Never before has the world had a tool like Wikidata. The semantic database behind Wikipedia and virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa is only ten years old this month, and yet with almost 100 million unique items, it’s the biggest open database ever. Wiki Education’s “Wikidata Will” Kent gathered key players in the Wikidataverse to reflect on the last ten years and set our sights on the next ten. Kelly Doyle, the Open Knowledge Coordinator for the Smithsonian Institution; Andrew Lih, Wikimedian at Large with Smithsonian Institution and Wikimedia strategist with the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Lane Rasberry, Wikimedian in Residence at University of Virginia’s Data Science Institute discussed the “little database that could” (not so little anymore!).

In our webinar (one of four this month celebrating Wikidata’s birthday), audience members joined us from libraries, universities, museums, galleries, and Wikimedia projects from all around the world. Kelly posed an important question to us: as knowledge professionals and stewards, what is our responsibility in building, curating, and tending to a database that reaches millions of people?

“We’ve really never had this opportunity,” said Andrew. “Folks from all different academic backgrounds, from different languages and cultures, can treat Wikidata’s taxonomy as a malleable lump of clay and try to converge on some version of consensus for how to model the world.” As the founder of Wikidata Denny Vrandecic and the Product Manager for Wikidata Lydia Pintscher have said, “Wikidata is an ontological playground.”

This playground is becoming more and more embedded in our online knowledge structures, connecting everyone to everything, everywhere. “Wikidata is the portal to the linked open web,” said Lane. “As soon as content gets into Wikidata, it reaches huge audiences around the world. Big tech companies index it. They start sending it in every direction. As does anyone else who wants access to a free and open database. Anyone can copy this stuff; anyone can recirculate it.”

Data science is a forming field, and it’s no different with Wikidata. As Andrew mentioned, it’s this malleability that makes the open repository so powerful. “If you get tapped into Wikidata, you get tapped into an ethical network,” Lane added. Even with its gaps and inaccuracies, there’s nothing else like it. “Who’s doing better at this?” Lane asked. “Who else has convened the global community to get together and have conversations about this? There is no ideal data set out there, but where are you going to find one better?”

Sure, we’re a long way to go from having the perfect repository. It will never exist, as Lane pointed out. But the radical beauty of Wikidata is how the community goes about striving for it anyway. As Will said, it’s the humanity inherent in Wikidata’s structure and culture that makes it different from other data repositories.

Even so, attempting to model the world through consensus is messy. “As anyone who dives into Wikidata knows, we’ve got a lot of inconsistencies, missing parts,” Andrew pointed out. “But boy, we’ve never had this opportunity before to try to do it collectively and collaboratively. When it works, it really works in ways that nothing else can. I think that’s one of the miracles of Wikidata.”

Becoming a Wikidata contributor enters you into this community that grapples with data ethics every day. The community, which spans countries and languages, discusses issues and precedents with transparency and openness. As problems appear, the community is designed to chew through them together. This is how Wikidata has come so far in a short time.

Will, our host, shared his own perspective as Wiki Education’s Wikidata Program Manager. Knowledge institutions, he suggested, are actually missing out if they’re not participating. “In my capacity, I teach a lot of courses and we work with a lot of professional institutions, and it might sound simplistic, but representation is huge. If you’re not on Wikidata, you can’t be linked to all these other things. So being more deliberate about what’s there versus what’s not is actually pretty radical. And being more thorough and accurate with all the data has a huge impact.” Knowledge institutions like the Met and MoMA consider it the authoritative place to disambiguate data. Their webpages feature Wikidata Q numbers now, rather than traditional powerhouses like Getty, because Wikidata is the biggest arts database out there. “The good news is that it wasn’t even hard to convince the Met of that,” said Andrew. “Now it’s just a matter of implementation.”

