CH3 Knowledge Production

Sunoikisis Digital Cultural Heritage, Spring 2021

Session 3. Wikipedia and cultural knowledge production

Thursday Feb 4, 16:00 UK = 17:00 CET

Convenors: Evelin Heidel/Scann (Creative Commons), Effie Kapsalis (Smithsonian), Gabriel Bodard (London), Andrea Wallace (Exeter)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/vaBHyV1mJ64

Slides: Scann's slides; Effie's slides; Combined PDF

Session outline

In this session we will give a general introduction to the Wikipedia editing and publishing model, including community norms and editorial intervention (or lack of). We will then think about the societal power structures and imbalances propagated in Wikipedia content, including gender, linguistic and global biases, and think about ways to address these. We will discuss some specific initiatives, including Smithsonian Institution archives editathons, Whose Knowledge, Women in Red, and the Women's Classical Committee. After a discussion between the participants, we will then suggest a practical exercise editing Wikipedia pages, and suggest some stub or recently created pages to look at improving.

Seminar readings

For discussion in this thread

• Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega. 2019. "Canon, Value, and Cultural Heritage: New Processes of Assigning Value in the Postdigital Realm." Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 2.2, 25. Available: https://www.mdpi.com/2414-4088/2/2/25
• Alexander Stinson, Sandra Fauconnier & Liam Wyatt. 2018. “Stepping Beyond Libraries: The Changing Orientation in Global GLAM-Wiki.” JLIS.it 9.3, 16–34. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.4403/jlis.it-12480

Further Reading

• Kira Allmann. 2020. “Knowledge Justice in the Digital Archive: The Exclusions of ‘Open’/ The Inclusions of ‘Closed’.” Conference paper. Available: https://bl.iro.bl.uk/work/ns/efcd9974-debf-42df-be3a-cef240e452b4
• Suze Anderson, La Tanya S. Audry & Mike Murawski. 2018. “Museopunks Episode 27: Museums Are Not Neutral.” American Alliance of Museums. Podcast. Available: https://www.aam-us.org/2018/06/28/museopunks-episode-27-museumsarenotneutral/
• S. Das & M. Lowe. 2018. “Nature Read in Black and White: decolonial approaches to interpreting natural history collections.” Journal of Natural Science Collections 6, 4-14. Available: https://natsca.org/article/2509
• Josh Davis. 2019. “Are natural history museums inherently racist?” Natural History Museum (blog post). Available: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2019/july/are-natural-history-museums-inherently-racist.html
• Victoria Leonard & Sarah E. Bond. 2019. “Advancing Feminism Online.” Studies in Late Antiquity 3.1, 4–16. (Not open access: https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2019.3.1.4)
• Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne. 2017. “Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’.” Gender, Place & Culture 24.7, 954–973. (Not open access: https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1339022)
• Linda Nochlin. 1971. "Why have there been no great women artists?” ARTnews. Available: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists-4201/
• Joel Taylor & Laura Kate Gibson. 2017. “Digitisation, digital interaction and social media: embedded barriers to democratic heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 23.5, 408–420. Available: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13527258.2016.1171245
• Adele Vrana & Siko Bouterse. 2019. "Whose Knowledge?" Keynote from Creative Commons Global Summit. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUY01kW8p2o

Other resources

• American Women's History Initiative
• Whose Knowledge
• Women in Red
• AfroCrowd
• #1Lib1Ref
• WikiShootMe
• Women's Classical Committee
• Tools and editing guides from the WCC
• Ten simple rules for editing Wikipedia
• Wikipedia Training Modules
• Intro to Wikimedia ecosystem (SunoikisisDC video)

Exercise

• NB: to carry out this exercise, you will have to create an account on Wikipedia well in advance, and it will help if you have made a dozen or so small edits to the Wiki in the couple of weeks before you start. You may also find your edits are more stable if you have a profile page associated with your account in Wikipedia.

1. Choose a page or group of pages (see suggestions below) on a topic you are interested in, and think about ways to improve this page. Consider ways of capitalising on Wikipedia's role as a hub for information: summarise and cite recent academic work, add links to external resources, and include details of historiography if you can.

   • For short articles that you may improve, you can browse the many “stub” categories in Wikipedia. For example there are many stub pages under Greek mythology, Ancient Roman People, Archaeology, Classical Studies. The most recently created pages in WCC are also likely to need improvement.
   • If you wish to create a new page you could start by looking at one of the lists of ‘red links’ which identify pages which need creating. The #WCCWiki project has a list of pages to create/expand here. There are also lists of Wikipedia red links by topic; those which may be of interest include archaeology, literature and philosophy.

2. Think in particular about what sources and authors are cited on your page; can you include titles by underrepresented scholars or authors, references to critical narratives and reactions, insider or indigenous authors as well as the established hierarchy, etc.

3. Add the page you have edited or adopted to your watchlist by clicking on the ‘Watchlist’ link at the top of the page. You will then receive notifications when someone makes a change to the page. Over the next few weeks observe the changes which are made to the page (remember to take a look at the ‘Talk’ page as well as the main content, as this is where editors will post notes about issues) and be prepared to discuss these with your colleagues. You can see exactly what changes have been made by clicking the ‘View history’ tab for your page, and comparing selected revisions.

4. Share your page with your group or class, and watch the pages adopted or edited by your colleagues as well; be prepared to make further improvements, comment on the Talk page, and help to resolve any conflicts that arise.

(If you have any technical problems with this exercise, you may ask for help in this forum thread)