Celebrating The Mixed Museum residency as it comes to an end

By Leah Emary, Wikimedian in Residence at The Mixed Museum and Connected Heritage Project Lead

Introduction and Overview

The Wikimedian in Residence partnership continued at the Mixed Museum from January to March 2023, building on the initial stage of the residency that began in September. This blog posting describes the initiatives focussed on during this time and next steps that both the Mixed Museum and Wikimedia UK might like to take to build on the residency. The End of Residency Report can be found here.

January to March 2023

Sustainable digital volunteer programme for the Mixed Museum

As described in the first report from the residency, editing Wikimedia projects is an ideal basis for a digital volunteering programme for the Museum. However, after the scope and scale of recruiting for and managing a volunteer programme became clear, it seemed desirable to fund a volunteer coordinator for the Museum who could deliver this with expertise and focus, rather than making it part of Chamion’s work. 

I outlined what would be required to create a sustainable virtual volunteering programme for the Mixed Museum, with the hopes that this could be used for a future funding bid. You can read the proposal here: Sustainable digital volunteer programme for the Mixed Museum. 

We had initially planned to create a bespoke, self-study training programme for volunteers based on a set of Google slides and embedded videos taken from Zoom-based training. Because the editing interface of Wikipedia changed quite dramatically in January 2023, the training videos and screenshots were quickly out of date and less suitable for self study, which altered our plans.

Rather than re-record, we took time to consider the implications of future changes to the interfaces making self study videos obsolete, and the considerable investment they take to remain up to date and useful. As the museum doesn’t have anyone to do that ongoing maintenance work, the bespoke training programme would quickly go out of date. We decided to rely on three existing resources for online training (Training Library [Programs & Events Dashboard], The Wikipedia Adventure, and The Introduction to Wikipedia) for a more sustainable future. For more information on which training we decided on and how to contextualise it, see the Sustainable digital volunteer programme for the Mixed Museum document.

Heritage Dot 2.0 Roundtable

Caption: The Connected Heritage team (Leah Emary and Dr Lucy Hinnie) from Wikimedia UK moderated a panel at the Heritage Dot Conference consisting of Dr Victoria Araj, Dr Jane Secker and Dr Chamion Caballero. The panel was chaired by Hope Williard.
The Connected Heritage team (Leah Emary and Dr Lucy Hinnie) from Wikimedia UK moderated a panel at the Heritage Dot Conference consisting of Dr Victoria Araj, Dr Jane Secker and Dr Chamion Caballero. The panel was chaired by Hope Williard.

In March 2023, Chamion participated in a roundtable discussion moderated by the Connected Heritage team and two other Connected Heritage partners, Dr Jane Secker and Dr Victoria Araj, as part of the Heritage Dot 2.0 conference hosted by the University of Lincoln. 

The discussion touched on how engagement with Wiki-based projects enabled these three cultural heritage organisations to improve the accessibility of their collections, while simultaneously empowering volunteers and members through embedded digital upskilling. The Mixed Museum’s Wikipedia edits were discussed as an example of ways that open knowledge can place overlooked cultural histories into the dominant narrative. Chamion also described the legacy the Residency will have on the Museum’s future projects. 

We were honoured to hear Josie Fraser from the National Lottery Heritage Fund mention the roundtable as a highlight of the conference during her closing remarks. 

Queen Mary University London Microinterns 2023

Two student interns, Leyi and Shannon, joined the Mixed Museum for four weeks in March 2023. The internship followed a similar model to one we ran last year. More about the micro-internship format is in this blog posting March is Wiki micro-internship month at The Mixed Museum and Manar al-Athar.

This year, the interns worked from a Trello board of Wiki tasks. Both Leyi and Shannon focussed on the military history of African American soldiers based in the United Kingdom during and after World War 2. While Shannon focussed on adding personal accounts to articles which read like lists of list of dates, Leyi was interested in adding social history to articles on military bases in England. Leyi experienced some pushback from other editors which she describes in her blog-based reflection [link here]  and was resilient in the face of it. The interns had interesting conversations with Chamion around who feels ownership over different parts of history and how our work editing Wikipedia can have an impact on what is  generally accepted as ‘important’. 

What Chamion and I discovered, having run this internship twice now is that, though the platform is the same and the work is similar each year, Wikipedia editing is like a mirror in that each person sees something different reflected back at them in the process. See the Internship Dashboard for 2023.

Museum Ethnographers Group Conference 2023

The work we did at the Residency around copyright and Wikimedia Commons (highlighted here) was the subject of a paper delivered to the Museum Ethnographers Conference in Cambridge in April 2023. Slides for Museum Ethnographers Group Conference presentation.

