In what feels like something of a landmark, iconic UK quiz show University Challenge hosted by journalist and former Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman this week featured a bonus round of questions about Wikipedia editors. UK readers can watch the clip on BBC iPlayer here for the next few days. The whole show is good, but the section in question begins around 5m45 in to the clip.
For Wikipedia to be featured in such a prestigious television show with a core audience of people in higher education is a great acknowledgement of the growing credibility that Wikipedia holds. But how would you fare against the students of Jesus College, Oxford University who faced the questions?
1. In 2012, the philosophy graduate Justin Knapp became the first person to be credited with 1,000,000 Wikipedia edits. He’s especially noted for his work on the bibliography page of which English novelist born in Bengal in 1903?
2. Secondly, what institutions associated with a beverage, and with for instance the Chinese city of Chengdu, give their name to the help space which is, quote: “A friendly place to help new editors become accustomed to Wikipedia culture”?
3. In an interview in 2014, the Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales stated that he “used to edit a lot of entries” about which specific UK political body often symbolised by a red portcullis?
The answers are below, but if you correctly answered any of the questions then you did better than the students, who got each one wrong. A sign that there is still some way to go, perhaps!
This post was written by Daria Cybulska, Wikimedia UK Programme Manager
AdaCamp is a conference dedicated to increasing women’s participation in open technology and culture. It brings women together to build community, share skills, discuss problems with open tech/culture communities that affect women, and find ways to address them. It has been taking place for several years in the US and Australia, but in 2014 it is coming to Europe for the first time. The Berlin AdaCamp will be October 11-12, 2014 at the Wikimedia Deutschland offices. It will also focus strongly on the Wikimedia community in particular.
It is a valuable opportunity for UK Wikimedians to attend a focused event (of only about 50 attendees) where we will focus on learning practical things and planning future projects.
If you have experience in open tech/culture, experience or knowledge of feminism and advocacy and the ability to collaborate with others, you should apply!
We would like to help build a community of UK Wikimedians supporting women in open tech/culture – especially Wikimedia projects – and for that reason we are offering scholarships for UK applicants.
The main meeting point for the community in the UK is the annual OER conference, which this year was hosted at the University of Newcastle. Simon Knight and I attended this year, with support from Wikimedia UK.
Despite some big successes for OER in the UK, trying to open up academic culture from within can feel very much like a struggle. The OER advocates see themselves as a small minority working to change a massive, well-embedded system.
In Wikimedia, we have a different perspective. Open resources are not only freely available and in legal and technical terms are repurposable, adaptable. Our creations – Wikipedia and its sister sites – meet this definition very well indeed.
This post was written by Jon Davies, Wikimedia UK Chief Executive
We have a big white board in the office where we share calendars and meetings; a few months ago I started a box counting down the days to Wikimania on it. However hard we tried it seemed a long way off in the distant future but now with less than three weeks to go we know differently!
The programme may be set, the speakers arranged, the food ordered and the wifi tested and for the first time in thirty years I feel that I actually know my way around the Barbican but the scale of the event is beginning to make itself felt. All around me are volunteers and staff wrestling with the last minute details: how many laptops do we need, where will the walkie talkies be stored, how much cash will we need over the conference days, can you fit a mobility scooter in the lifts? Small details but if everyone is going to have a great Wikimania it is the detail like this we need to get right.
So if we are a little slower than normal answering emails or getting back to you please be patient!
John Byrne speaking at an edit-a-thon on the topic of women in science
This post was written by John Byrne, the Wikimedian in Residence at Cancer Research UK. It was first published here under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence.
In our increasingly internet-enabled world, answering a question or checking a fact can be just a few clicks, swipes or touches away.
In many cases these searches are likely to leave you looking at a Wikipedia page. And if that burning question relates to your health, the desire for information can be far more pressing.
In the case of any health concern it’s important to see your GP as a first port of call. But as more people turn to the web for information as well, how can you be sure that the articles you’re reading on Wikipedia, for example, are accurate and up to date?
This question reared its head in May as numerousmediaoutlets covered US research published in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. The research set out to examine the reliability and accuracy of Wikipedia’s coverage of the “Top 10 most costly conditions in terms of public and private expenditure in the United States”.
