Knowledge equity refers to the expansion and diversification of valued knowledge. It looks to engage with the understandings, expertise and experiences of communities who have historically been excluded from social discourse.

Systemic bias and historic repression are key reasons for this marginalisation, yet by increasing knowledge equity on platforms like Wikipedia we all benefit from the shared resource we’ve improved.

Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has developed into a central hub for the world’s knowledge to coexist, accessed across the planet and enabling us to learn, contribute and share. As the validity, trustworthiness and editorship of Wikipedia has grown, so has its reach and diversity of content. With over 260 million page views per month, the online encyclopaedia has become an almost all-encompassing source of information.

Helping Wikipedia to represent the sum of all human knowledge is no simple task however. The systemic biases and cultural inequalities we see in the world around us are reflected in Wikipedia’s content. These biases are widely varied, relating to gender, culture, geography and religious worldviews among others. In addition, the biases on Wikipedia and its sister projects like Wikidata are both internal and external. Factors such as the availability of published sources, internet accessibility and political censorship result in a highly unbalanced level of engagement with Wikimedia across the world, the result being that European and North American issues and culture are covered more extensively. 

Knowledge Equity is a strategic focus for Wikimedia UK – our work in this field has resulted in a significant impact on the breadth and quality of cultural content on Wikimedia projects, as well as the diversity of groups and communities engaging with open knowledge. Together with key collaborators we have worked extensively on closing the gender gap, preserving minority languages, and delivering projects that increase access to underrepresented cultural heritage.

Our work with community groups, museums, galleries and educational institutions has made significant contributions to addressing inequality and knowledge gaps on Wikipedia.

For example, our partnership with the Khalili Collections – launched in 2019 – led to a research project in 2021 focusing on the diversity of visual arts content on Wikipedia. The research undertaken by Dr Martin Poulter and Waqās Ahmed highlighted significant biases, showing that Wikipedia gives many times more coverage to visual art from the Western tradition than for all other cultures’ visual art combined. Through this research, we have been able to propose actions that will give Wikipedia a more global perspective on visual arts. It also highlights to the global community of editors where the knowledge gaps lie, resulting in work to significantly improve articles on previously underrepresented culture. 

Through a University Arts London (UAL) staff secondment, the Decolonising Wikipedia Network was formed. The network ran training events for staff and students so they could play an active role in the decolonisation of knowledge, making their Wikipedia editing a form of knowledge activism. We also run our annual Celtic Knot conference, showcasing innovative approaches to open knowledge and open data that support and grow Indigenous language communities

Supporting Wikimedia UK for this year’s Giving Tuesday will enable us to continue engaging new organisations, communities and individuals to deliver impact through these unique projects. Together we can support communities across the UK to create and share knowledge, wisdom and experience where systemic bias and other barriers have previously inhibited representation.

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Wikiproject Palestine-Wales was a month-long editathon, which took place in August 2021, between Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia Levant. The event generated a total of 242 new articles.

Wikipedians from both communities listed the most important articles from their respective languages and translated them as a token of friendship. The wikiproject contributed to reducing the cultural as well as content gap on Wikipedia, and strengthened the bond between the State of Palestine and Wales, both Levantine and Welsh communities.

Half way through the programme, the organisers reached out to the Cornish editors who flocked over to the project in droves. They created a list of subjects based on Cornwall (for example, King Doniert’s Stone (Cornish, Welsh, Arabic, English, Stargazy pie and an article on the Cornish language revival) which were subsequently translated into Arabic and Welsh. This was their first Wikiproject and 7 editors participated; all in all, 32 editors contributed. There’s a Welsh saying that it’s easier for two mountains to get together, than two people; in this case we got three mountains!

The themes were mostly cultural: food, places of interest, women of note, education and COVID-19. Among the articles written in Arabic and Cornish on Wales were, Gwenno Saunders (English, Arabic, Welsh, Cornish), bara brith loaf and Aberystwyth University. The Cornish editors created 44 new articles, just shy of the Palestine editors who wrote 57 articles, and the Welsh community created 142 new articles.

In the context of languages, perhaps the winners are the Cornish speakers. There are 300 million Arabic speakers, 750,000 Welsh speakers and around 2,000 Cornish speakers. However, the number of articles per language was:

Cornish – 44

Arabic – 57

Welsh – 142

So the winner is… all 3 communities!

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Wikipedia is a magnificent tool for sharing knowledge with an enormous reach. Its pages are read 20 billion times every month. But like the world around us, it reflects some long-standing inequalities. At Wikimedia UK one of our strategic priorities is to increase the engagement and representation of marginalised people and subjects. We want to challenge these inequalities and help redress them by sharing information.

Universities and museums – keystones of education and heritage communication – are currently working out how to decolonise their curriculum and their collections. Doing so widens the variety of voices in interpreting and understanding our heritage. Within the context of higher education, courses often focus on the work of white, western people. Decolonisation aims to bring more diverse research into the curriculum.

Finding the best path to decolonisation can be tricky. Removing a subject from a curriculum, or a group of authors from a reading list, does not address the underlying structural inequalities which mean that reading lists tend to be predominantly white. Widening the range of sources used and exploring how the colonial past influences how particular subjects are approached and researched today is important.

Wikipedia itself needs to be decolonised. It began as an English language project, and while it is available in more than 300 languages English is still by far the largest. The dominance of English and a small group of languages risks eroding smaller languages. For people who speak more than one language, they tend to gravitate to where there is more content – even if it is in a language they are less fluent in. While language is an issue, it is one factor that Wikipedia needs to address and it extends to the content of our pages. The Wikipedia article about historians has images of eight people – all of whom are male and European.

Wikimedia UK is taking active steps to combat this. We run events improving Wikipedia’s coverage of under-represented subjects; we support residencies such as those at Coventry University and the Khalili Collections; and we run an annual conference supporting small language communities, the Celtic Knot. The conference has showcased the work of Welsh, Cornish, Irish, and Suomi communities amongst others and helped foster their work.

Coventry University has a programme of activity which aims to decolonise the curriculum, and our Wikimedian in Residence there, Andy Mabbett, is helping lecturers use Wikipedia as a way students can make information about a wide range of topics more accessible. The Khalili Collections comprise 35,000 items, including collections about Islamic art and Japanese culture. The Resident, Martin Poulter, has been sharing information about the collections through Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons, bringing them to a new audience. The images are already seen by a million people a month through Wikimedia.

We are working with organisations such the London College of Communications who have established a Decolonising Wikipedia Network. In the process of learning about Wikipedia and how it works, the students have an opportunity to redress some of the imbalances within Wikipedia. Many of our events try to highlight marginalised communities and figures who have otherwise been overlooked by Wikipedia; it is an ongoing process, often culturally sensitive and one which will take years.

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

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

What is Wikidata?

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

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

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

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

How can Wikidata support minority language Wikipedias?

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

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

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

Why translate labels on Wikidata?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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