In the presentation, the example of the Brown Babies images sits alongside work done by Martin Poulter at the Khalli Collections and Lucy Moore’s recuperative work to enhance the representation of museums in Oceania on Wikimedia projects. The three projects engage in a conversation about what it is to edit Wiki in today’s context and how we can work together to best surmount these and create a more equitable digital space for open knowledge.

Looking at visitor numbers to The Mixed Museum 

Chamion has long been interested in what the Museum’s Google analytics tell her about the numbers of visitors clicking through from Wikipedia links to The Mixed Museum. These so-called referral links make up a small but significant portion of the Museum’s audience. In the period before the Connected Heritage partnership, the Museum had very little traffic from Wiki sources. In fact, it was listed seventh of the referral channels, with 25 visitors coming directly from Wiki links. The top referral site then was a National Archives blog post, with 117 visitors. Since March 2022, National Archives referral rate has stayed relatively steady while the Wiki channel link has seen a percentage increase of 1584!

What is also interesting is that those who reach the Museum via Wiki sources are spending an average of 3.44 minutes on the site, compared to before the Connected Heritage partnership when they visited for an average of 1.27 minutes. Clearly, through more sustained and targeted editing, we have not only attracted more Wiki users to The Mixed Museum, but increased the engagement of these visitors with the exhibitions.

We can also see all the pages which reference the Mixed Museum by using the MassViews Analysis tool. 

Next steps

Though Leah’s Residency is coming to an end, the relationship between the Museum and Wikimedia UK will go on. Chamion will be contributing her insight and knowledge to a new research project dedicated to understanding the barriers that small and medium sized heritage organisations face when contributing to open knowledge. We hope to run the microinternships again in March 2024 and ideas for pursuing the digital volunteering programme are in the works. 

Interested in hosting a Wikimedian in Residence?

If you are involved with a heritage or cultural organisation in the United Kingdom and you think a Wikimedian in Residence might be good for your organisation, please talk to us about it. You can book a half hour meeting with the Connected Heritage team via Calendly or drop us an email.

VocalEyes and Wikidata: Making accessibility information easily available

By Richard Nevell, Programme Manager for Wikimedia UK

VocalEyes plays a vital role in making arts and heritage accessible for blind and visually impaired, D/deaf, hard of hearing, and neurodivergent visitors. They do this in a range of ways, including training and collaborating directly with arts and heritage organisations. They also conduct research on how various sectors are making their venues accessible.

In 2022, VocalEyes undertook ‘Heritage Access 2022’ – a survey of what information museums and heritage organisations share about accessibility on their websites. Before you visit a place, it is important to know if there are facilities such as accessible toilets, or braille displays. More than 60 volunteers were involved in collecting information about 2,258 sites across the UK. You can explore the results on the VocalEyes website.

Read the report in full

VocalEyes invited Wikimedia UK to participate in the project, specifically to help share the data. Both organisations felt that this could be a valuable addition to Wikidata, the open source database attached to Wikipedia which helps keep its content updated. It was not only an opportunity to share accessibility information, but also to explore how Wikidata and the Wikimedia projects present this information.

Sharing the data

Putting accessibility information on Wikidata has a few benefits. Firstly, it presents the information in structured, machine-readable form so that search engines can pick it up. Secondly, once this information is in Wikidata, it can be circulated around its sister projects. For example, we are discussing with the Welsh Wicipedia whether they can adapt their infoboxes that appear in Wikipedia articles to include information about accessibility. And thirdly, because Wikidata has other information you can run custom queries to explore the data further.

Our first step was to work out what information to share. Because the VocalEyes dataset was based on information from organisations’ websites it is possible that the sites may be out-of-date or not include accessibility information. We decided to include positive information, e.g. this place has blue badge parking. This meant we were sharing positive characteristics and didn’t penalise organisations who may have had accessible facilities but didn’t advertise it.

We also needed to work out what information Wikdiata could handle. VocalEyes collected lots of information relating to things such as noisy environments, lighting levels, audio guides, and floor surfaces. Some of the difficulties here are that if you are sharing information about some of these things that will vary around a site. Parts of a site may be wheelchair accessible, but not all of it. While you can add qualifiers to information in Wikidata to add nuance, when that information is reshared outside of Wikimedia sites the nuance is often stripped away. So we needed to make sure we presented straightforward information so that if it was reused it is less likely to be misrepresented.

