User:Will (Wiki Ed)/signpost equity lists

Equity lists on Wikipedia
Do you ever wonder where Wikipedia articles come from? With a world of knowledge to represent, it’s a big question. In my role at Wiki Education, I am especially concerned with Wikipedia being an equitable and representative resource. Whether it’s a museum of paintings, a library full of volumes of books, or an online encyclopedia, systematic bias is inherent in every collection. And Wikipedia is not immune to it. So when we think about where Wikipedia articles come from, another question we must answer is how do we ensure Wikipedia has articles to make it a more representative resource?

With support from the Nielsen Foundation’s Data for Good grants program, I have been developing Wikipedia resource that encourages editors to create articles to improve representation of diverse groups and topics on Wikipedia. We have been inspired by some of the amazing projects that are already working to address this issue on Wikipedia — Women in Red, Art + Feminism, Black Lunch Table — to name a few. It’s our hope that this tool can complement the work of these projects.

Specifically, Women in Red, uses Wikidata, the linked data knowledge base that connects all Wikimedia projects, to generate lists of articles that could exist in English Wikipedia, but don’t yet. Building on their efforts, we are creating a resource that allows community members to do the same thing, but with a broader scope of demographic variables. In addition to individuals who identify as women, we have constructed pages that list thousands of potential articles based around sexual orientation, nationality, disability status, and ethnicity.

These lists query the other language versions of Wikipedia and pull only the results that don’t have English language articles. From there, community members can select individuals and generate English language versions of the articles. Since these articles exist in other language versions of Wikipedia, the idea is they already pass notability and have references. The article writing process will still take time, but it saves some effort in not starting from scratch. Check out our the lists here.

I know what you’re thinking — can this get any cooler? And the answer is yes! Wiki Education has been developing and maintaining the Dashboard for the past few years. The Dashboard allows instructors and individuals to create courses that are scoped to a set of students/Wikipedians/edit-a-thon attendees, etc. – basically any set of individuals that want to participate in whatever the course is. Another feature is the ability to frame a course around a list of articles. Using the same query from our resource, anyone using a Dashboard can scope it to one of the lists we’ve developed. The idea here is to encourage Dashboard users to select articles about underrepresented groups or individuals and write them for English Wikipedia. Follow this link for an example of an article-scoped Dashboard. Heads up — clicking the PSID list will take some time to load because it is large.

And this, dear readers, is one place where Wikipedia articles come from.

The main idea is we’re building a tool that encourages community members to write articles to increase the visibility of diverse groups and topics on Wikipedia. We’re doing this using Wikidata, queries, a list tool called Listeria, articles scoping on the Dashboard, and the hard work of anyone taking a Dashboard course or attending an event that uses the Dashboard. Although systemic bias and underrepresentation will remain a significant problem on Wikipedia and beyond, we hope this tool can push new and old users alike to edit in a way that helps to improve representation on the platform. As the community and these tools mature, we also hope others can refine and adapt it to their specific needs. An amazing thing about pulling from Wikidata is that users can narrow and expand queries to generate new lists. These lists are configured to improve English Wikipedia, but in a snap they can point to other language versions.

We’re still tinkering and ironing out the wrinkles, but we hope you can start taking advantage of it now! Get ready to make some edits.

This post was originally published on the Wiki Education blog on August 31st, 2023.