Skip to content

Ch 2 Wikipedia

Jump to bottom
Gabriel Bodard edited this page Jan 26, 2023 · 18 revisions

SunoikisisDC Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage, Spring 2023

Session 2: Using and Editing Wikipedia

Thursday January 26, 2023, starting at 16:00 GMT = 17:00 CET (for 90 minutes)

Convenors: Monica Berti (Universität Leipzig), Gabriel Bodard (University of London), Richard Nevell (Wikimedia UK), Katharine Shields (King's College London)

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/CwrxsrPhdQQ

Slides: Download slides (PDF)

Outline

This session introduces the community-edited Wikipedia project, and the ecosystem of open and collaborative resources that surround the largest crowdsourced encyclopaedia on the Web. We focus on issues and challenges, including representation, accuracy, bias, sources and intellectual property, and projects and communities that aim to address inequalities and other problems with the recording especially of historical and classical information in Wikipedia, including the case study of the Women's Classical Committee’s Wikipedia project, creating articles for underrepresented woman classicists. Guidance on authoring and editing for Wikipedia will also be given.

Seminar readings

  1. Victoria Leonard & Sarah E. Bond. 2019. “Advancing Feminism Online.” Studies in Late Antiquity 3.1, 4–16. Available: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:23429/
  2. Martin Poulter & Waqas Ahmed. 2021. "Representation of Non-Western Cultural Knowledge on Wikipedia: The Case of the Visual Arts" (preprint). Available: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202104.0770/v1

Further reading

  • Bevan, A., Pett, D. et al. 2014. "Citizen Archaeologists. Online Collaborative Research about the Human Past." Human Computation 1:2:185-199 DOI: 10.15346/hc.v1i2.9
  • Blumenkron, A., Goodall, A. & Panesar, L. 2022. "Decolonising Wikipedia: opportunities for digital knowledge activism." Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal 5.1, 95-100. Available: https://sparkjournal.arts.ac.uk/index.php/spark/article/view/159
  • Dunn, S. & Hedges, M. 2013. "Crowd-sourcing as a Component of Humanities Research Infrastructures." International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 7.1, 147-169. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2013.0086
  • Lala Hajibayova & Kiersten F. Latham. 2017. “Exploring Museum Crowdsourcing Projects through Bordieu’s Lens.” Knowledge Organization 44-7, 506-514. Available: https://www.ergon-verlag.de/isko_ko/downloads/ko_44_2017_7_e.pdf
  • Jones, Lori & Nevell, Richard. 2016. "Plagued by doubt and viral misinformation: the need for evidence-based use of historical disease images", Lancet Infectious Diseases 16 (10) https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(16)30119-0, open access at https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/27873 (A case study of how information can spread online, and the role of crowd-sourcing in verifying and correcting information)
  • Moore, Lucy & Nevell, Richard. 2021. "Race, gender, and Wikipedia: how the global encyclopaedia deals with inequality" Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 31 (1) http://doi.org/10.5334/bha-660 (A short piece in a special edition about inequality and race in the histories of archaeology)
  • Orlandi, S. 2016. "Ancient Inscriptions between Citizens and Scholars: The Double Soul of the EAGLE Project." In Romanello M. & Bodard G, Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber. London: Ubiquity Press. Available: https://doi.org/10.5334/bat.l
  • Ridge, Mia. 2013. "From Tagging to Theorizing: Deepening Engagement with Cultural Heritage through Crowdsourcing." Curator 56.4, 435–450. Available: http://oro.open.ac.uk/39117/
  • Ridge, Mia. 2016. Making digital history: The impact of digitality on public participation and scholarly practices in historical research. PhD thesis Open University. Available: http://oro.open.ac.uk/45519/
  • Robbins, K. 2013. "Balancing the scales: exploring the variable effects of collection bias on data collected by the Portable Antiquities Scheme." Landscapes 14.1, 54-72.

Other resources

Exercise

NB: If you are in or from a place where editing Wikipedia is prohibited or dangerous, please DO NOT attempt the Wikipedia exercise. An alternative exercise involving the Digital Classicist Wiki can be found in this page.

  1. If you do not already have one, create an account on Wikipedia. Please choose a username that your colleagues will be able to recognise as you (if you prefer not to use your real name, tell us what username you have chosen). If you cannot use Wikipedia for any reason, you must choose the alternative exercise below.

  2. Before you start the main exercise, if you have created a new WP account, you should spend a bit of time looking for typos, unclear phrases, incorrect punctuation, or other very small and uncontroversial things you can correct. Once you have a dozen small edits under your belt, your account is less likely to be flagged as suspicious.

  3. In discussion with your group of colleagues, choose a page or small group of pages on Wikipedia that you would like to expand or improve. Start with small things: for example, add a reference to a secondary source, improve a description of an ancient place or person, or similar. If you add new information, remember to add a reference to a notable secondary source supporting the statement.

  4. Look at the pages edited by your colleagues, and if you can comment on or further improve those pages. Keep an eye on your page·s over the next few weeks, and see if anyone else engages with your edits. (Caveat: This may not always be a positive experience!)

Finding pages to work on

Clone this wiki locally