Ultimately, we decided to share information relating to:

  • Blue badge parking on-site
  • The presence of accessible toilets
  • The presence of Changing Places toilets

Once we had worked out what to share, then we needed to map the information onto Wikidata.

Important progress, with more to learn

As we began matching the museums and heritage sites in the VocalEyes dataset to Wikidata, it became clear that some places didn’t have an entry yet. Of the 2,258 sites, 107 didn’t have an entry in Wikidata, and more didn’t have Wikipedia pages. For these new entries, we were able to add locations and website links – useful for anyone who may want to write a Wikipedia article and is looking for somewhere to start.

What stood out most is how little information Wikidata, and by extension Wikipedia, has about accessibility. For museums and heritage sites in the UK we were essentially starting with a blank slate.

In Wikidata there was no entry about accessible/blue badge holder parking or Changing Places toilets. While there was an entry about accessible toilets, only three places in the UK had information about these facilities (two train stations and a hospital). By adding this information we have established a framework for future information sharing. The links below allow you to explore the data on a map:

While Changing Places and Blue Badge schemes are UK specific, it is worth noting that an accessible toilet is a broader idea and that the lack of information is not UK specific. The map of places with accessible toilets is now mostly about the UK, because of the data from VocalEyes.

It is also an opportunity to reflect on what other information Wikidata could host relating to accessibility. While there is some provision for information about physical accessibility, especially relating to wheelchair accessibility, there doesn’t seem to be an infrastructure for expressing what is available to support people who are neurodiverse. This approach can be used for other places, such as public transport, libraries, and hospitals. 

We are grateful to VocalEyes for involving Wikimedia UK in this work, and we strongly support the sharing of this information. We hope that this can lead to more people sharing information around accessibility.

Empowering literacy advocacy: a Wikimedian and certified trainer’s experience at the World Literacy Summit with support from Wikimedia UK

By Bukola James, Volunteer Wikimedian

Attending the World Literacy Summit 2023 at Baliol’s College in Oxford was a dream come true for me, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the accommodation support from Wikimedia UK. As a passionate advocate for literacy and a Wikimedian, I was thrilled to be surrounded by like-minded individuals who share the same passion for promoting literacy for all.

Throughout the conference, I had the privilege of meeting literacy ambassadors and advocates who are spearheading interesting projects and programs to make literacy accessible to everyone. I was inspired by their dedication and learned so much from their experiences.

One of the highlights of the summit was my encounter with Frank Schulenburg, the executive director of WikiEducation US & Canada. His presentation on the work of the organization and how Wikipedia fosters information literacy in higher education classrooms was truly insightful. After the presentation, we had a productive conversation over coffee where we discussed how some of the programs and initiatives could be adopted for WikiEducation projects in Nigeria.

During the summit, I had the opportunity to present my Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom project in East Room 14. It was a great feeling to share my work with the attendees and receive positive feedback. I also attended the plenary session at the Sheldonian Theater, as well as several tracks on World Literacy presentations. These sessions were highly informative and engaging, and I gained a wealth of knowledge about literacy programs and initiatives from around the world.

For me, some of the sessions that stood out were those that focused on the intersection of technology and literacy, and how we can leverage digital tools to make literacy more accessible and engaging for all. Another session that left a lasting impression on me highlighted the importance of promoting multilingual literacy and preserving endangered languages.

The World Literacy Summit 2023 was an enriching experience that reminded me of the transformative power of literacy. It reinforced my commitment to promoting literacy for all and ensuring that every person, regardless of their background, has access to the tools and resources they need to succeed.

As I return to Nigeria, I am excited to bring back the knowledge and ideas I gained from the World Literacy Summit and continue working towards free knowledge for all. I want to express my deepest gratitude to Wikimedia UK for their support throughout my stay in Oxford. I look forward to staying in touch and collaborating on future projects that will advance the cause of literacy around the world.

WikiHugs

Bukola James

User:Bukky658

Defying easy categorisation: Wikipedia as primary, secondary and tertiary resource

By Caroline Ball, Trustee of Wikimedia UK

Abstract

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

Introduction

What is Wikipedia?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Methodology

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia as tertiary source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia as secondary source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia as primary source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Abbreviations and Acronyms

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

Competing interests

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

International Women’s Day and the wiki projects

By Katie Crampton, Communications Coordinator at Wikimedia UK

The goal of Wikipedia is to create a world where everyone has access to all available knowledge, but in order to do this, we need to reflect all global viewpoints. Increased engagement and representation of marginalised groups and topics on Wikipedia has been a significant strategic goal of Wikimedia UK’s work to combat inequality and bias. While there are many ways that institutions of power and privilege can exclude people, we will be focusing on the gender gap this Women’s History Month and critically examining how women are portrayed on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects.