Kelly stressed that working on Wikidata is an efficient way for a single person or team to start a ripple effect in the informational stratosphere, especially since Wikidata is a semantic database. “For institutions like the Smithsonian or the Met who want to batch upload into Wikidata, that data can be read in over 200 languages with just one person doing the work,” Kelly shared. “Multilingual collaboration is real,” Andrew added. “It’s not just a theory. It actually happens with Wikidata. And it happens every second of every day.” “And it’s then impacting those language Wikipedias,” Kelly continued. “Especially in the gender gap space, where I primarily work, the question is why would we host an edit-a-thon if some of this content might be taken down or is not considered notable enough. We’re going to do all this research and it might not be able to stay on Wikipedia. But this is a great pivot to Wikidata because we can batch upload these lists of names and all of the biographical information behind it and have that in Wikidata because the notability threshold is lower. That’s really significant because we can then use what we put in Wikidata to build a case for later Wikipedia article creation.”

Wikidata and Wikipedia editing isn’t just beneficial to institutions. It’s a skillset that is becoming more relevant in the spheres of knowledge curation, creation, and archiving. “Wiki skills are professional skills,” Will chimed in. “For a lot of you attending this webinar, you do things that other people don’t do in your line of work. And that’s an asset.” One of Wiki Education’s goals with this Wikidata Speaker Series itself is to share innovative ways professionals are accomplishing their goals through Wikidata and hopefully inspire others to join this community as it influences more and more of the content people get on the internet.

And its impact will only continue to grow. “It’s important to remind folks how crucial Wikidata is to the fabric of knowledge now,” said Andrew. “Wikidata is being massively used in AI now for training, for trying to understand the world, for better or worse. It can be a little scary to think that they’re depending on Wikidata for the future of humanity. But it is the best assembly of human knowledge so far.”

So what’s next? The internet looks incredibly different now than it did ten years ago, and it will continue to adapt to meet people’s information needs. “Wikidata, Wikipedia, and the ecosystem gets a billion unique visitors a year,” Lane pointed out. “Big tech is doing some things in Wikidata. I’d like to counterbalance that with more museums and more universities getting involved.” That way, we can ensure a diverse group of experts will shape this ontological playground and share the best possible knowledge billions of times.

“When you add all of this together: all this attention on Wikidata, how Wikidata handles the social and ethical aspects of data, and all the data sets we can get from traditional and conventional resources, then you get absolute magic,” Lane continued. “You put all this in Wikidata, it mixes together, and you get new creative data, remixed data, things that would be unthinkable to create in any other way. It can only happen if you have everybody in the world, community representatives from all these institutions socializing in Wikipedia and Wikidata, remixing this, and then spreading it out. That’s the big cookie.”

Want to be a part of the big cookie? If you’d like Wikidata training, the Wikidata Institute has three upcoming training courses starting in November, January, and March. Consider also signing up for our next 3 webinar events celebrating Wikidata’s birthday all of October. 

Watch Tuesday’s webinar in full on our Youtube. 

Thumbnail image by Matt Britt CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

In four Wiki Scholars courses, museum professionals who work at one of the Smithsonian’s nearly 200 Affiliates collaborated with each other and Wiki Education’s team to add and expand biographies of notable women on Wikipedia. Over 6 weeks, they learned how to use Wikimedia projects as tools in their work to preserve and share knowledge with the public. All told, we trained 74 museum professionals how to edit Wikipedia, representing 53 different Smithsonian Affiliate museums, and they improved more than 160 articles. By embedding Wikipedia know-how within their institution, the Smithsonian has developed a network of new Wikipedians to continue this important work both through their own editing and through organizing local projects.

This is the story of how we worked together to bring high-quality information about historic women to the public — and how other organizations can make that happen for their faculty, staff, or members.

There are two key components to this project:

1. museum professionals from across the United States learn how to edit Wikipedia; 
2. we expand public knowledge of notable American women from across the U.S. by leveraging museum collections and materials.

1) Wiki Scholars courses teach museum professionals how to edit Wikipedia

During the 6-week courses, Wiki Education’s team of Wikipedia experts facilitated collaborative group sessions among the museum professionals and provided ongoing support as the scholars made their first edits. We worked together as they incorporated published information about notable and underrepresented American women from their collections onto Wikipedia, helping them navigate Wikipedia’s technical, procedural, and cultural practices. One participant reported that “it was great to have timely responses to even the smallest questions. It was also great to just have a safe environment in class to be confused while starting up the project.” When asked if the experience met their expectations, one participant said, “YES! I was eager to learn the back-end and was gobsmacked about how much actually goes into the development and editing of pages. I really had no idea about the back end of how the Wikipedia process comes together.”

