For refugee resettlement expert Shyam Krishnan Sriram, participating in the panel, “Being a MPSA Wiki Scholar: Sharing Political Expertise on Wikipedia,”  was an opportunity to break from his typical engagement with the conference.

“The MPSA is an important conference and I have attended a dozen times in the last two decades,” said Sriram, assistant professor of political science at Canisius University. “When it was suggested to come together as a panel, I jumped at the chance because this professional development side of the conference is important to me – not just presenting original research.” 

Reflecting on their experience as participants of a recent Wiki Scholars course, each of the four scholars noted the importance of editing Wikipedia as a strategy to combat misinformation, particularly during the 2024 election year. Panelists also initiated conversations about the role Wikipedia can play in disseminating research, its relationship with artificial intelligence and large language models, and the challenges of biases against Wikipedia. 

“We agreed during the panel that the number one challenge was a vast amount of misinformation about Wikipedia and its legitimacy as an academic source,” noted Sriram. “We still have a lot of work to do!”

Panelist and doctoral student at the University of Georgia Yao Yao agreed, underscoring the importance of educating academics and students on the immeasurable value of Wikipedia.

“As a PhD student, I believe it’s crucial to challenge the notion that students should be discouraged from using Wikipedia,” said Yao, an American politics scholar. “Instead, we should educate them on how to leverage its benefits effectively.”

From her first day in the Wiki Scholars course, Yao was drawn to the “inclusive and collaborative nature” of the Wikipedia community, embracing the chance to question her assumptions, gain practical skills in content creation, and join the worldwide group of editors dedicated to sharing knowledge. 

“One aspect of the course that particularly resonated with me was its emphasis on overcoming bias and fostering confidence in editing Wikipedia,” said Yao. “I also appreciated the opportunity to learn the intricacies of article editing, even though some processes seemed complex initially. The course provided valuable guidance on editing various elements such as images and charts, which has expanded my skill set and deepened my understanding of content creation on Wikipedia.”

An idea championed by panelist Muhamad Hassan Bin Afzal, visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Service at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, the group plans to collaborate on a writing project which will examine the topics they discussed at the conference.

“The participants were so fun, engaged, and curious, and we’re even in talks about developing a paper for publication,” said panel chair Jacqueline M. Keil, assistant professor of political science at Kean University.

Wiki Education staff also engaged with all MPSA conference attendees from our booth in the exhibition hall. Both Kent and Wiki Education’s Communications and Outreach Coordinator Colleen McCoy connected with political science experts from across the globe, sharing information about our upcoming Wiki Scholars & Scientists professional development courses and the opportunity to teach with Wikipedia in our Wikipedia Student Program.

To learn more about what these incredible instructors in our program had to say about their experiences running the Wikipedia assignment, watch the session here.

Thank you again to Lisbeth, Kathleen, and Stephanie for joining me at this year’s conference and for all you and your students do for Wikipedia!

WikidataCon 2021 begins today! The conference spans three days (October 29–31), several tracks, and so many sessions, so we thought we would share a list of sessions that might be of interest to those of you in the GLAM and education sectors. Some of these sessions feature past participants from our Wikidata courses.

But first, if you’re not registered yet, you can take care of that at this link!

• Wikidata at Texas A&M University Libraries: Enhancing Discovery for Dissertations (Jeannette Ho): This presentation will highlight how librarians at Texas A&M University uploaded student, dissertation, and faculty advisor data to Wikidata as part of the PCC Wikidata Pilot initiative. It will also cover some challenges and next steps, as well as possible implications that Wikidata may have for traditional processes to manage personal and organizational entities in a catalog.
• Wiki API Connector – Simplifying ETL workflows from open APIs to Wikidata/Commons (Andrew Lih): This session will provide an overview of the Wiki API Connector. The connector aims to simplify the extract-transform-load (ETL) process of metadata uploads to Wikimedia projects without complicated coding or software development. This tool may serve as a general solution useful for other GLAM institutions or partner organizations. This session will address work completed with the tool so far and seek feedback on how it may be useful for other users and applications.
• The Met Museum’s Work with Wikidata and Structured Data on Commons (Andrew Lih): This session will unpack how The Met Museum has contributed object metadata and depiction information to Wikimedia projects and in return, how Wikidata content is brought back into The Met’s database and made available via its open access API. This session will cover Structured Data on Commons (SDC), including the tools, processes, modeling challenges, and the complexities of using references for SDC.
• Wikidata in the Classroom: Updates from North America (Stacy Allison Cassin, Lane Rasberry, Amanda Rust, Amy Ruskin): This session will explore some examples of Wikidata in the classroom across North America. From the University of Toronto, Stacy Allison Cassin will describe the use of Wikidata in an introductory library and information science course. At Northeastern University, Amanda Rust and Amy Ruskin will share insights about a public art documentation project they are working on with students. From the University of Virginia and Wiki Education, Lane Rasberry and Will Kent will report out on a partner project, supporting Data Science masters students who used Wikidata for a capstone project.
• There are, of course, many other worthwhile sessions for anyone to attend, across all of the conference tracks. This year we’re especially excited about the the entire Education & Science track, which was co-curated by Shani Evenstein Sigalov and Wiki Education’s Will Kent and LiAnna Davis. With education and science being so dear to us at Wiki Education, we recommend attending as many of these sessions as you can!

