Making the Largest Open Resource of Human Knowledge Truly Diverse #18NTCWikipedia

1. Wikipedia as a Platform for Change:
Making the Largest Open Resource of
Human Knowledge Truly Diverse
#18NTCWikipedia
Ma’ayan Alexander

2. Session Notes and Conversation:
• Find and share collaboration notes: po.st/18NTCwikipedia
• Session hashtag: #18NTCWikipedia
• Session links: bit.ly/18NTCWikipedia

3. Agenda
• Wikipedia and Wikimedia at a glance
• Biases and challenges
• Why Wikipedia matters for nonprofits
• How can we make Wikipedia better
• How to get started, and how to keep going

4. Hello, World :-)
• Ma’ayan Alexander, @maayanale
• Tech for nonprofits and social change
• Digital activist in organizations and groups
• Wikipedia editor training: March 2012
• First Wiki Women TLV meetup: Sep 2014

5. Wikipedia is a Tool in My
Nonprofit Technology Toolbox
Image by Alice Achterhof on Unsplash

6. I’m With Phil, 11NTC

7. Here and Now
• How do you use Wikipedia?
• Is it part of your work?
• Have you ever tried to contribute to Wikipedia?
Image by Marc Wathieu, Flickr

8. What is Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia
project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model
of openly editable content. Wikipedia is the largest and most popular
general reference work on the Internet, and is named as one of the
most popular websites. (source: Wikipedia)
Wikipedia is a community of people who create and maintain together
a web-based, free-content encyclopedia. (For our session today)

9. • What Wikipedia is not
• Policies and guidelines
Encyclopedia
• Neutral point of view
• Representing
significant views
• Verifiability
• No original research
Digital
• Edit via web browser
• Fast edit and update
• Hyperlinks
• Flexible hierarchy
Open
• Anyone can edit
• Anyone can review
• Anyone can add

10. About Wikipedia
• Launched on January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger
• Wiki based encyclopedia
• More than 40 million articles in 299 different languages
• English Wikipedia includes more than 5.6 Million articles
• 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors per
month (Feb 2014)
• 31.7 million registered user accounts, around 270,000 are "active"
(Nov 2011)

11. Wikimedia
Statistics
stats.wikimedia.org/v2

12. Wikimedia Foundation
• Founded in 2003 to fund projects through non-profit means
• Operates Wiktionary, Wikidata, Wiki Commons and more
• Operates and maintains MediaWiki
• Independent chapters locally support Wikimedia projects

13. Wikimedia Movement
• A global community of contributors
to Wikimedia Foundation projects
• Supported by numerous
organizations around the world
• Chapters, thematic organizations,
user groups
Image by Adam Novak, Wiki Commons

14. “Real World” Biases reflected in Wikipedia
• Gender Bias
• Racial Bias
• Cultural Representation
• Digital Gap
• Vandalism
• Other criticism of Wikipedia
Image by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

15. Gender Bias in Wikipedia
• Women are only 8.5 – 16% of Wikipedia editors
• Causes are social, rather than personal
• Fewer and less extensive articles about women or topics important to
women
• Fewer topics important to women recognized as notable
• Biographies: less women, more personal life details
• Community culture: conflicts, harassments, trust
• Wikimedia Foundation attempt to increase female editorship

16. Gender Bias in Wikipedia - LGBTQ
• Who defines a person’s gender?
• The Caitlyn Jenner article
• Wikimedia LGBT+ Portal

17. Racial Bias
• Under-representation of people of color within Wikipedia editor base
• Lack of information regarding black history
• Articles on African topics are, according to some, more often edited
by editors from Europe and North America and thus reflect their
knowledge and consumption of media

18. Cultural Representation Bias

19. Accuracy, Reliability and Vandalism
• How can you trust an encyclopedia that anyone can edit?
• As of March 2017, Wikipedia has about 40,000 high-quality articles
• The open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia
the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world.
(Time magazine)
• Diversity of resources
• Fighting vandalism
Image by Sabrina Mazzeo on Unsplash

