Wikipedia's Gaps in Coverage : Are Wikiprojects a Solution?

This document is downloaded from DR‑NTU (https://dr.ntu.edu.sg) Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Wikipedia’s gaps in coverage : are Wikiprojects a solution? a study of the Cambodian Wikiproject Luyt, Brendan 2018 Luyt, B. (2018). Wikipedia’s gaps in coverage : are Wikiprojects a solution? a study of the Cambodian Wikiproject. Online Information Review, 42(2), 238‑249. doi:10.1108/OIR‑06‑2017‑0199 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/105868 https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR‑06‑2017‑0199 © 2018 Emerald Publishing Limited. All rights reserved. This paper was published in Online Information Review and is made available with permission of Emerald Publishing Limited. Downloaded on 25 Sep 2021 12:05:03 SGT Wikipedia’s gaps in coverage: are Wikiprojects a solution? A study of the Cambodian Wikiproject Abstract Purpose: This article examines the rather unsuccessful Wikiproject for Cambodia. Despite its lack of success it is a case that can be used to draw lessens for dealing with the issue of geographical under- representation on Wikipedia as a whole. After presenting evidence of the Wikiproject’s failure to achieve the goals for which it was created, I will discuss the pressing issues of imbalances in geographical coverage on Wikipedia as well as the deeper issues involved in remedying these imbalances; namely, the question of who gets to represent whom. Design/methodology/approach: I take a broadly qualitative approach to the study of Wikipedia. For this study the Cambodia Wikiproject main page, as well as the various talk page archives associated with it, was downloaded in November 2016 and subjected to a content analysis. Descriptive statistics are also used when necessary to build the argument. Findings: Wikiproject Cambodia has failed to appreciably improve the coverage of Cambodian topics. This is likely due to its inability to attract for a prolonged period of time a champion able to anchor the project and provide a sense that someone is listening. But the makeup of the project members also suggests that even if a champion could be found, the question of who gets to represent whom remains difficult to deal with. It is unlikely that Cambodia will anytime soon develop a strong community of Wikipedia editors given the economic and social constraints the country imposes on most of its population. Originality/value: This work builds on the small, but growing body of literature dealing with coverage gaps in Wikipedia. Given Wikipedia's growing importance as part of the everyday information infrastructure people use, such gaps and potential solutions to these gaps should be a vital part of the information science community's agenda. Introduction In recent years, scrutiny of Wikipedia has gone beyond an initial concern for accuracy to include in addition concern over gaps in its coverage. Wikiprojects, communities of editors who focus on improving or adding to articles on particular topics or areas, present one mechanism by which these gaps in coverage could potentially be filled. This article examines the Wikiproject for Cambodia – not a particularly successful venture, but one that can be used to draw lessens for dealing with the issue of geographical under-representation. Afterwards I will discuss what can be done to deal with imbalances in geographical coverage on Wikipedia as well as the deeper issues involved in such efforts; namely, the question of who gets to represent whom. Before turning to these concerns, however, I will briefly survey the literature that presents the evidence for Wikipedia’s content inadequacies. Under-representation on Wikipedia The issue of gender was one of the first gaps that caught the attention of Wikipedia and scholarly communities. Hence much of the literature on under-representation in Wikipedia deals with gender imbalances. One of the first studies of gender imbalance on Wikipedia was conducted by Lam et al (2011). Analysing a Wikipedia data dump they found that male and female editors focused on different content areas and that the coverage of topics traditionally of more interest to females was significantly less. Reagle and Rhee (2011) compared coverage of the biographies of women between the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia, discovering that “while Wikipedia has more biographies of women than does Britannica in absolute terms Wikipedia tends to be less balanced in whom it misses than Britannica…” (1155). Wagner et al., using computational methods to evaluate Wikipedia’s gender bias, found women to be “slightly” overrepresented, “but the proportional differences in the coverage of men than women are not significant”. On the other hand, they also found “that the way women are portrayed… is starkly different from the way men are portrayed” with articles about women more often linked to those about men and the content of articles on women more likely to include romantic and family relationships. Finally, Klein and Konieczny have developed the WIGI (Wikipedia Gender Index) to explore “worldwide longitudinal gender inequality trends.” Their study concludes that there