Most people are familiar with Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopaedia and source of most of the answers whenever you talk to Alexa or Siri. Higher education initiatives to close knowledge gaps on Wikipedia are also increasingly common, mostly focusing on improving and adding articles. However, underpinning Wikipedia is the database known as Wikidata. Wikidata is a vast collection of structured data but, more than that, it connects data to data. Anyone can then use that data to tell stories. For example, Ada Lovelace (Q7259) is the child (P40) of Lord Byron (Q5679). Or that the Loch Ness Monster (Q49658) is resident (P551) in Loch Ness (Q49650). Despite containing 112,863,167 items as of August 2024, there are still significant gaps in the data. The existing data is also difficult to explore and visualise without a technical background.
The blog post discussed the five Senior Honours projects I supervised in 2023/24, including the student perspective.
Outcomes from the projects
There have been several outcomes so far because of the students’ hard work:
- Three students have continued to develop their projects post-graduation with the intention of making them available permanently
- Additional Wiki based projects with new partners available to Senior Honours students in 2024
- One student used their project as an example of persistence in a job interview, and was successful
- Voluntary Summer Team Enterprise Project (STEP) collaboration to plug other gaps on Wikidata
- Poster presentation at the School of Computer Science Doors Open day in April 2024
- Poster presentation at Wikimania 2024 in Katowice, Poland
- Outline plans for an EPSRC Network grant to build capacity in addressing digital literacy and knowledge gaps using the Wiki projects
On reflection
I was delighted with how well the projects went, but there is always room for improvement. For example, I would provide all students with introductory training to Wiki and the community so that they know exactly where to go to find help and the information that they need. I would design a blanket ethics document to cover all their projects, rather than expecting them to each create one. I would also add their usernames to a tracking tool called the Outreach Dashboard. This tool, created by the WikiEdu team, enables you to quantitatively measure the impact of edits made by a specific group of contributors. This would enable me to see the impact of the projects on the wider Wiki community, including its readers. Finally, I would definitely include external partners in future projects. The students found this an incredibly valuable component and appreciated that their projects had real world impact, rather than being left on a shelf.