It is crucial to fight to improve the representation of women, non-binary individuals, and related topics on Wikipedia. We must ensure that the free global information resource, which is read more than 15 billion times a month, is conveying everyone’s narrative if “you can’t be what you can’t see.” Women, people of colour, persons with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and people who reside outside of the United States and Western Europe are included in this. Those individuals and their tales already exist; they don’t require a Wikipedia entry to make them come to life. The “first stop” for many of us, though, when we want to learn about the world is Wikipedia.

On Wikimedia, people of any gender can and do devote time and effort to solving gender inequity. This could be done in a variety of ways, including writing fresh stories on women, hiring more female editors, increasing awareness of the gender pay gap, etc. Editing Wikipedia is becoming more and more recognised as a type of knowledge activism that addresses information gaps and sparks debates about how knowledge and information are produced, vetted, and challenged online.

At Wikimedia UK we organise projects that help close the gender gap on Wiki, like our partnership with The National Galleries of Scotland worked with us to achieve greater gender parity for the artists represented on Wikipedia. In our lead volunteers – volunteers who organise events and projects supporting our work – we have achieved gender parity.

If you’re interested in attending events aimed at closing the gender gap, check our events page for upcoming opportunities.

March is Wiki micro-internship month at The Mixed Museum and Manar al-Athar

By Leah Emary, Wikimedian in Residence at the Mixed Museum

In March 2023, university students from Queen Mary University London and the University of Oxford will learn how to edit Wikipedia and upload to Wikimedia Commons as a part of a micro-internship program. 

Microinterns at the Mixed Museum

Microinterns at the Mixed Museum will spend 4 weeks as interns with the following schedule:

  • Week 1: The interns will be introduced to the team at WMUK and the Museum and get trained in how to edit Wikipedia and upload to Wikimedia Commons.
  • Week 2: In the second week, they will choose which topics and pages they would like to work on and begin to edit live Wikipedia and to upload images to Wikimedia Commons.
  • Week 3: In the third week, they will continue to edit, with support from the Connected Heritage team.
  • Week 4: In the fourth week, they will reflect on their experiences either in a blog posting or in a social media campaign.

The interns will be able to ask questions and get support over Slack, use Zoom and email to keep in touch with both the Wikimedia and Mixed Museum teams, which will give them experience with tools essential for a remote work environment. 

This year’s internship programs are building on the success of ones that ran in 2022. Read intern Anastasia’s reflection on her internship experience last year and have a look at the dashboard.

Microinterns at Manar al-Athar

Two interns from the University of Oxford will spend a week as micro-interns in the Manar al-Athar digital photo archive. On their first day, the interns will be trained in how to edit Wikipedia and upload to Wikimedia Commons, and will spend the rest of the week editing, with support from the Connected Heritage team as well as Manar al-Athar staff. 

Have a look at the impressive dashboard from last year’s training at Manar al-Athar. 

Are you interested in hosting a wiki internship?

If you’re interested in hosting an intern at your organisation, have a look at this document to start the planning process. 

Wikimedia UK at SOOCon23

By George Colbourn, Fundraising Coordinator at Wikimedia UK

The State Of Open Conference brings together organisations, communities and advocates of open data, technology and knowledge. This year, Wikimedia UK was excited to attend SOOC23, where we spoke with attendees from across the sector about our particular role in the open knowledge movement. It provided us with a great opportunity to network with like-minded individuals, learn about emerging trends and technologies, and gain new insights and perspectives. 

Keynote speakers included the Labour MP and shadow science minister Chi Onwurah, Google’s vice-president of Infrastructure Eric Brewer, and Open UK CEO Amanda Brock. Representing the Wikimedia Foundation was Movement Advocacy Manager Franziska Putz, who took part in a panel discussion on the relationship between open data and diplomacy. We were also delighted to hear from Jimmy Wales, who gave a fascinating keynote lecture on Wikimedia’s role in open-knowledge sharing and the challenges that both the Wikimedia projects and open knowledge sector faces today.

Jimmy Wales doing the keynote speech at SOOCon23

A particularly enjoyable aspect of this conference was the diverse range of topics covered, including cutting-edge developments in open software and hardware, best practices for team collaboration and the ethical considerations of open technology. Attendees were able to choose from a variety of sessions, workshops, and keynote speeches, allowing them to tailor their experience to suit their particular interests.