Our tried-and-tested Wiki Scholars course curriculum brings “newbies” into the community in a relatively short period, and we’re thrilled with how much participants enjoy the whole experience. One said that the course “exceeded [their] expectations with an exceptionally well thought out curriculum and a thoughtful instructor who made the content digestible.”

On top of learning how Wikipedia works, this course gave employees across Smithsonian Affiliate institutions the unique chance to collaborate with each other and learn about work at other museums.

Now, they’re primed to continue adding archival materials to Wikipedia, and they can find the tools and support they need to organize in their regions. Deborah Krieger, the Exhibit & Program Coordinator for the Museum of Work & Culture in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, has already hosted an edit-a-thon, where she and fellow participants helped improve articles related to five women featured in the museum’s recent exhibit, Rhode Island Women Create. Another participant said, “I learned exactly what I came in to do and can use these tools for additional programming!”

2) The public benefits from untold stories about American women

With its wide availability, Wikipedia presents a unique chance to democratize knowledge about notable figures in U.S. history. But who traditionally determines what’s ‘notable’? Both the volunteer editors and the publications available to them, since Wikipedia biographies require citations from reputable sources. The community of editors in the United States typically cluster geographically in major cities like New York, Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Those active editors have built strong initiatives in their localities, running editing events, responding to local interest in Wikimedia projects, and fostering fun and fulfilling communities that keep editors engaged for years.

Thanks to those organizers, we’ve seen an influx of new editors in these regions over the last two decades. They excel at writing local legends into Wikipedia, making their stories more widely known. So how do we shed light on the hidden figures from other parts of the country?

Wiki Education has been eager to activate editors outside of the major clusters who can build Wikipedia outreach into their professional lives. This project with the Smithsonian presented a great opportunity to bring together Wikipedia novices from across the United States, working with people from Rhode Island, Michigan, Montana, New Mexico, and 21 other states.

By bringing editors from diverse regions to Wikipedia, we are able to tell the story of American history beyond the names we know from our history books, especially when these editors have access to hyper-local archives and materials. Museum professionals identified the untold stories from their institutions’ own collections and brought them to a broader audience than the visitors who walk through their doors. As one participant, Freya Liggett, of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, Washington, said, “Projects like the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative can make significant contributions to Wikipedia’s content and open new ways for people to connect with resources at your museum.”

Freya developed a new biography for Wikipedia, writing about Estelle Reel. The suffragist and politician served as the national Superintendent of Indian Schools between 1898 and 1910. After the “many news stories [in 2021] about the grim legacy of North American Indian boarding schools,” Liggett thought it was important to add Reel’s role in the history of Indian schools, thus documenting the “individuals behind America’s assimilation-based education policies and the effects on Native children.” Though Reel’s role in developing racist curriculum to assimilate Indian children into white society is not a pretty one, these stories deserve to be accessible to the public, especially to honor Indian culture and history.

Erica Schumann, a member of the Development Team at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, created an article about Opal Lee, widely known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth.” Erica says she was shocked Opal Lee didn’t have an article, despite the considerable amount of national media attention she’d gotten. The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History had been working with Lee’s family to develop an exhibit display recognizing her for her achievements. So Erica dove right in to create her biography in her sandbox, a private drafting space on Wikipedia. While Erica’s draft was still in her sandbox, another editor created the article; Erica ended up moving her drafted text into the article others had started. “When I started sandboxing the article, I had no idea Juneteenth would become a federal holiday just a couple weeks later!” she said. “In the middle of the course, on June 17, 2021, Opal Lee saw her dream become a reality as she joined President Biden as he signed the bill formally establishing Juneteenth as a national holiday. This led to Ms. Lee gaining a significant amount of national and international attention over the course of just a few days, and it was incredible to see all the views the article was immediately getting! It was fantastic to see the article being updated in real time to reflect Ms. Lee’s huge accomplishment, and I am so grateful I got to be a part of that editing experience.” In only six months, Opal Lee’s biography has reached more than 20,000 readers, bringing one Texan’s story to a huge audience thanks to Wikipedia and editors like Schumann.

