other people who can’t see inside my head.
It then moved onto questions I thought other people might ask about the topic. Writing for Wikipedia is really an exercise in empathy and perspective. Who else is going to want to know about this and what might they be interested in about it?
Is what I’m writing accessible and understandable? Am I presenting it in a useful way? It’s an incredibly public piece of writing which is only useful if it serves the public, so trying to put yourself in the frame of someone who’s not you reading what you’ve written is important (and possibly the most difficult part).
It’s also about co-operation from the get-go. You can’t post a Wikipedia article and allow no one else to edit it. You are offering something up to the world. You can always come back to it, but you can never make it completely your own again. The beauty of Wikipedia is in groupthink, in the crowd intelligence it facilitates, but this means shared ownership, which can be hard to get your head around at first.
It’s a unique way of writing, and some tips for other students starting out on a Wikipedia project is to not be intimidated. Wikipedia articles in theory can be indefinitely long and dense and will be around for an indefinitely long time, so writing a few hundred words can seem like adding a grain of sand to a desert. But if the information is not already there then you are contributing – and what is Wikipedia if not just a big bunch of contributions?
There’s also the fear that editors already on Wikipedia will swoop down and denounce your article as completely useless – but the beauty of storing information is that you can never really have too much of it. There’s no-one who can truly judge what is and isn’t worthy of knowing*.
*There’s no-one who can judge what’s worth knowing, but the sum of human knowledge needs to be organised, and so there are actually guidelines as to what a Wikipedia article is (objective account of a thing) and is not (platform for self-promotion).
By Lucy Crompton-Reid, Wikimedia UK Chief Executive
I was delighted to be part of planning and delivering Wikimedia UK’s Education Summit in partnership with Middlesex University in February and wanted to share some notes, insights and presentations from that event with a broader audience than the 45 or so students, educators, academics and Wikimedians that were able to attend in person. This is something of a long read so please feel free to dip in and out, to look at the tweets from the day and to explore the excellent slides produced by a range of speakers.
Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services and Assistant Principal for Online Learning at the University of Edinburgh, gave a rousing start to the summit, using her keynote speech to advocate for Wikimedians in Residence at universities. With digital capabilities now a key component in student employability, and driving innovation in the economy, Melissa’s argument was that higher education institutions can’t afford not to have a Wikimedian on their team! The work in Edinburgh has improved the quality and quantity of open knowledge, embedded information literacy skills in the curriculum and made it easier to develop authentic learning experiences for larger bodies of students. For Edinburgh undergraduates, the opportunity to edit Wikipedia means that they are part of a worldwide open source software project, which Melissa sees as a significant authentic learning opportunity. The work enables students to understand sources and copyright and also “leads into discussions about the privilege and geography of knowledge”, as well as questions about neutrality.
Melissa also spoke about gender inequality in science and technology, and the role that working with Wikimedia can play in tackling structural barriers for women working in academia, particularly in relation to Athena Swann initiatives. She noted that the kind of work a Wikimedian in Residence will do can deliver successful, measurable outcomes on gender equality; and added that she feels “academics are missing a trick if they are not factoring Wikipedia into public engagement and understanding”.
To close, Melissa touched on some of the challenges inherent in working with the Wikimedia community, and the need for a resident to help negotiate and navigate the challenges of editing Wikipedia as a structured group activity. As she put it, “Wikimedians will save you from Wikimedians.”
Melissa’s high-level overview of the university wide impact of and strategic case for a Wikimedian in Residence was complemented brilliantly by Stefan Lutschinger’s more practical but no less compelling keynote speech focused on his own approach to Wikipedia in the curriculum. Stefan is Associate Lecturer in Digital Publishing at Middlesex University with whom Wikimedia UK worked closely in planning the event. He gave a detailed account of how the module he has developed and run for three years – with input from volunteers Ed Hands and Fabian Tompsett – is building digital literacy and confidence amongst his students and enhancing academic practice. He also touched upon Wikidata, as a resource that enables undergraduates to “understand the architecture, the anatomy, of data”, and ended his speech by sharing his ambition to make editing Wikipedia a mandatory part of the curriculum for first year students at Middlesex.
