Working with Wikipedia

SunoikisisDC Digital Classics: Session 5

Date: Thursday February 13, 2025. 16:00-17:30 GMT.

Convenors: Gabriel Bodard (University of London), Kate Cook (King's College London), Richard Nevell (Wikimedia UK), Katharine Shields (King's College London)

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/m_Hs5uwYCsk

Slides: tba

Outline

This session introduces the community-edited Wikimedia ecosystem, especially Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. We discuss a couple of classics- and archaeology-specific projects on Wikipedia, communities that aim to improve coverage in these areas. 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 is also given, and an editing project suggested as an exercise for students to try in their own time.

In preparation for this session, please create an account on Wikipedia, if you do not already have one.

Required readings

• Allfrey, F., Moore, L. & Nevell, R. 2024. "Forging the medieval on Wikipedia." Postmedieval 15, 549–580. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-024-00321-6
• Mckee, G. 2022. '“He Lied to the People, Saying ‘I Am Nebuchadnezzar’”: Issues in Authority Control for Rebels, Usurpers, Eccentric Nobility, and Dissenting Royalty'. Library Resources & Technical Services. 66(2). 94. Available: https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.66n2.94

Further readings

• Bianchini, C., S. Bargioni & C.C. Pellizzari Di San Girolamo. 2021. 'Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries'. Information Technology and Libraries. 40(2) Available: https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v40i2.12959
• 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
• 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)
• 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/
• Mahony, S., 2011. “Research communities and open collaboration: the example of the Digital Classicist wiki.” Digital Medievalist 6. Available: http://doi.org/10.16995/dm.26
• 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)
• 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
• Nevel, R., & Moore, L. 2024. "Wikipedia and Archaeology". In The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and the Media in the 21st Century (pp. 195-213). Routledge.

Resources

• Wikipedia Help
• Wikipedia Training Modules
• MediaWiki formatting help
• Digital Classicist Wiki
• Editing the Digital Classicist Wiki
• Wikidata Help
• Women's Classical Committee Wikipedia Project
• Tools and editing guides from the WCC

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. 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.

2. 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. 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. 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.

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.