2025:Program/Forging the medieval on Wikipedia
Session title: Forging the medieval on Wikipedia
- Session type: Lightning talk
- Track: Lightning Talk Showcase
- Language: en
Wikipedia's reach extends far beyond the pages of the encyclopedia. Through its prominence in search engine results, digital personal assistants, and as a training dataset for LLMs its content reaches huge audiences and shapes how they understand the world around them. Recent research by Allfrey, Moore, and Nevell shows how Wikipedia is embedded in society and the impact it can have on contested areas. This talk summarises the research and presents it as evidence to make the case for expert engagement – showing researchers why they should be engaging with Wikipedia as “the last best place on the Internet”.
Description
This lightning talk will present the findings of research by Allfrey, Moore, and Nevell’s 2024 publication “Forging the medieval on Wikipedia”. The authors are experienced Wikimedians who advocate for researchers to actively contribute to the Wikimedia projects to support their fields of research and the online knowledge ecosystem.
The information is presented to with two audiences in mind: researchers and Wikimedians. For researchers, the message is simple: you should be contributing your knowledge to Wikipedia, and here are some examples showing why that is a beneficial thing to do. For Wikimedians, this information can be used as a tool for advocacy when interacting with researchers. Many research positions are precarious, and researchers have numerous calls on their time so the benefits to their career and their field needs to be clear to justify time which could be spent on other activities.
In the US, there is a growing hostility to education and research. With knowledge production under threat, the Wikimedia movement needs to respond not just by providing a platform for information sharing, but by proactively seeking the input of researchers. We hope that the information presented here can be used to advance some of those conversations.
The research on which this lightning talk will draw is available as an open access publication: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-024-00321-6
- How does your session relate to the event theme, Wikimania@20 – Inclusivity. Impact. Sustainability?
This talk focuses on the impact of sharing information through the Wikimedia projects
- What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?
Everyone can participate in this session
Resources
Speakers
- Lajmmoore
- My name is Lucy and I learnt to edit Wikipedia in 2019. I routinely edit with Wikiproject Women in Red, and have now written a biography for a woman from every country in the world. I have also worked as a Wikimedian in Residence, both for the National Trust and for LEEDS 2023. From 2021 to 2023 I was on the NW Europe Grants Comittee and in 2024 I joined the Wikimedia UK Community Development Committee.
- Richard Nevell
- Richard Nevell has been a member of staff at Wikimedia UK since 2012. In that time he has led numerous partnerships with educational and cultural heritage organisations. He led the Connected Heritage project from 2021 to 2023, and wants more researchers and heritage professional to take part in writing Wikipedia. In his time with Wikimedia UK he had led dozens of training workshops and works closely with volunteers.