Richard Nevell leading a workshop at #WMED17 – image by John Lubbock
Following these excellent speeches the summit broke into three workshop spaces, with the volunteer Nav Evans and Wikimedian in Residence at Edinburgh University, Ewan McAndrew, running a practical workshop on Wikidata; Wikimedia UK’s Richard Nevell and Hephzibah Israel, Lecturer in Translation Studies at Edinburgh, giving a presentation on Wikipedia in the Classroom and the use of the Outreach Dashboard; and an unconference space facilitated by Andy Mabbett. I attended the latter and participated in a wide-ranging discussion with a group of established Wikimedians and one or two people from the university sector, which explored instructional design and materials for developing editing skills, the challenges of adapting resources for different learning styles and the need to be explicit about the benefit of editing in terms of research and analytical skills, plus next steps and potential partners for the UK Chapter.
After the morning workshops we moved into Lightning Talks, with Fabian Tompsett kicking us off by talking about his residency at the May Day Room. In particular he highlighted the potential offered by Wikisource. This is sometimes seen as a repository for older materials but we should be encouraging more academics to upload their materials and papers.
It was fantastic to have a number of presentations from Stefan’s students, including Behlul, Adrianna and Lauryna, who talked about their experiences of working on Wikimedia as part of their Media Studies course. Behlul shared the creation of a pirate pad to edit articles as a group, and noted that he now views Wikimedia as a platform for different learning opportunities rather than just somewhere to gain information. Adrianna focused on Fake news vs Wikipedia and was “fascinated by what a reliable source of information Wikipedia actually turns out to be…contributions can be traced and authors are accountable. Tens of thousands of Wikipedia editors act as watch dogs”. She also quoted the Wikimedia Foundation’s Executive Director, Katherine Maher, who describes the projects as a “public park for knowledge.”
Educator and Wikimedian Charles Matthews gave a presentation on a new online learning resource that he is currently developing, with input from Wikimedia UK trustee Doug Taylor, based on the idea of questions as data. He is interested in annotation, collaboration and translation of educational materials, with robust metadata that tells you more about the resource such as to what extent it has been tested in the classroom and how has it been used successfully. To make this project work will require a big database of questions that Charles and Doug are hoping to crowd source, with the aim of having a link to relevant questions from the sidebar on any given Wikipedia article.
Clem Rutter also highlighted the potential to make better use of existing technologies to support the use of Wikimedia as a tool for teaching and learning. He gave a short introduction to his Portal for Learning, which draws on his substantial experience as a secondary school teacher and his existing links and relationships with the formal education community.
Ewan McAndrew gave an energetic and comprehensive account of his work at Edinburgh University, focusing on the successful introduction of Wikipedia in the Classroom assignments in a number of departments. He sees Wikipedia as a powerful tool for educators and not something that has to be additional to their practice and described the work of Translation Studies MA students contributing in one language and translating into a different language using the content translation tool, noting how allowing students to take ownership of this work was a critical motivating factor. He also shared outcomes from the World Christianity course, in which students edited Wikipedia to present a more holistic, broader worldview of Christianity, which otherwise tends to be written about with a western bias.
Ewan is very pleased that 65% of event attendees have been women, a key target audience for his events given the gender gap highlighted by Melissa earlier in the day. He feels that “we need to demystify Wikipedia and make it accessible, share good practice and not reinvent the wheel” when working across universities. With this in mind Ewan is in the process of creating and sharing resources, videos and lesson plans for educators.
Judith Scammell closed the lightning talks by giving her perspective as a librarian based at St George’s University in London. She is in the early stages of getting staff and students to use Wikipedia but feels that it is ideal for building the 21st century learning skills of enquiry, creativity, participation and digital Literacy. Judith has been inspired by Natalie Lafferty, Head of the Centre for Technology and Innovation in Learning at Dundee University, who shares her insights through her blog e-LiME.
Wikimedians working at #WMED17 – image by John Lubbock
Following lunch and networking, the attendees of the summit again broke into three workshop sessions, with another unconference space, a presentation by Dr Martin Poulter and Liz McCarthy on working together on a Wikimedian in Residence programme at Bodleian Libraries and now across the University of Oxford, and Josie Taylor and Lorna Campbell leading a session on curating Wikimedia’s educational resources. I very much enjoyed hearing from Wikimedian in Resident Martin and Liz – Web and Digital Media Manager at Bodleian Libraries – about the success of the residency in terms of correcting bias. In his initial residency, Martin focused on sharing the 8000 files that he felt were of most interest and that represented hidden histories, with these now having had nearly 50 million page views. In the new phase of the residency he is working across the whole university, building relationships at an early stage with a dozen big research projects to build in openness from the start, and linking research outputs and educational materials. They are now thinking more about interdisciplinary practice and feel there is potential benefit for every department of the university, with Liz commenting that hosting a Wikimedian in Residence is “an obvious path on the way to public engagement”.