While it’s hard to disagree with the overall take-home message of the stories – that people shouldn’t be relying solely on sources like Wikipedia to diagnose themselves (something Wikipedia itself is completely clear on) – the study leaves little room for suggestions on how Wikipedia could be improved for patients and the general public – something Cancer Research UK is actively involved in, as we’ll discuss below.
It also led to headlines claiming that “90% of Wikipedia’s medical entries are inaccurate”. Is this a fair representation of the research, and of Wikipedia?
Errors or ‘discordances’?
As the lead researcher on the new study, Professor Robert Hasty, from Campbell University in North Carolina, US, explained in an interview, the study was prompted by seeing young doctors looking things up on Wikipedia.
The use of the site by medical professionals has been the subject of a fair amount of research (e.g. see the summary on p12/13 of this PDF) though mostly looking to answer questions on how much do they do it (answer: a lot) and should they do it (answer: not as a primary source) rather than why do they do it.
In the new study, each of the “10 most costly conditions” the researchers looked at was matched to a relevant Wikipedia article, which was sent out to two randomly assigned junior doctors tasked with assessing the reliability of the content.
They were asked “to identify every assertion (ie, implication or statement of fact) in the Wikipedia article and to fact-check each assertion against a peer-reviewed source that was published or updated within the past 5 years.”
They found many “discordances” in the content, which they later referred to as “errors” in the conclusions of the research (so, unsurprisingly, this word became the focus of the media coverage).
This led them to conclude that “Health care professionals, trainees, and patients should use caution when using Wikipedia to answer questions regarding patient care” and “physicians and medical students who currently use Wikipedia as a medical reference should be discouraged from doing so”.
This was translated into the headlines we mentioned earlier, flagging the “90% inaccurate” figure.
For example – to pick one out of many points the editors have discussed – the study doesn’t say where these “errors” are, meaning it’s very hard to check or change the articles.
For a general readership
To quote the physicist Freeman Dyson FRS: “Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it…. The information that it contains is totally unreliable and surprisingly accurate.” – a useful distinction when looking at Wikipedia.
Wikipedia – and its volunteer editors – have always made it clear that it does not offer medical advice, let alone represent a substitute for professional advice, nor is it a medical textbook.
The internal style manual for medical articles is emphatic that Wikipedia’s medical content is aimed at a general readership, and cautions against writing directed at either patients or medical professionals, as well as banning the inclusion of information such as pharmaceutical dosages.
In practice, however, many of the articles do contain technical terms, and this can make some of them difficult for the average member of the public to understand. Clearly, there’s room for improvement.
Part of my role here will be to work with the existing medical editors on Wikipedia to improve our articles on cancer topics, in particular those on four harder-to-treat cancers where there has been little improvement in survival rates in recent decades. These are cancers of the lung, pancreas, brain and oesophagus, which Cancer Research UK is giving particular focus to as part of its new research strategy.
But I will also be addressing other cancer-related content, for example for the Medical Translation Project that translates articles between the over-200 different language versions of Wikipedia.
Cancer Research UK has access, through its own staff and its access to other researchers and clinicians, to tremendous amounts of expertise, both in terms of science and the communication of science, where they have teams trained and experienced in communicating with a wide range of distinct audiences – including through its flagship patient information content.
I’ll be exploring a number of approaches to bringing all this expertise to bear on Wikipedia’s cancer content. The very large annual nerd-fest conference Wikimania 2014 is in the Barbican in London this year, about a mile from the charity’s HQ. This gives a great opportunity to bring Cancer Research UK and many medical Wikipedians together face to face.
Another aspect of the role is that we are planning to conduct research into the experiences of a range of different types of consumers of Wikipedia’s cancer content. There has been very little formal qualitative research into the experiences of Wikipedia’s readers – we hope this project will begin to address this gap, as well as encouraging others to carry out similar projects.
It’s important that we all work hard to reduce unreliability and make the accuracy less of a surprise in Wikipedia’s cancer articles. If you are curious, or interested in helping in any way, please do get in touch below or on my Wikipedia Talk Page. It would be sad if today’s media reporting put medical professionals off engaging with Wikipedia – the site, and the public, need your help.
John
John Byrne is Cancer Research UK’s Wikipedian in Residence
Hasty R.T., Garbalosa R.C., Barbato V.A., Valdes P.J., Powers D.W., Hernandez E., John J.S., Suciu G., Qureshi F. & Popa-Radu M. & Wikipedia vs Peer-Reviewed Medical Literature for Information About the 10 Most Costly Medical Conditions., The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, PMID: 24778001
This post was written by Richard Scriven, a geography researcher who attended the event below, and is re-used with kind permission. It was first published here.