In 2021, a Wikipedia editor approached the Hagley Museum and Library with a rights and reproductions request: could they have images of the patent models Hagley had in their collection for inventor William E. Sawyer? Hagley Registrar Jennifer Johns immediately saw Wikipedia as another way to generate interest in their collection. As a part of the Wiki Scholars course, Jennifer expanded biographies of four notable women: Frances Gabe, Harriet Tracy, Clarissa Britain, and Anne Marguerite Hyde de Neuville. All are subjects of Hagley’s collection; the first three are inventors and the fourth is an artist in the collection whose work Jennifer likes. Because Jennifer had access to the museum’s collections, she was able to use photographs she’d taken of the patent models. Hagley is opening a new patent model exhibit, Nation of Inventors, in spring 2022, and Jennifer has made it her mission to ensure all the represented have Wikipedia biographies. After that, she says, she’ll tackle a larger project: ensuring all women inventors in Hagley’s collection have Wikipedia articles.

Above, you can see the quantitative impact this group has had over the past year. Their hard work (adding 81,000 words!!) has reached nearly 3 million people in less than a year. Now, anyone with access to the internet can learn about Anne Burlak, a labor organizer from Pennsylvania who helped shape labor standards for textile unions. Perhaps they’ll read about Cornelia Clarke, a nature photographer from Grinnell, Iowa, or Minnie M. Cox, the first Black postmaster in Mississippi.

3) We brought unique perspectives to Wikipedia

This project had another unintended impact on Wikipedia: 86% of the Wiki Scholars use “She/Her” pronouns.

You’ve probably heard of the Wikipedia gender gap — that far more people who identify as men edit Wikipedia than those who identify as women or different gender identities. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and other projects, releases periodic “Community Insights” reports, which include demographic data on Wikipedia’s editing community. The 2021 Community Insights report shows the progress that’s been made on that front recently: Globally, women made up 15% of contributors, but in Northern America, where Wiki Education’s programs operate, that number is 22%. In contrast, self-reported survey data from across Wiki Education’s programs show that 67% of our program participants identify as women. The Smithsonian collaboration had an even higher percentage of participants who use “She/Her” pronouns: 86%!

Wiki Education has shown time and time again that providing a space for structured learning and discussion — like the weekly Zoom classes — helps new Wikipedia editors tackle the work it takes to write high-quality Wikipedia articles, especially for the first time. On this International Women’s Day, we’re celebrating that we’ve created a supportive learning environment that brings more diversity to the projects. As one Smithsonian Wiki Scholar put it, “REPRESENTATION MATTERS. Our course was focused on populating Wikipedia with notable women. The benefit is that now at least 50 or so new articles will be online for women who otherwise would have no online presence. That matters.” That matters for representation in Wikipedia’s content, and it matters for representation among the editors.

How other institutions can celebrate International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month by developing a similar project

Our team works personally with organizations like the Smithsonian to set up Wikipedia training courses that align with their mission and bring untold stories to Wikipedia. We’re eager to continue this work, but we need your help. You can sponsor a course like this one for your team. This unique, fun professional development experience is fulfilling for scholars as they share knowledge with the world, and we can’t wait to bring more subject-matter experts into our community.

If you’re interested in beginning a conversation about buying out a customized course for members or staff of your organization, contact us at partner@wikiedu.org.

Photo credits: Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 371, Box 02, Folder: December 1975, Image No. 75-14850-05; Bain News Service, publisher, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Baroness Anne-Marguerite-Henriette Hyde de Neuville, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

As the Exhibit & Program Coordinator for the Museum of Work & Culture in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Deborah Krieger organizes the museum’s changing exhibitions, develops programming to accompany those exhibitions, and works on the museum’s permanent exhibits. She also has a master’s degree in Public Humanities from Brown University. In both her academic and professional careers, Deborah had used Wikipedia — a lot.