A talk in the main room at #WMED17 – image by John Lubbock
Finally, we gathered together at the end of the day in a plenary discussion to share key points from each session, and to start thinking about future developments. Martin Poulter encouraged everyone to take the next step in implementing any new ideas that have emerged from the summit, and Nav Evans encouraged people to create their own Histropedia timeline. I hope that everyone who attended was able to take away at least one thing that they can do at an individual level and that those in positions of influence are thinking about how they can create change at an institutional level. For Wikimedia UK, some key action points emerged, including the need to:
Develop and share our thinking in terms of education, particularly how we prioritise this work and what support we can offer teachers and learners
Support existing Wikimedia education projects and nurture new ideas.
Build on the work that’s been started in terms of curating and creating resources and redeveloping the education pages on the Wikimedia UK site.
Continue to provide opportunities for people working within education and Wikimedia to come together virtually and in person to share practice.
Share models of good practice, case studies and learning.
If you’re interested in how Wikimedia can play in role in education and support learners to contribute to the Wikimedia projects, please email us at education@wikimedia.org.uk.
Wikimedia UK’s educators’ workshop in summer 2016.
This post was written by Dr Pedro Telles, Senior Lecturer in Law at Swansea University and originally published on his website.
For the last couple of years with my colleague Richard Leonard-Davies I have been teaching competition law here at Swansea University and doing so in a very traditional and straightforward way: lectures focused on plenty of case law and seminars where we drilled down the details. As competition law is one of those topics that can be eminently practical, there was plenty of scope for improvement. As we run two separate Competition Law modules in different semesters (Agreements in the first, Dominance in the second) it is possible to make changes in only a part of the year.
About a year ago I found this blogpost by Chris Blattman on getting students to draft a Wikipedia article as part of their assessment. Blattman called this the creation of a public good while my preferred description is getting them to pay forward for the next lot. Immediately I thought, “hmmm let’s see the entries for competition law” and they were very underwhelming.
Fast forward a year, a few hoops and plenty of support from Wikimedia UK and we’re now in the position of starting the module with a new assessment structure that includes the (re)-drafting of a Wikipedia entry. Here’s the nitty gritty:
Assessment 1 (2,000 words)
For the first coursework you will have to choose from the topics covered this semester and check if it has a Wikipedia entry or not. Once you have selected a topic you will need to submit it for approval to either member of the teaching team. If an entry already exists you will critically analyse the entry by providing a report which encompasses the following:
– Why you have chosen this topic
– What is covered in the Wikipedia entry
– What the entry does well
– How the entry could be improved in your view (ie, caselaw, different perspectives, more recent doctrinal developments, context)
– What aspects of the topic were not covered but should have been included
– What sources (academic/case-law) you would use to reference the entry
We expect the piece to be factual on its description of the area of the law you decided to analyse but at the same time critical and reflective, basing yourself in good quality academic sources for the arguments you are presenting.
Assessment 2 (1,000 words)
For Coursework 2 you will be expected to put in action the comments and analysis from Coursework 1, ie you will be drafting an actual Wikipedia entry that improves on the strong points identified and addresses the weaknesses as well. This entry will be drafted on your Wikipedia dashboard (to be discussed in the Coursework Workshop in March) and will have to be submitted both on Turnitin and also uploaded to Wikipedia itself before the deadline.
Regular plagiarism rules apply, so if you pick an entry that already exists you are advised to re-write it extensively, which, to implement the changes from Coursework 1 you should be doing nonetheless. It is fundamental that you make the Turnitin submission prior to the Wikipedia one
The drafting style for this entry will be very different from the first one (or any academic coursework for that matter) as you are no longer critiquing a pre-existing text, but creating an alternative one. As such, it is expected to be descriptive and thorough, providing a lay reader with an understanding of the topic at hand. For an idea, please check Wikipedia’s Manual of Style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_better_articles
What we are hoping for with this experiment is to get students out of their comfort zone and used to think and write differently from the usual academic work. Instead of padding and adding superfluous materials, they will be expected (and marked) to a different standard.