A recent Wiki workshop for geographers organised by Wikimedia UK and the RGS-IBG, demonstrated the positive role that people can play in both disseminating knowledge and contributing to the online resources. The workshop outlined the ideas central to Wikipedia, the operating principles and ways of creating and editing content. Beyond the particulars, I took three main points away from the day, which I think worth sharing.
1. Wikipedia is an important tool. It is much maligned in the academy, but this approach puts the emphasis on the wrong aspect: the tool is not the issue, how you use it is. It should be appreciated for what it can do and not dismissed for what it can’t. Wikipedia is a gateway or a starting point for general information, summaries and signposting. If someone misuses it in an academic context, this is not Wikipedia’s fault, it is more likely a case of poor online literacy and/or bad judgement. The session helped me form a renewed appreciation for Wikipedia.
2. We have a role and even a duty to participate. We all have knowledge, skills and access that are not available to the others and these can be used to benefit discussions, debates and understandings. This is especially true for those in university settings. My own interest saw me gravitating towards areas such as social and cultural geography or research methods where I found articles I could contribute to. Anyone with an area of expertise can contribute to these sections. The content is decided by those who write it, but in the case of Wikipedia that editor/author can, and should be, you.
3. It is easy. The editing and creating of content is very accessible. With a little knowledge, you can do a lot. The singular common observation from the workshop participants was the ease with which we could use the site. There are also numerous supports available through Wikipedia from simple guides to opportunities to seek assistance, such as The Teahouse, ‘a friendly space where new editors can ask questions about contributing to Wikipedia and get help from peers and experienced editors’. Just get started, dip your toe into the Wikipedian waters and contribute.
Over the last year, I’ve been working with Jisc, the national charity providing expertise on digital technology for education and research, to explore how academia and Wikimedia can work more closely together. From an office in the University of Bristol, I’ve reached out to lecturers, librarians and other staff across the country, running events and creating guidance documentation. It has also been a chance to explore these experts’ perceptions of Wikipedia and its sister sites.
Although the Wikimedia sites aim for universal accessibility, their complexity and patchy documentation can be off-putting for newcomers. Then again, there are extremely helpful resources that just need to be better-known, such as the educator portal and case study booklet, expert outreach portal, or guidance for new users.
The project supported three ’editathon’ events, delivering free training in using scholarly resources to improve Wikipedia. These included the first-ever editathons on veterinary science (hosted by WikiVet) and medical humanities (hosted by the Wellcome Library). The Women in Science editathon hosted at Oxford University was one of the most successful ever in terms of content created and improved, including five articles that were linked from the front page of Wikipedia. Since the relative lack of female Wikipedians has been in the news recently, I’m pleased to say that the great majority of contributors at these Jisc-supported events have been female.
One of the main outputs of the project is an infoKit, Crowdsourcing: the wiki way of working. It looks at cultural reasons for Wikipedia’s success and shows how professionals and volunteers can work together to create or improve scholarly and educational materials.
Another output is the collaboration flowchart, which shows how Wikimedia sites including Wikidata, Wikisource, and Wikimedia Commons can benefit projects in scholarly and educational sectors. In each case, the flowchart suggests next steps and key links.
This press release was issued on 1 July by Wikimedia UK, the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimania 2014 team
– *Featured speakers include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and new Wikimedia Foundation Chief Executive Lila Tretikov; Thousands of Wikimedia volunteers; Leaders in Technology, Culture and Society. From August 8th to 10th at the Barbican Centre; Tickets go on sale today.*
– *Wikimania programme to focus on Social Machines, The Future of Education, Democratic Media, Open Scholarship & Open Data*
Wikimania’s 2014 team today announce the programme for this year’s historic event. Wikimania 2014 will be held at the Barbican Centre in London from 8th to 10th August, with a two day pre-conference held August 6th and 7th. Over 4,000 attendees are expected; more than twice the number at any previous Wikimania.
The future of Wikipedia, and other Wikimedia projects, forms the central theme. As technological advances promise big changes on the platform, Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales will delve into what the future has in store
for the world’s fifth most popular website.