This conference happens every other year, now is the perfect time to meet some luminaries in the Wikidata community and catch up on Wikibase, decolonizing Wikidata, Wikidata tools, and building a sustainable future for Wikidata. We encourage you to attend as many as you can. Many of these sessions will be recorded and archived for you to watch as your schedule permits. See the full schedule here.

Image credits: AJurno (WMB), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Bleeptrack, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Plus, we know systemic bias among Wikipedia’s contributors leads to egregious content gaps. Only 18.14% of biographies are of women—a number I’m proud (and sad?) to say has been increasing over the past several years. The growth in that piece of the pie is not, as I like to joke, because we’re sneakily deleting biographies of men. It’s largely thanks to communities deciding they can do something about gender parity on Wikipedia and then actually doing something about it.

That’s why I love seeing organizations that promote and support women take a stand and decide to take part in correcting this imbalance. Earlier this year, Wikipedian extraordinaire Jess Wade connected me to the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society. They were interested in leveraging their platform to raise awareness of Wikipedia’s gender gap, and they wanted to invite members to be a part of the change they wish to see on the internet. But learning how to participate in a community like Wikipedia, which has 19 years of its own procedures and cultural norms, can be incredibly difficult. It’s helpful when new editors have guidance in their efforts.

Women’s Forum Global Meeting edit-a-thon

So last month, Samantha Weald and I were honored to attend the Women’s Forum Global Meeting in Paris as a part of the effort to give interested new users the space (and human faces!) to learn the ropes. At the conference, we spent three days speaking to attendees–mostly women–about how they are poised to change the face of Wikipedia. We signed up new users, helped several people make their first edits, translated pages, and started conversations we anticipate leading to long-term impact on the encyclopedia.

With the help of our friends at Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia France, and French Wikipedia’s les sans pagEs (an effort similar to the excellent Women in Red project on English Wikipedia), we introduced conference attendees to the process of adding biographies to Wikipedia. We even added items and details to Wikidata! Thanks to the multilingual nature of the global event, we facilitated as people translated pages from one language to another, and new editors added content in English, French, German, and Arabic.

Moving the needle to close the gender gap

The Women’s Forum wielded their influence as a leader with a mission to enact change, and 57 attendees walked away with new Wikipedia user accounts and the confidence that they, too, can be a part of this initiative. Countless people know where to get help as they familiarize themselves with the procedures and community norms that have made Wikipedia such a reliable resource for the world.

Together, we added 33 new pages to the Wikimedia projects, added to 71 pages, and added the equivalent of 32,600 words to Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Some attendees wrote their first stub article, expressing the pride they felt at such an accomplishment. Others approached us to share the effects of imposter syndrome—a feeling that they don’t have enough “knowledge” to share confidently to Wikipedia’s 500 million monthly readers. This conversation, of course, helped us impart to interested new editors that adding to Wikipedia isn’t about what you know but about what you can find out, summarize in your own words, and add with citations so other readers can verify the claim. In short, the group representing Wikipedia was able to quell common fears and remove the barriers that keep prospective community members—especially women—from trying to be a part of this prodigious effort to free knowledge.

Changing the face of Wikipedia

We were thrilled to see new biographies come out of this event, representing a group of women with a diverse set of accomplishments. One participant translated the French page on Kidi Bebey, a French journalist and author, into English. Another translated the English page on Rosalind Brewer, an executive at Starbucks, into French. We saw new pages about rising stars in the business world, scientists combatting climate change, and even Ai-Da, a humanoid robot designed as an artist. One attendee approached us knowing exactly who she wanted to represent on Wikipedia: Gerard Fernandez, a Roman Catholic nun who counseled inmates on death row in Singapore. As we explained to several people, once you start looking for missing women on Wikipedia, you’ll discover historic women whose work is underrepresented in nearly every discipline and occupation. Thanks to efforts like this one, curious readers can now learn about them on Wikipedia.