But that is not the only thing we’re changing as the seminars will also be quite different from the past. This year we will use WhatsApp as a competition law case study.
Why WhatsApp?
Well, when considering what company/product to use as a case study there had been no investigations into WhatsApp so that made it a clear frontrunner as a potential case study. It’s a digital product/service which may or may not be tripping EU Competition Law rules with enough of a grey area to get people to think. So we will apply the law to WhatsApp and try to figure out if:
– It has a dominant position (and if so, in what market)
– It has abused its putative dominant position
– Its merger with Facebook is above board
– it’s IP policy/third-app access policy is compliant with competition law requirements
To this end, students will have to find information by themselves (incredible the amount of statistics freely available these days online…) and be prepared to work together in the seminar to prepare the skeleton arguments in favour/against any of those possibilities. The second half of the seminar will be spent with the teams arguing their position.
We’ll see how it goes and will comment on the whole experiment in four months or so. In the meanwhile, if you want to know more drop me a line in the comments.
Bunhill Fields, Middle Enclosure with Head Gardener Anthony – image by Jwslubbock CC BY-SA 4.0
I really like Magnus Manske’s WikiShootMe tool. It visualises Wikidata items, Commons photos and Wikipedia articles on an OpenStreetMap. Wikidata items are shown as red if they have no photo and green if they do have one. For the past few months, I’ve been spending my lunch hours walking around the area near the Wikimedia UK offices, trying to turn red data points into green ones.
WikiShootMe tool – green Wikidata items dotted around Bunhill Fields – Image by Jwslubbock
The biggest concentration of data items near our office was in Bunhill Fields, a famous cemetery just outside the old city walls of London. It opened in the 17th century, and had over 100,000 people buried there before it closed in the middle of the 19th century. Because of its location, it became a home for many nonconformist Christians, especially Methodists, as it is just over the road from the the Methodist Chapel of John Wesley. Daniel Defoe, William Blake and John Bunyan are buried there, along with Wesley’s mother Susanna.
Bunhill fields is a beautiful place to walk through, and now, thanks to the linked data I’ve attached to the Wikidata items for the listed graves in the cemetery, you can view images of all of the graves to identify which one is which as you walk around the site. I’ve also created a hyperlapse video showing a walk around the cemetery which is CC licensed.
Most of the gravesites are enclosed, but I could take photos of many of the graves from the paths, and on some days, groups of volunteer gardeners manage the enclosures, and are happy to let you enter to take photos. The park attendant was also very helpful, and let me look at his book showing the locations of graves whose inscriptions had become illegible, which helped to identify many of them.
Bunhill cemetery book showing location of graves – image by Jwslubbock CC BY-SA 4.0
Eventually, I ticked all the graves off the list, and I have to say that it was quite fun and satisfying. I’ve always felt that there is an underlying element of gamification within the Wikimedia projects. People take pride in having lots of edits or uploads, completing tasks and being the person who started particular articles. If these elements could be made more satisfying within the overall user experience of editing Wikimedia projects, it could encourage many more editors to participate.
In May, there are two hackathons taking place for developers working on Wikimedia projects in Prague and Vienna, and there will be a particular focus on the Wikimedia Commons Uploader, an android app that will make uploading easier. Currently, the web browser is a pain to use, and you can only upload 50 photos at a time. With millions of people in the developing world becoming connected to the internet through their mobiles, we need to improve the user experience for the projects, especially on mobile phones.
Imagine a Pokemon style application which took you on a walking tour of you nearby location, pointing out historical heritage and showing you the geolocated data that exists and encouraging you to fill in the gaps, taking photos or adding descriptions or other fields. Rewarding the editors with points for valuable edits and uploads could make the whole experience much more enjoyable and encourage people to edit who would never normally consider it.
We have a long way to go in developing our open source community, but there are exciting possibilities ahead as our movement evolves to meet new challenges and fix old problems.
If you’re interested to get involved and learn more about Wikidata and how it works, you can sign up here to attend our Wikidata hackathon on Saturday April 8 at the Wikimedia UK offices near Old Street.
This article based on the text of Wikimedia UK’s submission to the government’s inquiry into fake news, which was launched in January.