In addition to the educational aspect, this conference was a fantastic chance to connect with others, providing a chance for Wikimedia UK representatives to meet new people and form meaningful connections with potential collaborators or volunteers. After three years of largely online working, this event provided an opportunity to learn from industry experts, connect with peers, and gain exposure to the latest technologies and trends. 

Although Wikipedia is a globally recognised and utilised resource, many attendees we spoke with were not aware of the specific work that Wikimedia UK undertakes to contribute to the open knowledge movement. Therefore, it was great to be able to speak with those unfamiliar with our organisation and to discuss our work in the fields of cultural heritage, information literacy, and open knowledge advocacy. Our efforts sparked numerous questions and discussions regarding how Wikimedia can help shape the future of open technology and how to get involved with our projects.

Whether we were talking with experienced industry professionals or students just starting out, the conference was a highly  positive and rewarding experience, and it was great to speak with others who recognized the benefits of open collaboration and knowledge sharing.  As a first-time attendee representing Wikimedia UK at a conference, I was struck by the passion for open technology felt throughout the community. The commitment to advancing and promoting this sector was evident, and the experience reinforced the critical role that Wikimedia plays in this field. I was delighted to see the overwhelmingly positive response from many of the attendees towards the important work that we do.

Thank you to everyone who supported us during SOOC23, especially our volunteers Ian Watt and Navid Nezafati!

The Mixed Museum: an overview of the residency

By Leah Emary, Wikimedian in Residence at the Mixed Museum and Connected Heritage Project Lead at Wikimedia UK

As a part of the Connected Heritage project at Wikimedia UK, I have been embedded at the Mixed Museum one day a week as a Wikimedian in Residence since September. The Mixed Museum is directed by Chamion Caballero and is a digital museum and archive that contributes to widening knowledge about Black and ethnic minority British history. This blog posting reports on three aspects of the residency:

  1. Sharing Mixed Museum’s scholarship and research on Wikipedia
  2. Creating a Volunteering Programme
  3. The Brown Babies Images

The mini-Residency was initially scheduled to run from September-December 2022 but it’s been so fruitful and interesting for both the Mixed Museum and for Wikimedia UK that we decided to extend it into the first few months of 2023.

Mixed Museum Residency First Steps

The Mixed Museum’s Director Chamion has long been a supporter of Wikipedia and Wiki editing, having written a piece in 2018 about how important it is for academics to write about their work on Wikipedia and not lock academic research behind paywalls. Yet she had never had the time or opportunity to edit or write articles herself. So the Residency gave us the chance to set aside time for bespoke one on one training for her. 

Bite-sized Training Sessions

We decided to break a typical Introduction to Wikipedia training into smaller, weekly sessions rather than the usual 3-4 hour block of time. The first week, Chamion and I met on Zoom and she created an account and a user page. The second week, she created her Wikipedia sandbox and began to play with headings, inserted citations, an image, and an infobox. 

In the third session, she made her first edit to live Wikipedia and we both cheered very loudly! As a sociologist who has relied heavily on UK census data in the past, she was keen to update some misinformation and lack of nuance on the Wikipedia page on Mixed as an ethnicity category in the UK. So her first edit was to change the page summary and to add a key reference. She plans to continue work on this page. 

In our fourth training session, we returned to talking more about what does and does not belong on Wikipedia and some of the guiding principles such as notability, reliable sources, conflict of interest and systemic bias. A theme throughout each of our training sessions has been a wider consideration of how Chamion can continue to thread wiki work into the Museum’s existing workflow, and to fill content gaps on Wikipedia using the Museum’s exhibitions and scholarships. 

Telling the Brown Babies story on Wikipedia

Chamion then spent some time drafting a few paragraphs in her sandbox about the UK’s brown babies, the name given to the children of white British women and African American soldiers born during and after World War 2. The Mixed Museum hosted a successful Brown Babies exhibit which opened in 2020 and the families of these children are keen to to tell their stories more widely and especially to share some beautiful family photographs of the children, some of whom lived at a children’s home in Surrey called Holnicote House. 

There is no Wikipedia page dedicated to Holnicote House, but there is a page for Holnicote Estate, which includes a subsection on Holnicote House. So instead of creating a new page, we decided to embed the history of Holnicote House and the brown babies story onto the Holnicote Estate page. Look what a difference her edits have made: 

Before   

Before there was one sentence about the use of Holnicote House as a children’s home which was buried in the history of the house and outbuildings.