Overcoming imposter syndrome

Perhaps my most memorable encounter was with one attendee whose professional background includes decades as a science writer specializing in climate change. In the final 30 minutes of the conference, she sheepishly approached me to admit she’d been convincing herself to stop by our space for three days. After all, what if she wasn’t qualified to add content to Wikipedia? Thankfully, we quickly overcame those doubts as she dug in to find enough information about a businesswoman who launched a start-up to use chemical technology to recycle plastics, a feat that has generated several awards and prizes for the organization. This new editor had a knack for finding multiple sources and innately understood why third-party sources are required to ensure quality and prevent promotional editing. In theory, our community welcomes people with this skill set, but it doesn’t always work like that in practice. Thanks to this opportunity to connect in real life, I’m confident she knows her knowledge is exactly what Wikipedia wants and needs.

We loved working within this space to affect change, not only in the content on Wikipedia but also on people’s understanding that this precious project is one we’re all accountable to uphold. Thank you to the Women’s Forum for seeing how urgent it is to raise women’s visibility online and for taking steps to do something about it.

If you’re interested in spending more time with our team of Wikipedia experts to learn how to add to Wikipedia, consider joining our upcoming Wiki Scholars course, April–June 2020. For inquiries about partnering with Wiki Education, contact Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson at jami@wikiedu.org.

Follow this link to see recordings, notes, and descriptions of all of the sessions. Some highlights include…

• A Glimpse Over Wikidata which provided some important Wikidata updates and news from the team at Wikimedia Deutschland.
• Wikidata Commons contribution strategies for GLAM organizations. Wikidata is becoming increasingly important to GLAM and cultural heritage institutions. This session explored how GLAM institutions using Wikidata and highlighted what tools are available to help out.
• Wikibase Inspiration Panel. This session provided an overview of some different Wikibase use cases – each from a unique organization with specific needs, challenges, and goals.
• Wikibase for Canadian Indigenous Content. How can Wikibase improve on colonial descriptions and provide more agency for oppressed communities?
• Questioning Wikidata – No knowledge base is perfect. This session takes care to point out some very important areas where Wikidata needs to change. The session also exposes some of the inherent problems of classification systems.
• Wikidata Education Panel. An overview of Wikidata being used in courses all over the world.
• Infoboxes Panel. One of the promises of Wikidata is to integrate its data with other Wikimedia projects. This session provides updates on this work.
• Wikidata Query Service Tutorial. This session presented several different example queries to explain how querying works.
• ShEx (Shape Expressions) Workshop – Wikidata is using ShEx to validate establish data models for certain entities which should help with data quality and consistency. This session provide an overview of how ShEx works and why it’s important to the community.

We also celebrated Wikidata’s seventh birthday with cake, gifts, and updates on all of the hard work that so many volunteers have contributed to Wikidata. Wikidata continues to grow quickly. Community members are developing tools to enhance Wikidata’s functionality, draw in new editors, and do things we’ve never done before. As an instructor of Wikidata courses, it is very exciting to see this all happen firsthand and play a role in helping this project into its next stage.

These enriching discussions and exchange of ideas are helping us continuously improve our Wikidata courses at Wiki Education. If you’re interested in learning more about our courses, ways Wikidata could help you share your collection, or the impact that linked data is having across several industries, visit our informational page. There, you can also sign up for our beginner and intermediate-level courses that start in March.

Header image by Pierre-Selim Huard, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Last weekend, Wiki Education staff attended WikiConference North America, an annual gathering of Wikimedians from around North America. This year’s event was hosted at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and focused around the theme of reliability — an element that also runs through Wiki Education’s work to make Wikipedia and Wikidata more representative, accurate, and complete.

Wiki Education staff presented at several sessions, as did our program participants. This extensive list of presentations indicates just how intertwined Wiki Education’s work is to the broader outreach happening in North America!

• Senior Wikipedia Expert Ian Ramjohn joined other contributors to the forthcoming Wikipedia@20 book as a featured panelist for the opening keynote. Two of our instructors, Joseph Reagle and Amy Carleton, were also on the panel, as was former Visiting Scholar Jackie Koerner.
• Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson joined Judith Davidson, Sara Marks, and June Lemen from the University of Massachusetts Lowell to talk about the university’s Women in Red at UMass Lowell initiative. The session comes in the middle of a Wiki Scholars course Wiki Education is running with university faculty and staff.
• Wiki Education Board Member Carwil Bjork-James gave an excellent talk on knowledge equity beyond gap-filling, talking about how to think more about the sources we use and how we frame discussions of knowledge to be more equitable.