A changing media landscape
The media landscape has changed beyond all recognition over the past 25 years. Before the internet, there were just a handful of media providers with large, guaranteed audiences and plenty of funding to compete with each other on the quality of their journalistic output.
In this bygone era, people generally had more trust in mainstream sources of information and knowledge. You knew where this media was coming from, and the media landscape was predictable. But now none of this certainty exists. The media landscape is diverse, with hundreds of subsidiary websites controlled by opaque political groups or corporate bodies. Faith in the old canonical media sources has eroded and social groups insulate themselves in bubbles that keep out conflicting ideas.
As economic inequality has risen, fragmented social groups have retreated into ideological positions. The erosion of trust in traditional media institutions further contributes to the ability of people to ignore facts that don’t fit their confirmation biases. This trend has become so bad that some commentators have declared that facts don’t matter.
Where does Wikipedia fit in?
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a news service (though its sister site WikiNews is a news service), and our mission is not political in the way many media organisations are – our goal is accurate, neutral information, not to make money or support any political ideology. Our volunteers are diverse in their politics, but they subscribe to the same process and mission to make the best, most neutral source of information which can be trusted by people no matter what their political views are. A recent study by Harvard Business School showed that Wikipedia articles usually become more politically neutral as more contributors get involved in editing them. This allows us to win the trust of our readers and hopefully provides an example to the media of how to regain the confidence of the general public.
As the charity which supports and promotes Wikipedia and its sister projects in the UK, we believe that facts do matter, but the way in which they are produced matters too. Wikipedia generates trust in itself through transparency and verifiability. You can check the sources of the facts written on every page in the list of citations. You can see the history of how each article was written and the accounts or IP addresses of the editors who wrote it. If you disagree with the content, you can discuss it on the talk page of the article to reach consensus with other editors about whether the information should be included.
Part of the problem is that our education system is still too often set up to inculcate facts, rather than analytical ways of thinking. Our pedagogic processes haven’t evolved from a media landscape in which you could be reasonably sure that what the BBC said was true, to one in which children are bombarded with messages from different political points of view, advertisers and ideologies. Our minds have always been a battleground for various social forces, but the sheer number of agents and institutions vying for control of our thoughts and feelings today is so large that it is confusing and destabilising for many.
In such a confusing landscape, people will often choose simple, clear messages which cut through this white noise. Facile slogans with little substance like ‘Take our country back’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ can gain momentum and huge support, while more complex facts and realities are drowned out.
Teach critical ways of thinking, not just facts
We believe that instead of trying to control the conversation and narrative, the best thing that governments can do is to arm their citizens with the educational tools to analyse this confusing landscape and protect themselves from indoctrination by simplistic political messaging. We believe that learning how to use Wikipedia, engaging in the creation of knowledge through debate and consensus, is one way that people can be armed with the analytic tools to form their own opinions and to distinguish good information from bad information.
On Facebook, people often share stories that conform to their previously held beliefs without checking the source of the information first. One very common internet meme from the middle of 2016 involved a made up quote by Donald Trump about how he would run as a Republican candidate for President because they are the ‘dumbest group of voters’. Just a minute of effort searching for the source of this information would reveal that it had been made up, but people wanted to believe it. This kind of fabrication is impossible to get away with for long on Wikipedia.
When you create a new article or add information to an existing article on Wikipedia, other editors who are watching the page will review your work, deciding if the information is correct and the source is reliable. Some of the highest traffic articles on Wikipedia are peer-reviewed by thousands of different people. Here are the page view statistics for the International Women’s Day article, which has been viewed over 1 million times already in 2017 on the English Wikipedia.
Wikipedia also creates trust and reliability by being the only non-commercial website in the top 100 most popular sites (by traffic) on the internet. It is run by a non-profit charity, the Wikimedia Foundation, and has no advertising. We believe that the absence of commercial advertising is integral to maintaining trust in the site, and this shows in the public’s response. Wikipedia gets around half a billion unique visits a month, and a recent poll by YouGov shows that people trust Wikipedia more than journalists from any media group.