Wikipedia page for Holnicote House before the edits

After 

She created a new heading for a history of Holnicote House in the 20th century and added three paragraphs of text about who these children were and how they came to live there. She uploaded an image of the children to Wikipedia (the challenges we faced in our efforts to upload images of the brown babies to Wikimedia Commons will be the subject of another blog posting). I think the addition of the image is a particularly powerful aspect of bringing this history to life. 

Wikipedia page for Holnicote House after the edits

Though Chamion’s journey as an editor is just beginning, the impact of her work is shown in the Residency’s dashboard statistics. 12,5000 views of the 5 articles and 1 Commons upload she has worked on!

Project dashboard showing stats

Creating a Wikimedia volunteering package for The Mixed Museum

One issue for small heritage organisations is that, though there may be many people interested in volunteering for the organisation, the administrative capacity to train and manage volunteers just isn’t there. This is a problem that Chamion faces. We thought that we could perhaps create a digital volunteering programme for The Mixed Museum based on editing Wikimedia Projects in The Mixed Museum’s areas of expertise: the history of racial mixing in Britain. 

This project is particularly exciting in the heritage space because it’s entirely digital: digital museum, digital platform and digital volunteers.

Training the volunteers

To begin with, we envisioned three types of volunteer: 

  1. One with confident digital and academic skills who would be keen to learn how to edit Wikipedia
  2. One with confident digital skills who might like create digital content for Wikimedia Commons 
  3. One who might be a keen researcher, writer, creator or storyteller but who might not yet have the digital confidence to edit Wikimedia projects.

Each volunteer would require a training program which they could complete remotely and on their own time and, when they were ready, a set of tasks which they could begin work on independently. 

To begin, we recorded Chamion’s Zoom-based wiki training sessions and edited those down so that the volunteer training videos would feature Chamion’s voice and be tailored to the digital museum’s context. 

These videos will be embedded into three different Mixed Museum Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons volunteer training programmes, though they are hosted on Wikimedia Commons and YouTube. The training programmes are currently structured as three different Google Slides presentations which volunteers can click through as a self-study study tutorial. 

Managing the volunteers’ work 

A final piece of the puzzle is how to manage the volunteer programme. As the sole full time paid member of staff, Chamion does not have the time to oversee volunteer training and work in real time. So we came up with the idea of managing the training and work with the help of  two Trello boards. One Trello board is to manage the volunteers’ time and work. The second is to keep track of work which needs doing. 

In the first board, each volunteer has a section with their name on it. They can be assigned a training programme and can give updates on their progress or ask any questions on their training there. Once they have completed their training, they can either choose or be assigned a Wikimedia task. 

Trello board with a pool of Wikimedia tasks

The second Trello board holds a pool of Wikimedia tasks. In a Wikipedia editathon context, this would be known as a ‘work list’ and would usually be a list of tasks that need doing, the Wikipedia page which needs editing, a list of relevant sources to use and any advanced tutorials a new editor might need to support them. A part of the edithon would involve an editor claiming a task with their initials and going off to work on it. In the Trello board, each card contains these bits of information and the cards are categorised by which type of volunteer they might best suit: 

  1. A text-based Wikipedia task (such as adding references to Steve Stacey’s biography page
  2. A digital content creation task on Wikimedia Commons, such as uploading 19th century images of mixed race people in Ireland
  3. An off-wiki task for someone, such as identifying what’s missing on Wikipedia pages.

Volunteers can either go in and select a task that appeals to them and drag it over to their Trello workspace, or Chamion can select one for them and assign it to them. 

Trello board for volunteers to update their progress and ask questions

Volunteers can update on their progress and ask questions on tasks within Trello. Any unfinished tasks can be returned to the pool and any finished tasks can be marked as complete and archived, thus providing a record of what has been achieved.

Would you like to be a Wiki volunteer at the Mixed Museum?

We aim to prototype and test the volunteering programme with willing participants in 2023. New to wiki work and interested in helping us prototype the training? Please be in touch.

John Stockley and his mother. The babies born to black GIs and white British women were labelled ‘brown babies’ by the African-American press, far preferable to ‘half-caste’, the term used at the time in Britain.

Is copyright resulting in systemic exclusion?

The Mixed Museum used a series of images to illustrate the Brown Babies exhibition which included the story of children who lived at Holnicote House in the 1940s. From the outset, Chamion was very keen to upload these Holnicote House images to Wikimedia Commons and embed them on relevant Wikipedia pages. 