“Wikipedia is the largest knowledge base in the world, consulted by over half a billion people each month,” says Wales. “However, we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what can be done with it. Through international expansion, a new focus on open data, and a big investment in technology development, our movement is charting exciting new territory.”
Attendees will also welcome Wikimedia’s new executive director, Lila Tretikov. Her keynote will focus on the impact of Wikipedia in our changing world and its potential for our future. Tretikov sees Wikipedia, a top five website, as an opportunity to for unlocking and democratizing knowledge globally: “I’d like us to think beyond what we know today. Think beyond our accomplishments, towards opportunities. Opportunities for all our collective minds to build the future of knowledge, collaboration and trust.” Recent developments have included plans focused on overhauling Wikipedia’s user experience for readers and editors, a programmatic approach to grant-making and community, and establishing a development platform for knowledge building.
Open to the public, Wikimania is a five-day, community-organised event focusing on new projects in the world of MediaWiki, transparency, and open knowledge. Themes include collaborative working, natural language
processing, crowdsourcing, education, journalism, scientific and medical research, open data, and multimedia.
Wikimedia UK education organiser Dr Toni Sant delivering his keynote presentation at the 6th International Integrity and Plagiarism Conference at the Sage, Gateshead on 17 June 2014.
This post was written by Hannah Jones, Wikimedia UK education volunteer
Some readers of this blog may remember me from EduWiki 2013 in Cardiff or the more recent Future of Education Workshop ahead of Wikimania, but most others will probably not know me as a volunteer on other Wikimedia UK activities. I have worked mostly with Dr Toni Sant and Darren Stephens on Wikipedia classroom assignments at the University of Hull’s Scarborough Campus. I am also a postgraduate student in education at York College.
From the 16th to the 18th of June 2014 I attended the 6th International Conference on Integrity and Plagiarism at the Sage Gateshead, just across the Tyne River from Newcastle. It was an excellent opportunity to meet other educators and discuss Wikipedia in the context of this conference. It was also an excellent opportunity to catch Dr Sant’s keynote address on the second day of this event.
He took the stage in Hall 2’s impressive theatre in the round, in front of an audience of about 200 delegates. After an introduction by Turnitin’s Senior Vice President Will Murray, Toni started off by introducing the efforts of the Wikimedia movement to support the use of Wikipedia and sister projects in education.
Taking a leaf out of a recent report by Turnitin entitled What’s Wrong With Wikipedia?, Toni proceeded to outline the perceived problems with Wikipedia in higher education. On the one hand, students in Higher Education are largely consumers/readers, are unaware of what Wikipedia really is, and use it freely as a source for their (research) papers. On the other hand, academics continue to discourage the use of encyclopedias in general, and while fully aware that students use Wikipedia widely, they are mostly against the use of Wikipedia at University.
Paraphrasing a CC-by-SA slide from Jake Orlowitz, who gave a similar presentation earlier this year, Toni pointed out that Wikimedia and academia are natural allies. Wikipedia is often the starting point for research, but it can lead students back to sources, so they can critically think about subjects, understanding knowledge production, contributing to Wikipedia, and in the process deepening their learning.
I believe that Wikimedia UK’s presence at such conferences, especially when represented by professional experts from within its staff and volunteer members is just the right approach to ensure that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects find a comfortable home in higher education settings. Our chapter has some very valuable resources to offer the UK higher education sector, and getting the word out to educators who are seeking solutions to the perceived problems in Education that involve Wikipedia is essential. I was simply amazed by the number of people who approached me during the conference saying that they never saw Wikipedia in a positive light as an academic resource before listening to Toni’s keynote presentation.
This post was written by Jon Davies, Wikimedia UK’s Chief Executive
I thought I’d share this with you:
‘Dear Jon
Thank you for the opportunity to attend the xxxxxx. It was a privilege to meet such an interesting group of people and hear about the laudable ambitions and achievements of the Wikimedia organisation.
You inspired me to try editing a Wikipedia page; so today I have joined the rank of wiki-editors and updated the page about my village. And yes it was just as easy as you described.
I’ll certainly be spreading the word and encouraging other people to do likewise.
Kind regards
xxxxxx’
All I did was explain to this well educated middle aged woman a) how everyone had something to contribute; b) how women were not properly represented and; c) how to press the ‘edit’ button. I have asked her which page she edited and hope her edit has been welcomed.