The Museum of Work & Culture is a division of the Rhode Island Historical Society that tells the story of French-Canadian immigration to the Blackstone Valley and their lives as workers in the area’s textile mills — and it’s also a member of the Smithsonian Affiliates. As part of the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative, Wiki Education ran a series of Wiki Scholars courses, teaching Affiliates staff how to improve Wikipedia biographies of American women related to their collection. Deborah, as an avid Wikipedia reader, signed up to also become an editor.

“I have used Wikipedia many, many, many times over the years, and have observed as it became a more and more useful and reliable resource and jumping-off point for research and information, so I like to think I brought a Wikipedia user’s enthusiasm as well as professional and academic expertise to the course,” she says.

Perhaps that deep reader experience gave Deborah a better grasp of how to create a well-developed biography article than many new editors come to Wikipedia with — because she brought her first article, on Anne Burlak, from a short article of three or four total paragraphs all the way up to Good Article status on Wikipedia. A Good Article designation is given after an extensive peer review process; fewer than 1% of all articles on Wikipedia reach this status, and it’s extremely rare for a newcomer to achieve it with their first article, as Deborah did.

“The Wiki Education class really helped me learn about the process of editing Wikipedia — most important, how to take an underpopulated article to a Good Article, as my article on Anne Burlak was recently deemed!” she says. “Using the sandbox, responding to editorial comments and suggestions from other Wikipedians… all very helpful as I decide which article to work on next.”

Deborah chose Anne Burlak as the focus of her work as she is featured in the Museum of Work & Culture’s history of local unions. A union organizer and activist, Burlak even inspired a poem by Muriel Rukeyser.

“I thought it would be a great opportunity to study Burlak and collect the disparate sources of information about her on the internet into a place where people interested in labor history could learn about the ‘Red Flame,’ as she was known,” Deborah says.

Since taking the course, Deborah was inspired to host an edit-a-thon, where she and fellow participants helped improve articles related to five women featured in the museum’s recent exhibit, Rhode Island Women Create. Next up for Deborah is to get more involved in Wikipedia, potentially as an article reviewer for other Good Article nominations, since she had such a great experience working with the editor who reviewed her work.

“Since Wikipedia is based on collaboration and reciprocity, I think I could help pay it forward by helping another Wikipedian take their work to the next level,” she says.

Image credit: Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Earlier this year, a Wikipedia editor approached the Hagley Museum and Library with a rights and reproductions request: could they have images of the patent models Hagley had in their collection for inventor William E. Sawyer? Hagley Registrar Jennifer Johns immediately saw Wikipedia as another way to generate interest in their collection.

Hagley is a Smithsonian Affiliate institution, and for the last year, Wiki Education has been running Wiki Scholars courses as part of the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative to work with Affiliate staff to improve biographies of American women on Wikipedia.

Wiki Education’s instructor, Will Kent, guided Jennifer and other Affiliate staff through a Wikipedia editing course via Zoom, with structured assignments and tutorials outside of class. The course covered the basics of how to edit Wikipedia, with a focus on biographies of women. Jennifer says the class sessions with other Affiliate staff were enjoyable — and gave her the skills to get started.

“I could not have done as good a job as I feel I have done without having taken this class,” she says. “There are so many layers and nuances about Wikipedia that I don’t think I could have ever learned on my own or have given enough of my time to without the structure of a class setting.”

Jennifer expanded biographies of four notable women as part of the course: Frances Gabe, Harriet Tracy, Clarissa Britain, and Anne Marguerite Hyde de Neuville. All are subjects of Hagley’s collection; the first three are inventors and the fourth is an artist in the collection whose work Jennifer likes.

Because Jennifer had access to the museum’s collections, she was able to use photographs she’d taken of the patent models they had in their collections. (The image at right, one Jennifer took and added to Wikimedia Commons is the model of Frances Gabe’s self-cleaning house!) Jennifer says she particularly enjoyed adding images to the articles she wrote. And, of course, it helps advance her museum’s mission.