• Wiki Education Board Member Richard Knipel and former Wiki Education staff member Rob Fernandez showed off “Mbabel”, a system for using Wikidata to preload an infobox and recommended section headings for missing articles, which they’ve been using at thematic edit-a-thons as a practical way to let new editors dive quickly into article writing.
• Chief Technology Officer Sage Ross joined a session led by the Wikimedia Foundation’s developer advocacy team to discuss best practices and advice for software development internships and mentoring.
• Sarah Mojarad and Helen Choi from the University of Southern California presented on some of the challenges instructors still face in adopting the Wikipedia assignment and lingering misconceptions about Wikipedia in higher education. They discussed how they’re both using Wikipedia assignments to help engineering and science students learn how to communicate their subject-matter expertise to the greater public.
• Wikipedia Student Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal presented alongside Amanda Kaufman of Wake Forest University, Trudi Jacobson of the University of Albany, and Darrin Griffin of the University of Alabama and focused on how instructors can use the Wikipedia assignment to impart critical digital and information literacy skills to today’s students.

• Ximena Gallardo from LaGuardia Community College and Ian Ramjohn from Wiki Education helped lead the Wikimedians of the Caribbean/AfroCROWD translate-a-thon, which focused on translating articles into languages used in the Caribbean. LaGuardia CC has been running these translate-a-thons in April for a few years. Sherry Antoine (of AfroCROWD and WikiCari) and Ximena taught participants how to use the translation tool. Participants worked in Spanish, French, and Dutch, the major non-English languages of the Caribbean.
• Elizabeth Che from CUNY’s Graduate Center discussed how she and fellow faculty are using the Wikipedia assignment to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of women psychologists. We enjoyed hearing about the survey results from her students before and after completing the Wikipedia assignment. It was especially gratifying to note that 76.7% of students said that Wikipedia was more reliable than they previously thought, and 80% felt empowered by publishing an article!
• Colleen D. Hartung and Polly Hamlen spoke on the 1000 Women in Religion WikiProject, which is aimed at improving Wikipedia’s coverage of women in religion, thus helping to narrow the gender gap on Wikipedia. The following day Wiki Education Wikipedia Expert Shalor Toncray spent some quality time with Colleen and Polly assisting them with their event Dashboard and discussing their mutual interests in religious studies and improving Wikipedia.
• Helaine, along with Wikidata Program Manager Will Kent and Scholars & Scientists Program Manager Ryan McGrady, discussed how Wiki Education is seeking to bridge the gap between subject-matter experts and Wikipedia through its Student and Wikipedia Scholars and Scientists programs.
• After listening to a riveting discussion on teaching intellectual property law with Wikipedia by Kit Heintzman, Shalor Toncray was able to talk with a law instructor who was interested in teaching with Wiki Education — and was later able to connect him with a law instructor who has taught with Wiki Education and could give him advice and guidance.
• Will Kent led a session about developing a curriculum for Wikidata. In the question and answer session, a great conversation developed around the difference between documentation and a curriculum, as well as tips for teaching different aspects of Wikidata to different audiences.
• Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight is Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University, improving Wikipedia’s coverage of women writers. In addition to helping to organize WikiCon, she shared her recent efforts to bring structured data about women writers, as well as other information like reviews and readership of their works, into Wikidata to enable new kinds of research and analysis.
• Ian Ramjohn and MIT librarian Kai Alexis Smith joined other members of Wikimedians of the Caribbean to present the results of a multi-language survey of Wikipedians in the Caribbean. The survey demonstrated real interest by people in the Caribbean for tools and trainings to contribute to Wikipedia. Special cases discussed included that of Cuba, where the population is highly educated, but lacks affordable internet access, and the struggle for people to see Caribbean creole languages as legitimate (with examples raised from Haiti, Jamaica, and the French Caribbean).

• Ximena Gallardo from LaGuardia Community College discussed her ongoing work with her writing students around Wikipedia-based projects. They’re currently working on taking advantage of LaGuardia’s rich diversity to promote translation projects and on forming an alumni group of students who’ve participated in Wikipedia assignments.
• Malavika Shetty from Boston University demonstrated how her students are drawing on their cultural heritage to improve Wikipedia content while enhancing their research and writing skills.