As we planned the uploads, it became clear that we did not have enough information about the provenance of the images (or where they came from) to allow them to be openly licensed and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Though there may be acceptable levels of risk that a heritage organisation might be willing to take in terms of uploading images which are likely in the public domain because of copyright elapsing or the copyright owner being untraceable, Wikimedia Commons applies a cautionary principle, and won’t accept images unless their status as copyright-free or freely licensed can be firmly established. 

After many weeks of emailing, phone calls and expert copyright advice from three sources, we were able to document a chain of donation and speak with the donor of the image. This donor’s late husband appeared in the photographs when he was a child. This donor is, like Chamion, very keen that the images be shared on Wikimedia Commons. The donor also considers this a family photograph, and her daughter’s inheritance. Yet we cannot establish whether the photos were taken by the Holnicote House employees in the course of their employment (and would therefore be the property of the employer) or if the photographers were not employed by Holnicote House (and therefore copyright would be owned by the photographer or their heir). Either way, because this information cannot be firmly established, these photographs are not able to be uploaded to Commons under existing rules.  

I raised the issue at the Village Pump on Commons, because it seems to me and Chamion that the unintended consequence of this strict application to UK copyright law results in systemic bias against children who grew up in care. And mixed race and Black children in Britain are disproportionately overrepresented in the care system so this issue will impact the family photographs of mixed race and Black people more than others. Please contribute to the discussion on the Village Pump if you’re keen to move this along!

What next? 

The obvious and usual answer to these types of issues is to avoid images from the 20th century or ones where the creator is unknown, ‘complicated’ or ‘problematic’. From a wiki perspective, we often will turn to the low hanging fruit such as 19th century or earlier images or contemporary ones created expressly for Wikimedia Commons. By ignoring ‘complicated’ images such as the ones of the Brown Babies, however, we are systematically excluding important histories. 

In addition, one needs to be very careful particularly about framing mixed race families as ‘problematic’ or ‘complicated’ or ‘not respectable’. This carries racist overtones and there is a legacy of discrimination based on these very categories in England and elsewhere. At Wikimedia UK, we focus “on knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. We break down the barriers that prevent people and organisations from accessing and contributing to open knowledge, and support the development of people-centred and technical solutions to help eradicate inequality and bias on the Wikimedia projects.” -Wikimedia UK Strategic Framework 2022-2025. This example of the Brown Babies images gives us a chance to dive deeper, to reflect, and to move the dial where systemic exclusion on Wikimedia platforms exists, rather than to avoid these in favour of images or subjects which might be more straightforward. 

Open licensing is a lot of work

That said, the amount of work, expertise, and time involved in this process is prohibitive for many heritage and cultural organisations. We were able to achieve this at The Mixed Museum because of the time dedicated through the Wikimedian in Residence programme and because Chamion was motivated to understand open licensing in the interest of pursuing National Lottery Heritage funding.

The work of establishing ownership, understanding copyright alongside open licensing, the rules of Wikimedia Commons and discussing how it applied in this case took several months. We involved an experienced Wikimedian, a former Wikimedia Commons Bureaucrat and two experts in copyright in the GLAM sector. Not to mention Chamion herself, me, the donor, and my fellow Digital Skills Wikimedian Lucy Hinnie. We also drew on the expertise of the Wikimedia UK community and at the Village Pump on Commons. 

Even after all this work, we’re still undecided about whether we can openly license the Holnicote House images for Wikimedia Commons.

If we consider other cultural and heritage organisations who do not have these resources and knowledge to call upon, for example, a small community archives group, it seems clear that they would not be able to engage with Wikimedia Commons. A group or an individual that is sourcing, digitising and preserving family photographs and would potentially like to license these openly would have a lot of work to do to answer these questions. Even with grant funding, people are just too overstretched with the work of the actual project to engage much with the licensing and copyright issues. As Chamion and I remarked frequently to each other, anyone who wasn’t us would have given up long before we did! 

Interested in hosting a Wikimedian in Residence?

If you are involved with a heritage or cultural organisation in the United Kingdom and you think a Wikimedian in Residence might be good for your organisation, please talk to us about it. You can book a half hour meeting with the Connected Heritage team via Calendly or drop us an email. 

Train the Trainer Dec2022 Feedback

By Esma Gjertsen, Volunteer Coordinator at Wikimedia UK

We organised the most recent iteration of our Train the Trainer (TtT) course in 2022 in the first week of December.

TtT trains volunteers who are keen to deliver Wikipedia editing events. Volunteer trainers are at the heart of delivering Wikimedia UK programmes. They act as community leaders and extend our work to underrepresented communities. They train new and existing editors. We currently have 45 trainers in 33 different locations across the country.

