Wikipedia Toolkit
Wikipedia as Public Scholarship
Wikipedia is an online, open-source, multi-lingual, and community-run encyclopedia. Regularly ranked within the 15 most-visited sites globally, and with an average of 2 billion unique visits each month and over 56 billion articles (“About”), Wikipedia has increasingly been taken up by scholars for its potential to facilitate public and collaborative forms of advocacy, teaching, and research. As a form of public scholarship, Wikipedia has the capacity to reach a large and diverse audience outside traditional academic spaces. In the classroom, it introduces students to a collaborative writing process with tangible impacts and public audiences. This toolkit builds on the advice and resources shared by participants in our roundtable on forms of public scholarship through Wikipedia. It introduces methods for using Wikipedia and further points to resources available at UBC and beyond.
On March 12, 2021, the Public Humanities Hub co-hosted with UBC Library a roundtable discussion by scholars about using Wikipedia for academic research, advocacy, and classroom teaching. This event was organized as part of the Honouring Indigenous Writers Wikipedia Edit-a-thon happening at UBC. Our panelists’ experiences with Wikipedia ranged from first-time experiments with UBC Wiki courses to occupying the role of Wikipedian-in-Residence:
Erin Fields (Open Education and Scholarly Communications Librarian, UBC Library) as moderator
David Gaertner (Assistant Professor, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, UBC) [2:08] on using Wikipedia to think about data and collective-based knowledge production in issues of Indigenous sovereignty and knowledge systems within colonial structures.
Tina Loo (Professor, History, UBC) [22:02] on her first-time experiment with teaching a Wikipedia course, “North American Environmental History”
Christine D’Onofrio (Associate Professor of Teaching; Art History, Visual Art and Theory; UBC) [37:19] on activist interventions on Wikipedia and starting a Vancouver chapter of Art+Feminism
Amber Berson (Writer, Curator, and PhD Candidate, Queen’s University) [51:05] on her work as co-lead of Art+Feminism and the challenges facing marginalized editors and contributors
✪ Download the transcript or view the video below.
Featured Public Humanities Hub Presentation
Readings and Resources Mentioned in Video
Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism. MIT Press, 2020.
Vine Deloria, “The Right to Know: A Paper.” 1978.
Siobhan Senier, “Indigenizing Wikipedia.” Web Writing (Open peer review edition, Fall 2013).
Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literature Matters. WLU Press, 2015.
Leanne Simpson, "Bubbling like a Beating Heart.” Indigenous Poetics in Canada. Edited by Neal McLeod, WLU Press 2014, pp. 107-120.
Tenille Campbell, Nedi Nezu: Good Medicine. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021.
Jennifer Chan, "Total Jizzfest” (2012).
Rachel Whiteread's "Untitled (Library)." 1999.
Anita Sarkeesian, Feminist Frequency.
Wikimedia’s Universal Code of Conduct.
Monika Sengul-Jones, Amber Berson and Melissa Tamani, “Unreliable Guidelines: Researching reliable source guidelines in multiple language Wikipedias,” Medium, 8 July 2021.