Of course, while sessions offer an opportunity to hear from featured speakers, one of the key values to conferences like this is our opportunity to connect with other Wikimedians and wiki enthusiasts from across North America. Numerous hallway conversations fueled lots of interesting thoughts and connections, and Wiki Education staff are excited to take these insights forward into our work in the coming months. We are deeply grateful to the organizing committee for all their hard work, and our fellow collaborators in the open knowledge space for sharing their expertise with us.

Header/thumbnail image by Victor Grigas, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It may be pretty simple, sure, but that’s the phrase I said over and over at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting. As it turns out, many people did want to learn more. I spoke to biogeochemists, dendrologists, and limnologists, graduate students, post-docs, and professors. I told them about our free resources that instructors use to teach and empower students how to edit Wikipedia. I explained the benefits of such a task.

Many were taken aback by this. “Wait, you want students to use Wikipedia?” or “But I’ve always told students that Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source!”

Wikipedia shouldn’t be considered an academic source, we know. Just like other encyclopedias, it’s a tertiary source. But reliability on Wikipedia is a much bigger conversation than simply telling students, “Don’t trust it.” The site is built on a system of verifiability. And by teaching your students how to improve content, I’d say, you would help them become more information literate. Students can help distinguish fact from half-truths and fill in content gaps. Not only would you get to achieve your education goals outlined on the syllabus, but the whole world—no exaggeration—would get to benefit from the result.

I led a bird researcher to the very incomplete article on “gray vireo”. I found articles on genera of invasive bamboo. And I showed these experts the thousands of views these topics received each month. Oftentimes, they would find errors or omissions within the first few sentences, illustrating the need Wikipedia has for editors with diverse scientific backgrounds.

With our special emphasis on improving coverage of the sciences on Wikipedia, Wiki Education has helped teach nearly 23,000 science students how to add content to Wikipedia, resulting in 20.4 million words. However, there’s still more to be done. By attending conferences such as ESA, we get to have hundreds of conversations and interactions with scientists, bringing in new voices that will shape the way the public understands science.

To access our free assignment templates, tools, and student trainings, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Header image by Thompsma, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

If attendance, question-asking, and post-session lingering are any indication — linking library resources to Wikidata and using the open data repository to enhance library collections is a popular topic. Although Wikidata has been around for six years, interest in it has reached a tipping point thanks to more data donations, investment from institutions to support Wikidata projects, and proof-of-concept projects that are growing in number. The backbone of the semantic web is getting more robust with Wikidata and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) leading the charge.

Hearing about updates from representatives from the Library of Congress and OCLC were insightful and a wonderful complement to the Wikidata presentations. Production environments for linked data are only now becoming accessible to a wider audience. As part of the planning committee, working to have a more inclusive set of participants was a major concern of mine to reflect wider audiences and their needs. Sessions addressed topics around metadata standards, better serving patrons through catalogs, letting indigenous communities create their own subject headings, as well as integrating services across platforms. They reflected a more diverse set of needs for a more diverse crowd.

We are starting Wikidata courses and workshops at Wiki Education. As these initiatives come together, I see even more reason for libraries to get excited about joining the open data movement. This conference confirmed the curiosity, passion, and resources are there. The potential to have libraries and individual librarians join the community of already-passionate Wikidata editors is an exciting prospect. I’m looking forward to more conversations about realizing the opportunity of linked data and encouraging libraries to share their collections on Wikidata.

Check out data.wikiedu.org to sign up for our September Wikidata courses or to request an in-person workshop at your institution. Follow this link to the conference’s presentations.

Image by Rosiestep, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

This past week, Wiki Education’s technical team attended the 2019 Wikimedia Hackathon where the Program & Events Dashboard was featured as a prominent area of focus. While there, Sage Ross & I were able to meet with Czech users, network with other developers working on Wikipedia projects, and build a number of features for both our global tool and classroom tool.

For those who haven’t heard of one before, a hackathon is an opportunity for people across the technology industry to come together and “hack” on a product or project for a set amount of time, i.e. solve known issues and make improvements. At the Wikimedia Hackathon, participants were encouraged to work on improving the new editor experience, mobile contributions to Wikimedia commons, and also features of Wiki Education’s own dashboard.

Our team started by meeting with Czech Dashboard users and getting feedback on our tool and how it could be improved. The Czech team had a number of great suggestions from increasing the visibility of various admin links and buttons to making public stats more readily available for other developers to use. Our team then worked on these tasks along with other fantastic volunteers such as psinghal20, takidelfin, and urbanecm.

All told, our developers and volunteers were able to complete over half of the requests from Czech users in just one weekend! These improvements will help teams across the world using the Dashboard.