“I feel by adding and editing Wikipedia on things that relate to our collection, I am being a good team member and helping my institution,” she says. “I see it as another way to get information about your collection out into the world, especially since only about 2-5% of any one collection is on view at any given time for most institutions.”

Jennifer has already created another new article since the end of the class, and she’s planning to write more. Hagley is opening a new patent model exhibit, Nation of Inventors, in spring 2022, and Jennifer’s made it her mission to ensure all the women inventors in that exhibit have Wikipedia articles. After that, she says, she’ll tackle a larger project: ensuring all women inventors whose patent models Hagley has in their collection have Wikipedia articles.

Image credits: Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; FairyShrimp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Jennifer Johns, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As a fourth generation Japanese American, Nina Nakao says she was drawn to study more about the history of her family and community. As a college student, she studied intergenerational trauma within the Japanese American community, and upon graduation, began to work at the Japanese American National Museum. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted her role to focus on a national virtual visits program for the museum, creating opportunities for students to engage virtually with the Japanese American experience highlighted at the museum. Wikipedia is one such opportunity.

“As a museum educator I think it’s vital to think critically about how knowledge is created, distributed, and used – especially by students – and Wikipedia is a huge part of that!” Nina says.

As part of the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative, they worked with Wiki Education to host a series of Wiki Scholars courses for staff of museums like Nina’s, Affiliates of the Smithsonian. Nina joined the course to help improve biographies of American women related to her museum’s collection.

“I wanted to take the class to understand the processes and standards that go into published Wikipedia articles – particularly in an era of ‘fake news’,” she says. “As a young millennial, I’ve always grown up in a world with Wikipedia as a classroom resource (whether or not my teachers allowed it!), so now, as an educator, I find it crucial to understand the methods that Wikipedia writers and editors use to guide their work, cite their sources, and ground published knowledge in truth and facts.”

With other Smithsonian Affiliate staff members, Nina learned to edit Wikipedia through Wiki Education’s course. Weekly Zoom sessions were supplemented with online tutorials and out of class activities. She loved learning about the community behind Wikipedia, and fun elements like WikiLove and barnstars.

“The class was incredibly formative and well structured. Without the guidance of Zoom classes, I would not have known where to begin in my research, or how to evoke the tone and structure of a high quality Wikipedia article,” Nina says. “Wiki Education also gave me insight into how articles gain readership, are internally linked to each other, and evaluated. The class gave me an insider’s perspective on all of the complex details that make Wikipedia so great!”

Nina chose to improve the article for artist Estelle Peck Ishigo, one of a few people who was not ethnically Japanese but was incarcerated during World War II because she was married to a Japanese American man.

“I chose her because I’ve always been drawn to her emotional charcoal drawings of camp life,” Nina says. “As I learned more about her, I understood the deep struggles she faced throughout every stage of her life, and how her art became a form of resistance and resilience.”

Nina enjoyed her experience in the course and hopes more museum staff have an opportunity to participate in similar courses.

“I hope that these courses continue to be offered as means to creating pathways of access for a more diverse body of editors to learn how to use Wikipedia,” she says. “In a funny way, both museums and Wikipedia function to serve the public and provide trustworthy knowledge and information. Understanding Wikipedia as a daily resource that is used by visitors is vital as the museum field thinks critically about accessibility, engagement, and education and moves toward a more equitable future.”

She looks forward to continuing to edit articles related to upcoming exhibits at the Japanese American National Museum.

“I see Wikipedia as a great tool for those who are just beginning to learn about the Japanese American WWII incarceration,” Nina says. “I’m especially passionate about building up archives on the involvement of Japanese American women in post-war activism – not only within their own community during the fight for redress and reparations in the 1970s and 80s, but also working in solidarity with other women of color during the Civil Rights Movement.”

Image credit: Justefrain, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, Washington, is a Smithsonian Affiliate — which made their staff eligible to participate in one of Wiki Education’s recent Wiki Scholars courses, themed around the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative. Northwest Museum Curator of History Freya Liggett signed right up.

“I’d never considered becoming a Wikipedia contributor,” she says, “but when the Smithsonian asks, ‘do you want to?’ the obvious answer is YES!”

