Within the WikiUNLP team, one of our most important goals is to establish and strengthen relations between the different Wikimedian communities and academia. We consider the Wikimedia projects, and Wikipedia in particular, as a powerful communication tool for public outreach of science, to highlight local lines of research, and to augment the public’s perception of science. This is why we—in an exploratory fashion—made a series of edits and interventions on archaeology-related articles to evaluate their long term impact.
We presented the results of this work at the National Congress of Argentinean Archaeology in 2023: a paper reflection on the possibilities of using Wikipedia to further the public outreach of Archaeology. There, we presented our analysis of articles—newly created and existing—with the aim of increasing visibility on specific contents that will help reduce geo-political and gender biases in Archaeology-related articles through editing their Wikipedia articles. We understand this to be a powerful and innovative way of communicating science from the Global South.
Later, we were invited to submit an article for Revista del Museo de Antropología, [Journal of the Museum of Anthropology], one of the most important academic journals of this discipline in Argentina. Our article was published under the title “Excavando Wikipedia. Apuntes sobre la comunicación pública de la arqueología en una enciclopedia libre y colaborativa” [Digging up Wikipedia. Notes on Public Outreach of Archaeology on a Free, Collaborative Encyclopaedia, with several members of Wiki UNLP as co-authors.
This article was written to showcase the potential of the Wikimedia projects as communication channels for public outreach of science, taking Archaeology in Argentina as a particular example, and considering that potential readers of this article might know about Wikipedia in general, but are not editors. We included sections to explain briefly the general editing process, particular features of the Wikimedia projects that make them Free Knowledge and Open Science initiatives, and the potential reach of Wikipedia. We also presented our analysis on a series of Archaeology-related articles—biographies of researchers, academic journals on Archaeology, basic concepts of Archaeology—that were created or improved by members of the WikiUNLP team, as part of our volunteer work within the Wikimedia projects.
When it comes to the interventions done on archaeology-related articles, we considered two types: edits that contribute content to the encyclopedia and allow for access to new knowledge, and those that significantly improve the quality of the article, considering a more global, more inclusive vision, with gender-aware perspectives and from the Global South.
We analyzed the potential impact of these actions on the people reading the articles, measuring different variables such as page views throughout time. We were able to see several examples where the actions taken resulted in positive interactions with the readers who—based on the contents of the articles—we assume is made up mostly of people in academia. At the same time, we believe that creating new biographies on female Archaeology researchers contributed to making their life and contributions known, thus reducing the gender gap on Wikipedia. Similarly, creating articles on academic journals focused on Archaeology—and most of them being from Argentina—helped promote the existence and heightened visibility of the overall academic output on this discipline.
Last but not least, we believe that this article we published is but a single step towards building relationships between Wikipedia and the academic world—mostly Archaeology in this case—; these are ultimately fertile fields to actually delivering on the premises set by Open Science and Free Knowledge initiatives, where we conceive knowledge as a common, public good.
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References:
Zubimendi, M., Cueto, J. J., Béguelin, M., & Archuby, F. M. (2024). Excavando Wikipedia: Apuntes sobre la comunicación pública de la arqueología en una enciclopedia libre y colaborativa. Revista del Museo de Antropología, 17(1), 189–206. https://doi.org/10.31048/1852.4826.v17.n1.43539
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