has been “a steadily improving trend” in the inclusion of female biographies on Wikipedia, but that there are large differences if the analysis is broken down by cultural or linguistic community (Klein and Konieczny 2015). Women are not the only group substantially under-represented on Wikipedia. Large swathes of the planet do not feature heavily in the encyclopaedia, but these other gaps tend to receive less attention. Cindy Royal and Deapina Kapila have noted disparities in coverage based on country population size, among other factors (2009). Taking up the issue of geographical coverage, Mark Graham has argued “that how places are represented and made visible (or invisible) in Wikipedia has a particularly immense bearing on the ways that people interact with those same places culturally, economically and politically” (Graham 2011). That there are geographical gaps was made clear in another study by Graham that sought to determine if a core –periphery pattern was discernible in terms of Wikipedia coverage of nations of the world. They suggested that this was indeed a case and that much of the pattern could be explained by three variables: country population, availability of broadband Internet, and the number of local editors, although certain countries performed above or below expectations. Gender and, to a lesser extent, geographical under-representation issues on Wikipedia have not gone unnoticed by Wikipedia’s leadership. Jimmy Wales, the encyclopaedia’s co-founder, in an NPR interview spoke of his disappointment that efforts to increase the number of female editors have not been more successful and expressed his desire “to have more diversity in the community, because we believe that it brings more quality” (Selyukh 2016). Certain Wikipedians have taken up Wales’ call for more diversity by developing activities designed to attract a new and diversified set of editors. One of these is the edit-a-thon: “an organized event where editors edit and improve a specific topic or type of content, typically including basic editing training for new editors” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit-a-thon). Wikipedia records a total of 110 edit-a-thons from the first, held at the British library in 2011 up to 2016, an event held at the Mount Pleasant library in Washington D.C. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How _to_run_an_edit-a-thon#See_also). Interestingly the vast majority of these took place in the United States and the United Kingdom, again emphasizing the disparities in the Wikipedia world. Another means used to overcome the disparity in coverage on Wikipedia are wikiprojects. As noted previously, these are basically groups of editors who are especially interested in improving particular topics, locations or even tasks. What provides the “glue” to hopefully cement together such a group of editors are the Wikiproject pages: “… A central place for editor collaboration [where they] develop criteria, maintain various collaborative processes, keep track of work that needs to be done and act as a forum where issues of interest to the editors… may be discussed” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Wikiproject). Wikiprojects are not a new feature for the online encyclopaedia. The first appears to have been created by Manning Bartlett on the topic of sports in 2001 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Signpost/2013_04_01/Wikiproject_report) and today there are an estimated 2000 such projects in various states of activity, so many in fact, to warrant the operation of a coordinating committee: the Wikiproject Council (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council). By concentrating and coordinating the energies of interested editors WikiProject’s are supposed to lead to an overall improvement in terms of quality and quantity of articles in whatever area the project delimits. While it is difficult to ascertain how well any of these projects have contributed to such lofty goals it is possible to get a sense of their functioning or lack thereof by examining their talk pages and changes over time to their main pages. The aim of this article then is to explore these artefacts for the Cambodian wikiproject. In previous work I demonstrated the uneven coverage of that country’s history (Luyt 2013). Given this uneven coverage it is not perhaps surprising that a wikiproject was established1. Certainly the uneven 1 Two key texts that are helpful in understand Cambodia are Chandler (2008) and Slocomb (2010). coverage galvanized one editor to get involved with the project. Writing on his user page, Paxse declared, “As I wandered around the places where I may be able to add some information to this wonderful Wiki project – I found to my distress that many important and topical articles related to Cambodia like – Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot – are currently in a sad state indeed. The information included is scant. Poorly cross-linked, and contains gaping holes …” (User talk page, Paxse, Archive 1). The question whether the project has contributed much to solving the problem is, however, more problematic.

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