And Freya is glad she did. Over the six weeks of the course, she learned the ins and outs of editing Wikipedia and how to become an active member of the Wikipedia community. She says the Wiki Education Dashboard’s training modules were great at teaching the technical aspects of editing, but she found the weekly video call was what was most important.

“Wiki Education is worth another Zoom meeting on your calendar!” she says. “Having the support of the Wiki Education team helped me get up the nerve to push the publish button for the first time.”

She clicked that publish button on the biography of Estelle Reel, a suffragist and politician prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment. Reel also served as the national Superintendent of Indian Schools between 1898 and 1910.

“There were so many news stories this summer about the grim legacy of North American Indian boarding schools,” Freya says. “Adding context to Reel’s role in that history felt important to better understand the individuals behind America’s assimilation-based education policies and the effects on Native children.”

As museum staff, she saw the value that her participation in the course brought to both her museum and the general public. She says the course taught her not only the basics of editing, but also gave her an appreciation for Wikipedia as a credible resource and how cultural institutions like the Smithsonian and other museums are building those competencies within their work.

“Projects like the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative can make significant contributions to Wikipedia’s content and open new ways for people to connect with resources at your museum,” Freya says. “Learning with a cohort of affiliates also provides a supportive environment to learn with other people with museum-specific needs and interests.”

Freya expects to keep editing Wikipedia. She’s already identified the next biographies she plans to add: Spokane is naming new middle schools after people with connections to the Pacific Northwest, and she wants to create articles on the finalists. Understanding there’s always more work to be done on Wikipedia is also something she got from the course.

“For museum folks, editing Wikipedia is like an exercise for writing label copy. Be concise. Be able to back it up. It’s also an exercise in letting go,” she says. “Pressing publish never ends the conversation.”

She does now, in part thanks to Erica Schumann, a member of the Development Team at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. Erica was taking one of Wiki Education’s courses run in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative. Erica’s museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate, meaning she was invited to participate in the course.

“I’ve always wanted to get involved in Wikipedia editing, but I felt that I needed some help getting started,” she says. “On top of my general interest, I am interested in increasing the representation of women in history, both in our in-person Museum experiences as well as online, so this course was a perfect fit!”

Erica says she was shocked Opal Lee didn’t have an article, despite the considerable amount of national media attention she’d gotten. The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History had been working with her family to develop an exhibit display recognizing her for her achievements. So Erica dove right in to create her biography in her sandbox, a private drafting space on Wikipedia. While Erica’s draft was still in her sandbox, another editor created the article; Erica ended up moving her drafted text into the article others had started.

“When I started sandboxing the article, I had no idea Juneteenth would become a federal holiday just a couple weeks later!” she says. “In the middle of the course, on June 17, 2021, Opal Lee saw her dream become a reality as she joined President Biden as he signed the bill formally establishing Juneteenth as a national holiday. This led to Ms. Lee gaining a significant amount of national and international attention over the course of just a few days, and it was incredible to see all the views the article was immediately getting! It was fantastic to see the article being updated in real time to reflect Ms. Lee’s huge accomplishment, and I am so grateful I got to be a part of that editing experience.”

As other editors jumped into help build out the article, she gained a new appreciation for the community aspect of Wikipedia.

“I love being part of a group of people talking to each other about how best to portray a person’s accomplishments and legacy. The community element of Wikipedia was something that I never really considered,” Erica says. “Before this course, I assumed the editing was more combative, with each individual fighting to make their edit stick. It’s actually a very welcoming and considerate community when you get down to the talk pages.”

Erica notes her understanding of how much happens behind the scenes on Wikipedia grew tremendously during the course. Before taking Wiki Education’s course, she says, she thought people just wrote something, someone else added more, and then the article was there. Now, she understands there are community standards, article assessments, and other collaborative efforts to improve Wikipedia’s quality in a more structured way.

The course was also in line with Erica’s work. She’s worked on several gender equity initiatives at the museum, particularly to improve the representation of women in STEM. She hopes to convert some of the research she’s done for those exhibits into Wikipedia articles.