This term 15 trainers attended our course. The training equipped candidate trainers with the skills, experience and resources to deliver a standard Introduction to Wikipedia workshop. The second part of the training focused on Developing Community Partnerships. This session brought together candidate and accredited trainers and served as an opportunity to network as well as learning about how to establish connections with different communities and institutions.

Objectives

“I want to feel ready and confident to run a successful edit-a-thon.”

Candidate trainers expressed their objectives for attending the TtT as:

  • Improve confidence in delivering training
  • Learn how to support new editors from non-academic backgrounds
  • Explore how to handle difficult questions
  • Structure engaging and interesting sessions
  • Approach institutions and communities
  • Contribute to controversial subjects on Wikipedia
  • Organise translation events

Commitments

“I will revisit the role-play scenarios to inform the outreach to museums that I’m going to do.”

Following the training, our trainers committed themselves to:

  • Get in touch with their networks to scope out editing events
  • Translate materials to their native languages
  • Identify who to contact
  • Study the TtT checklists and template emails in organising future events
  • Follow up with existing contacts 
  • Think about how to engage better with participants after events
  • Set up and promote volunteering projects
  • Share learnings with colleagues
  • Find framework/funding for Wikimedian residencies
  • Follow more people on social media, and actually take up space

Feedback

“Really enjoyed the training, learnt a lot and look forward to putting it into practice.”

We are glad to see that our trainers had an overall good experience. We received 9 responses (60%) to our questionnaire that requested feedback for the pre-training information, training sessions, communication, training venue, catering, and online experience. All participants rated their experience 4 and above out of 5.

Introduction to Wikipedia

Developing Community Partnerships

We noted the following constructive feedback with appreciation:

  • Shadowing the lead trainers to see how to set up the dashboard, the worklist, etc.
  • Shorter day for especially online participants
  • More time for interactive exercises such as role-playing
  • Providing more context about the training content
  • Interaction between the in-person and remote participants

We will strive to improve future sessions with these in mind. We will particularly pay attention to develop opportunities for bringing together in-person and remote participants, thus creating a truly hybrid experience for all.

Poems championing free knowledge inspired by University of Leeds students

To celebrate Wikipedia’s 22nd birthday on Sunday 15 January, the University of Leeds is sharing poems inspired by conversations between two poets, postgraduates in the Faculty of Biological Sciences, and staff in the Library and Digital Education Service:

The poets were invited to contribute to a Wikimedia Champions project (funded by Research England) that is seeking to embrace Open Education as part of the University of Leeds Libraries ‘Knowledge for All’ 2030 strategy.

Hira Khan, one of the postgraduate researchers on the project, said: “This project is an amazing initiative and is a great starting point for me, as a scientist, to fulfil my responsibility in making science more accessible and understandable. The Wiki family is a much more regulated and robust source of information than I previously anticipated. I believe there is a heavy misconception on how Wiki is regulated and is usually referred to as an ‘untrustworthy source’. It was quite enlightening to see otherwise.”

Beth Soanes, another postgraduate researcher on the project researcher, commented: “Working on this Wikimedia project alongside my research has been a truly enriching experience… Going forward, I would like to continue to provide Wikimedia Commons with figures and schematics to aid articles in my area of interest… I will also continue to use Wikimedia as a resource myself, and hope to contribute to Wikidata in particular more and more throughout my career. I am especially interested in open accessibility in science, and see this as a new frontier in science communication.”

Wikipedia: the world’s largest free online encyclopaedia

Contributors to Wikipedia have sought to support free knowledge, open collaboration, and trust on the internet. In times when disinformation and polarisation have been challenging our trust in information and institutions, Wikipedia is as relevant as ever. 

Today on Wikipedia, more than 55 million articles can be accessed in over 300 languages, for free, and without advertisements, all created by volunteers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wikipedia saw record-breaking increases in daily traffic with a growing community of medical professionals contributing knowledge about COVID-19 to the platform. Studies have shown that Wikipedia is one of the most-viewed sources for health information, and its role in providing trusted access to information about COVID-19 in the pandemic led to a milestone collaboration with the World Health Organization in October 2020.

“In a world where information is increasingly commoditised, Wikipedia’s model has always been based on the belief that knowledge belongs to all humans,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said. “Wikipedia forces us to step outside of our echo chambers and contend with what a shared understanding of the world could really look like. After all, a Wikipedia article is the same no matter who or where you are in the world, and if something isn’t right in the article, you can change it.”