20. Minding the Gap and Closing It
• Research and publications
• WikiProjects
• Organizations
• Wikimedia Foundation Strategy
Image by Rafaela Ely, Flickr

21. Tsipi
Erann
Emily
Temple-
Wood
Ravan
Jaafar
Altaie
Minding the Gap:

22. WikiProjects
• Groups of contributors who want to work together as a team to
improve Wikipedia.
• Often focus on specific topics, locations or tasks
• Over 2,000 WikiProjects in English Wikipedia
• About 1,000 are monitored by 30–2,000 editors
• Some WikiProjects cooperates with outside organizations
• Finding a project (automatically curated & manually curated)

27. Whose Knowledge
• A global campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized
communities on the internet.
• Marginalized communities are the majority of the world
• 3/4 of the online population of the world today comes from the
global South: Asia, Africa, Latin America. Yet most public
knowledge online has so far been written by white men from Europe
and North America.
• To address this, we work particularly with women, people of color,
LGBTQI communities, indigenous peoples and others from the global
South to build and represent more of all of our own knowledge
online.

29. AfroCROWD
• Afro Free Culture Crowdsourcing Wikimedia (AfroCROWD)
• An outreach initiative to increase awareness of the Wikimedia and free
knowledge, culture and software movements among potential editors of African
descent.
• Launched during Black Wiki History Month in 2015.
• AfroCROWD has sensitized thousands in its target audience about free culture
crowdsourcing and the need to close the multicultural and gender gaps in
Wikipedia.
• monthly multilingual editathons in partnership with cultural institutions, galleries,
libraries, archives, museums (GLAM) and others.
• AfroCROWD has also worked with professors at educational institutions like New
York University, The New School, Icahn Medical School and Columbia University
among others.

30. #BlackLifeMatters Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, The Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, New York City

31. Wikipedia matters for nonprofits
• Knowledge and information about your organization
• Share your knowledge and data
• Develop knowledge
• Broaden the mainstream
• Community development and service

32. Articles about Organizations:

33. What Can We Do
• Understand Wikipedia
• Register and create a user page
• Join the community
• Edit and create articles
• More ways to contribute
• Organization based cooperations

34. Understand Wikipedia
• It is a community of many people
• Culture and costumes
• Protocols and conventions

35. Join the Community
• Find articles in your fields of interest
• Read articles’ talks, view history
• Visit user pages of editors or other users
• Use the User talks to contact
• Join WikiProjects or user groups
• Join meetups and editathons

36. Things We Can Learn From a User Page
• Fields of interest
• Wikipedia experience
• Languages
• Expertise
• Beliefs and faith
• Contact information
• Paid contribution or conflict of interest

37. Every Edit Matters
• Create a new article
• Edit and add knowledge to an article
• Translate articles
• Fix typos
• Correct poor grammar
• Create redirects
• Repair broken links
• Add images

38. More ways to contribute
• Maintenance
• Review
• Code
• Help and train other editors
• Public speaking

39. Wikimedia Outreach
• Recruit and support new Wikimedians
• Build strong relationships with cultural and educational partners
• GLAM Wiki project works with galleries, libraries, archives and
museums to bring cultural content online
• Wikimedia Education Portal connects people who use Wikipedia and
related projects in education throughout the world
• Outreach best practices

42. Imagine a world in which every
single human being can freely
share in the sum of all
knowledge. That's our
commitment.
Wikimedia Foundation’s Vision

43. Wikipedia is a Tool in the
Nonprofit Technology Toolbox

44. Where to Begin
• Wikipedia editing is a long term project
• Register as a user and create a user’s page
• Enable the visual editor, but also learn the markup
• Join a group or a project, local or online
• Whose Knowledge’s intro to Wikipedia
• A game-style tutorial to English Wikipedia

45. Keep in Contact
and Keep the Conversation Going
• Evaluate this session: http://po.st/DL0BLQ
• Or in the mobile app
• Website: MaayanAlexander.com
• Email: Maayan@maayanalexander.com
• Twitter: @maayanale
• Wikipedia: Snufkinit (Eng, Heb)