“I think it is important to make the stories that we feature in our museums publicly available. By working on improving Wikipedia articles with the materials in our collections and exhibits, we can ensure that people have the opportunity to learn about the important historical figures they wouldn’t have otherwise known about,” Erica says. “People shouldn’t have to travel to the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History to learn about Opal Lee and Charlie Mary Noble; this information should be readily available online.”

“This seemed like a controlled way to learn more, with people who had interests in common, and with a teacher who I could ask for help,” she says. “My cohort was great, full of interesting people from around the country, which made me extra excited about being involved with the Affiliates, and I enjoyed our instructor’s positive attitude to all our questions.”

The course was designed to encourage Smithsonian Affiliates staff to add biographies of women relevant to their collections to Wikipedia. In the last years, Jan spent some time researching for projects related to the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which provided great fodder for her Wikipedia work, too.

“I started by adding Lethia Sherman Hankins, who was a local politician, educator, and community activist,” she says. “I figured if I only added one person, I wanted it to be her. Cape Fear Museum has a collection of materials relating to her life, and she is one of a handful of African American women who have served in local government here.”

Moving her first new article live was so much fun that she didn’t want to stop there. Next, she wrote the biography of Mary Ethel Williams Barrett, who was the first director of the Wilmington Art Museum. Still inspired by the course, Jan then wrote the biography of Katherine Mayo Cowan, the first woman mayor of Wilmington. Two of the three articles ended up with other Wikipedia editors questioning if they met Wikipedia’s notability standards. Jan believes this experience reflects some of the gender biases of Wikipedia. Still, she sees value in editing Wikipedia. 

“I enjoyed adding the articles, and the course, and I think I will likely continue to add things to Wikipedia,” she says. “I’m a public historian, and a public servant; part of my job is to provide information to folks who ask, so I think adding historically accurate information to Wikipedia definitely fits into the parameters of my job.”

Jan encourages other Smithsonian Affiliates and museum professionals more broadly to participate in future courses like this. Wikipedia, she says, is a great starting place for research, with footnotes linking to useful references. That makes contributing to the articles an important part of the museum profession.

“This is a great way to share what’s in your collection, on your website, and provide an additional avenue into the scholarly work so many of us do in our organizations,” she says. “I write a lot, but I don’t publish in traditional academic places, so adding materials to Wikipedia puts the history out there for more people to explore.”

Image credit: Musehist, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As the chief public engagement officer for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, Doug Roberts often refers to and uses content from Wikipedia in his work. So, he says, he recognized that there is a need for Wikipedia to better represent women and other underrepresented groups.

When the opportunity presented itself for Doug — whose museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate — to take a course on improving Wikipedia biographies relevant to his museum’s collection as part of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, he jumped at the chance.

“I wanted to help represent under-represented communities in Wikipedia biographies,” Doug says. He did so, creating a new article on Charlie Mary Noble, an astronomer for whom the Noble Planetarium at the Fort Worth Children’s Museum was named. It was the first planetarium to be named after a woman. Today, the planetarium has been rebuilt at Doug’s museum, but still carries the name in honor of Charlie Mary Noble.

“Finding and putting together a picture of someone very influential to me, who I have never met, was the best part,” Doug says. “The feeling that I preserved the details of an important person — and role model — is very fulfilling. I even have the feeling that I actually know this person.”

Wiki Education’s course, Doug says, was helpful at providing structure and the nuts and bolts of creating new articles. While he had a prior grasp on the technical aspects of editing, he found the course extremely helpful in giving him insight into best practices, context, and other community elements. And in writing an article himself, he learned just how much work goes into creating a page from scratch.

This knowledge will be helpful for Doug, as he intends to host a Wikipedia edit-a-thon at his museum to get more engagement within the Fort Worth community. He sees engagement with Wikipedia as a key skill not only for his museum, but for any museum professional.

“Museums are run by and employ or have connections with experts, many of whom are important to the community. The stories of their lives and accomplishments need to be preserved,” Doug says. “This course helped museum professionals know how much effort is involved in authoring these articles.”

Image credits: Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Doctor.spaceman.wwt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons