Blog for January 2019: Wikipedia & knowledge sharing

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In January 2019, NetIKX held a seminar on the topic – Wikipedia and other knowledge-sharing experiences.  Andy Mabbett gave a talk about one of the largest global projects in knowledge gathering in the public sphere; Wikipedia and its sister projects.  Andy is an experienced editor of Wikipedia with more than a million edits to his name.  He worked in website management and always kept his eyes open for new developments on the Web.  When he heard about the Wikipedia project, founded in 2001, he searched there for information about the local nature reserves.  He is a keen bird-watcher.  There was nothing to be found and this inspired him to add his first few entries.  He has been a volunteer since 2003 and makes a modest living with part of his income stream coming from training and helping others become Wikipedia contributors too.  The volunteers are expected to write publicly accessible material, not create new information.  The sources can be as diverse and scattered as necessary, but Wikipedia pulls that information together coherently and give links back to the sources.

The Wikipedia Foundations which hosts Wikipedia says: ‘imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.  That is our commitment.’

Wikipedia is the free encyclopaedia that anybody can edit.  It is built by a community of volunteers contributing bit by bit over time.  The content is freely licensed for anybody to re-use, under a ‘creative commons attribution share-alike’ licence.  You can take Wikipedia content and use it on your own website, even in commercial publications and all you have to do in return is to say where you got it from.  The copyright in the content remains the intellectual property of the people who have written it.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the organisation which hosts Wikipedia.  They keep the servers and the software running.  The Foundation does not manage the content.  It occasionally gets involved over legal issues for example, child protection but otherwise they don’t set editorial policy or get involved in editorial conflicts.  That is the domain of the community.

Guidelines and principles.

Wikipedia operates according to a number of principles called the ‘five pillars’.

  • It is an encyclopaedia which means that there are things that it isn’t: it’s not a soap box, nor a random collection of trivia, nor a directory.
  • It’s written from a neutral point of view, striving to reflect what the rest of the world says about something.
  • As explained, everything is published under a Creative Commons open license.
  • There is a strong ethic that contributors should treat each other with respect and civility. That is the aim, although Wikipedia isn’t a welcoming space for female contributors and women’s issues are not as well addressed as they should be.  There are collective efforts to tackle the imbalance.
  • Lastly there is a rule that there are no firm rules! Whatever rule or norm there is on Wikipedia, you can break it if there is a good reason to do so.  This does give rise to some interesting discussions about how much weight should be given to precedent and established practice or whether people should be allowed to go ahead and do new and innovative things.

In Wikipedia, all contributors are theoretically equal and hold each other to account. There is no editorial board, there are no senior editors who carry a right of overrule or veto.  ‘That doesn’t quit work in theory’ says Andy, ‘but like the flight of the bumblebee, it works in practice’.  For example, in September 2018, newspapers ran a story that the Tate Gallery had decided to stop writing biographies of artists for their Website.  They would use copies of Wikipedia articles instead.  The BBC does the same, with biographies of musicians and bands on their website and also with articles about species of animals.  The confidence of these institutions comes because it is recognised that Wikipedians are good at fact-checking and that if errors are spotted or assertions made without a supporting reliable reference they get flagged up.   But there are some unintended consequences too.  Because dedicated Wikipedians have the habit of checking articles for errors and deficits, Wikipedia can be a very unfriendly place for new and inexperienced editors.  A new article can get critical ‘flags to show something needs further attention.  People can get quite zealous about fighting conflicts of interest, or bias or pseudo-science.

For most people there is just one Wikipedia.  But there are nearly 300 Wikipedias in different languages.  Several have over a million articles, some only a few thousand. Some are written in a language threatened with extinction and they constitute the only place where a community of people is creating a website in that language, to help preserve it as much as to preserve the knowledge.

Wikipedia also has a number of ‘sister projects’.  These include:

  • Wiktionary is a multi-lingual dictionary and thesaurus.
  • Wikivoyage is a travel guide
  • Wikiversity has a number of learning models so you can teach yourself something.
  • Wikiquote is a compendium of notable and humorous quotations.

Probably the Wikidata project is the most important of the sister projects, in terms of the impact it is having and its rate of expansion.  Many Wikipedia articles have an ‘infobox’ on the right side.  These information boxes are machine readable as they have a microformat mark-up behind the scenes.  From this came the idea of gathering all this information centrally.  This makes it easier to share across different versions of Wikipedia and it means all the Wikipedias can be updated together, for example, if someone well known dies.  Under their open licence, data can be used by any other project in the world.  Using the Wikidata identifiers for millions of things, can help your system become more interoperable with others.   As a result, there is a huge asset of data including that taken from other bodies (for example English Heritage or chemistry databases etc.

Wikipedia has many more such projects that Andy explained to us and the information was a revelation to most of us.  So we were then delighted to spend some time looking at an exercise in small groups.  This featured two speakers who talked about the way they had used a shared Content Management system to gather and share knowledge.  These extra speakers circulated round the groups to help the discussions.  The format was different to NetiKX usual breakout groups but feedback from participants was very positive.

This blog is based on a report by Conrad Taylor.

To see the full report you can follow this link: Conradiator : NetIKX meeting report : Wikipedia & knowledge sharing

 

January 2019 Seminar: Making and sharing knowledge in communities: can wikis and related tools help?

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Summary

At this meeting Andy Mabbett, a hugely experienced Wikipedia editor, gave an introduction to the background of Wikipedia and discussed many of the issues that it raises.
Accumulating, organising and sharing knowledge is never easy; this is the problem Knowledge Management sought to address. Today we hope networked electronic platforms can facilitate the process. They are never enough in themselves, because the issues are essentially human, to do with attitudes, social dynamics and work culture — but good tools certainly help.

In past seminars, NetIKX has looked at MS Sharepoint, but that is proprietary and commercial, and it doesn’t work for wider communities of practice and interest. In this seminar, we looked at a range of alternatives, some of them free of charge and/or open source, together with the social dynamics that make them succeed or fail.
First we looked at the wiki model. The case study was Wikipedia — famous, but poorly understood. Andy Mabbett presented this. Andy is a hugely experienced Wikipedia editor, who inspires respect and affection around the world for his ability to explain how Wikipedia works, and for training novices contributing content – including as a ‘Wikipedian In Residence’ encouraging scientific and cultural organisations to contribute their knowledge to Wikipedia.

A few stats: Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can in theory edit, has now survived 18 years, existing on donations and volunteering. It has accumulated over 40 million articles in 301 languages, and about 500 million visitors a month. The English edition has nearly 5.8 million articles. There are about 300,000 active contributors, of whom 4,000 make over a hundred edits annually.

Under the wider banner of ‘Wikimedia’, there are sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiversity, which hosts free learning materials, Wikidata, which is developing a large knowledge base, and the Wikimedia Commons, which holds copyright-free photos, audio and other multimedia resources.

And yet, as the Wikipedia article on Wikipedia admits, “Wikipedia has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, for presenting a mixture of ‘truths, half truths, and some falsehoods’, and for being subject to manipulation and spin in controversial topics.” This isn’t so surprising, because humans are involved. It’s a community that has had to struggle with issues of authority and quality control, partiality and sundry other pathologies. Andy provided insight into these problems, and explained how the Wikipedia community organises itself to define, defend and implement its values.

No NetIKX seminar would be complete without syndicate sessions, conducted in parallel table groups. For the second half of the afternoon, each group was presented in turn with tales from two further case studies of knowledge sharing using different platforms and operating under different rules. These endeavours might have used email lists, Google Docs, another kind of wiki software, or some other kind of groupware. There were tales of triumph, but of tribulation too.

At the end of the afternoon polling thoughts helped to identify key factors that may point the way towards building better ways of sharing knowledge.

Speakers

Andy Mabbett has been a Wikipedia editor (as User:Pigsonthewing) since 2003 and involved with Wikidata since its inception in 2012. He has given presentations about Wikimedia projects on five continents, and has a great deal of experience working with organisations that wish to engage with Wikipedia and its sister projects. With a background in programming and managing websites for local government, Andy has been ‘Wikimedian in Residence’ at ORCID; TED; the Royal Society of Chemistry; The Physiological Society; the History of Modern Biomedicine Research Group; and various museums, galleries and archives. He is also the author of three books on the rock band Pink Floyd.

Our case-study witnesses

Sara Culpin is currently Head of Information & Knowledge at CRU International, where she has implemented a successful information and knowledge strategy on a shoestring budget. Since graduating from Loughborough University, she has spent over 25 years in information and knowledge roles at Aon, AT Kearney, PwC, and Deloitte. She is passionate about getting colleagues to share their knowledge across their organisations, while ensuring that their senior managers see the business value. https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-culpin-2a1b051

Dr Richard Millwood has a background in school maths education, with a history of applying computers to education, and is Director of Core Education UK. As a researcher in the School of Computer Science & Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, he is developing a community of practice for computer science teachers in Ireland and creating workshops for families to develop creative use of computers together. In the 1990s Richard worked with Professor Stephen Heppell to create Ultralab, the learning technology research centre at Anglia Polytechnic University, acting as head 2005–2007. He researched innovation in online higher education in the Institute for Educational Cybernetics at the University of Bolton until 2013, gaining a PhD by Practice in ‘The Design of Learner-centred, Technology-enhanced Education’.

Time and Venue

2pm on 24th January 2019, The British Dental Association, 64 Wimpole Street, London W1G 8YS

Pre Event Information

None

Slides

No slides available for this presentation

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Blog

See our blog report: Wikipedia & knowledge sharing

Study Suggestions

Andy Mabbett, experienced Wikipedian

Andy Mabbett is an experienced editor of Wikipedia with more than a million edits to his name. Here’s a link to a ‘Wikijabber’ audio interview with Andy by Sebastian Wallroth (Sept 2017)
https://wikijabber.com/wikijabber-0005-with-pigsonthewing/