Ensuring the best information is more visible
One aspect of Wikipedia’s importance is its search engine ranking. Unreliable sources can game the way search algorithms work to place high on Google rankings. However, Wikipedia articles will also appear near the top of searches, providing a reliable, neutral place to find a summary of other good sources. Here is an example:
Unfortunately, many educators have had a propensity to warn students away from Wikipedia, in the belief that if it can be edited by anybody, its reliability cannot be as good as the BBC or other traditional media. We believe this is clearly not true for most articles, but the point of Wikipedia is not to encourage people to take the information at face value. The sources will be transparently listed at the bottom of each article so you can see where the information comes from.
Social trust is an important bedrock to creating political consensus. Countries that exhibit low levels of interpersonal trust are generally ones beset by social and political issues. Economic inequality creates the conditions for a loss of trust, and makes it more likely that people will be willing to believe biased information. Wikipedia cannot fix the underlying problems of economic inequality, but it can teach people how to understand and analyse information in context.
Our community creates trust by developing rules by which we can judge the veracity and value of the content that people add to Wikimedia projects. Editors have for a long time deprecated the use of unreliable media sources, with one policy (WP:PUS) stating that:
The more extreme tabloids such as the National Enquirer should never be used, as most stories in them are intentional hoaxes.
These policies guide and inform discussions and disputes about the content of articles, and editors engage with each other on the Talk pages of articles to discuss and decide by consensus whether a source is reliable and whether particular information is relevant. This whole process is transparent, and you can look back at the history of any article to see its previous versions and what has been changed.
Active knowledge construction as part of good citizenship
What we try to do as a charity is to encourage people not simply to be passive consumers of information, but active agents and participants in the collective construction of knowledge about our world. We don’t believe that the narrative of history is best controlled by any one powerful interest, and we would like everybody to understand the process by which knowledge is produced on Wikipedia, so that we can all be sure the final output is transparent and verifiable.
It is this process which is lacking in traditional media. You never get to see the process by which the sausage is made, and that allows people with low levels of trust in traditional institutions to believe that the information is inherently biased. It is harder to believe this about Wikipedia because you can see for yourself how it was produced.
The world has changed, and yet we are still right at the dawn of the internet age, experiencing the changes that this new technology has wrought on culture, politics and society. We need to get to grips with these changes and develop systems which allow a more equitable balance of power between individuals, corporations and states so that people cannot be exploited for others’ gain. Wikipedia is one way to do that.
A robot built to write the Bible – image by Mirko Tobias Schaefer
The Guardian recently picked up on a piece of research about the behaviour of bots on Wikipedia in the first 10 years of its history. The research noted that as bots became more common, their rules sometimes came into conflict with each other, resulting in some bots changing or reverting thousands of edits by other bots.
Bots can be incredibly useful. They do a lot of the repetitive and mundane edits that would take humans ages and can be automated reasonably easily. One of the most notable examples is Lsjbot, which has created millions of Wikipedia stub pages in Swedish and Cebuano (a Philippine language and the mother tongue of the Swedish bot creator’s wife).
This has resulted in Swedish and Cebuano punching far above their weight in terms of the number of articles in their respective languages. The Welsh language Wicipedia has also expanded considerably using automated stub creation. Aside from this, one of the major uses of bots is to protect against vandalism, for example by reverting edits containing swear words.
Of course, the work of bots has not gone without criticism. The large-scale creation of articles (on the English language Wikipedia at least) has been restricted and a bot policy has been implemented to regulate the kinds of tasks that bots are allowed to perform. The Wikipedia page about bots states that:
‘Bots are able to make edits very rapidly and can disrupt Wikipedia if they are incorrectly designed or operated. For these reasons, a bot policy has been developed.’
The way in which Wikipedia operates can be seen as labyrinthine; a trait which is somewhat unavoidable in large, open source communities like the Wikimedia projects. So perhaps it’s not surprising that journalists often write about ‘murky and opaque’ underbelly of Wikipedia without capturing the full complexity of how the websites work. Once you get involved and see how it works, it’s usually not as complex or strange as it might seem at first glance.
Editing Wikipedia and its sister projects is great for anyone who wants to become more IT literate and understand how the complex series of relationships and data flows that we call the internet works. Curating the largest store of information and the biggest human project in the history of the world isn’t easy, and it takes a lot of people a lot of time to make Wikipedia as good as it is. We think it’s worth it, and can bring a lot of personal development and satisfaction to the people who do it.
Written by Nour Geres
By Martin Poulter, Wikimedian-in-Residence at Bodleian Libraries
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